The first-time entrepreneur screaming for ice cream

Photo credit: Valerian KOo / Unsplash

It was, concedes Jeremy Tan, “a strange jump.”

The former Exxon and SingTel staffer recently leapt from the corporate ladder to create a startup focused on ice cream.

“Me and my family love ice cream,” says Tan. “We’ll go out and find ourselves looking for ice cream – and not just any packaged ice cream. We’re looking for a good experience – a good quality ice cream with good ingredients.”

But that’s apparently not so easy to find.

“That’s when I began thinking: why aren’t more businesses selling soft-serve ice cream? The really soft kind,” says the Singapore-based founder. “And that’s when I realized the main problem is actually the machines themselves.”

The machines are decades old really expensive, and they take a lot of time and manpower to clean, laments Tan. Plus, they limit stores to only one or two flavors.

CEO Jeremy Tan / Photo credit: Swirl Go

His last job at SingTel had him working on smart gadgets, which prompted him to conceive how all that dated ice cream tech could be changed.

Game of cones

With Swirl Go, Tan has made a Keurig-style machine for soft-serve ice cream. Each serving comes from a pod, making it easy to operate as well as hygienic since no ice cream comes into contact with the machine itself, says the first-time entrepreneur.

Rather than flog a pricey gadget to the likes of you and I, and risking a costly flop like the implosion of Juicero, Tan wants his device to be used in stores:

Photo credit: Swirl Go

Just desserts

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