After Gabriel Wolff was diagnosed with celiac disease at 17, he realized he needed to make some major lifestyle changes. He cut gluten and dairy out of his diet, but finding acceptable foods proved to be difficult in Quebec, where he attended McGill University and studied neuroscience, and just as difficult while traveling with the school’s volleyball team.
“Playing six to eight hours of volleyball every day and just feeding yourself a salad afterwards is just not sustainable, so I started cooking everything myself,” said Wolff, 25, who grew up in South Valley Stream.
He was taking control of his diet, but he missed ice cream. He explored alternatives, but was disappointed — soy-based products were bland, and coconut-based ones were fatty.
So he started experimenting. “Threw a bunch of stuff into a blender, froze it and it didn’t taste half bad,” he said. “That’s how it started.”
He tried different proteins, including rice and pea, and sweetened the mixture with Splenda. When his sister-in-law, who is diabetic, started a thrift shop in Manhattan’s East Village to benefit diabetes research, Wolff decided to make his concoction sugar-free and hypoallergenic. Some friends in his dorm at McGill tried it and liked it, and a few with food restrictions began buying quarts of the stuff for $5.
Wolff graduated early, but didn’t want to spend his days in a lab, so he tried his hand at day trading. He kept with it for just under a year, until his girlfriend, Ani Blinova, persuaded him to leave the financial industry and pursue his dream of selling the product he’d developed.
Wink Frozen Desserts was launched in the rented basement of a Mexican restaurant in Hewlett. Wolff started with standard Cuisinart appliances, toiling amid the strong smell of taco grease but with the support of the restaurant owner above. He eventually upgraded to an industrial ice cream maker he bought used for $3,000. He estimated that his total starting cost was $50,000, which he was able to pay with savings from his day trading. (Follow link for full story).
