Our gelato is handcrafted in-house from scratch recipes using the finest ingredients in the Bay Area.  Our gelato is pure from the beginning with only milk, sugar, cream, eggs, and carob flour as ingredients.  Our sorbetto is is made from only fresh, whole fruit, sugar water and carob flour and is vegan friendly.  To flavor our gelato we partner with high-quality, well-known brands like Blue Bottle Coffee, TCHO Chocolate, St George Spirits and Numi Tea.  We source our farmed ingredients locally.  Our pistachios are from a farm in the Central Valley.  Our fresh fruit is selected mostly from farms representing a variety of California’s climates.

We service grocery stores and mom& pops alike.  From small 7-pan showcases in a chocolate shop to full 40-pan gelaterias    We deliver to the entire Bay Area on a weekly basis and ordering can be done over the phone or online.Because we make our gelato from scratch daily, we can produce custom flavors for individual clients.  Commissioning a flavor, or requesting a flavor from our hundreds of offerings is a great way to make your business unique.

Our pricing includes delivery and we reuse environmentally conscious metal pans rather than wasteful plastic pans.  Our gelato is available in 5 liter pans and you can order whatever flavors you wish from our current production list.  There is no need to order in pairs.

Please contact us for more information or to schedule a tasting.  We don’t have pesky sales people, either.

Pictured here are Mr & Mrs Grossman, rare fruit growers living in Berkeley. The Grossmans used to sell their guavasteens to Berkeley Bowl grocery store, but they noticed the guavasteens didn’t sell well because few people knew what they were.

In 2005 they dropped some off at our gelateria and asked if we could make some sorbetto out of them. One taste and we were hooked. For the past six years we have bought their entire guavasteen tree and turned the delicious fruit into a wonderfully tart and sweet sorbetto. It is available right now.

If you are looking for the bars, they are in here.

We’ve been told for years that we need to sell our gelato in pints in grocery stores. We appreciate the compliment but we know the grocery game is much more complicated than it looks and those freezers are crowded with dozens and dozens of brands and flavors. At the same time, we want to grow our business, create jobs and most of all, serve great gelato. In October of 2010 we went to our friends at Whole Foods Market with a new idea, our gelato in a bar. They didn’t just like them, they loved them.

We already had a good relationship with Whole Foods from selling our gelato in their stores for the past 3 years but we got even closer when they made us a part of their Local Producer Loan Program. Then, it was time to get busy. We had to learn about packaging, branding, storage, and the intricate workings of the grocery business. Luckily, we knew a lot of really smart people already.

We don’t take shortcuts when we make our gelato, so we wouldn’t be taking shortcuts with the bars either. Rather than making a few gallons of a given flavor at a time, the bar production demanded dozens of gallons for each batch. Commercial ice cream manufacturers would laugh at us for calling that a big batch but for a small gelateria like ourselves, it required hours and hours to get up to speed for the launch. We cold-steeped the Blue Bottle Coffee, brewed Numi Tea, juiced fresh grapefruit, and peeled hundreds and hundreds of kiwis. The bars were frozen, wrapped, boxed, stacked, driven around and finally, stocked into our sweet little freezer units.

And now, they are waiting for you. We invite you to stop by your local Whole Foods Market and have one.

We have been invited to some pretty cool gigs over the years, like the Pixar wrap party for Cars, Slow Food Nation, and a huge party at Yahoo! Monday we added to that list when we were invited to the Governor’s inauguration party in Sacramento. This wasn’t the hot dogs on the steps of the capital, either.

The flavors we brought really showed-off the bounty of California including an olive oil gelato the was the talk of the party. We use Lucero Olive Oil from Corning California to make a beautifully fragrant gelato.

The party was filled with the finest foods and wines our great state has to offer, lots of wine, actually, and we were proud to be a part of it. It was great to hear more than a couple of our state politicians ask if we had plans to go down to southern California.

We keep in touch and recently thought it would be fun to revive Sketch at Naia Berkeley. We focus on gelato, and admittedly our goodies bin is a little bare. Eric and Ruthie are superb pastry chefs and we always enjoyed their tasty accompaniments like the Cioccalat Budino, and the Olive Oil cake. Both Gelateria Naia and Sketch Ice Cream are purists in their own way, so we get along well - and Eric and Ruthie said YES, they’d have fun rolling Sketch out at our store!

Naia will be offering a rotating list of goodies that go great with gelato at our Berkeley location - including the Budino and Olive Oil cake - as well as some great sauces! Later we will also be celebrating Sketch’s ice cream with some gelato renditions of some old favorites.

Our pistachio is a bit unique in that we use pistachios. Just pistachios. If it sounds odd that I would point that out, you should check out a recently released cookbook on gelato from a big, national gelato manufacturer. For some reason their pistachio recipe calls for almond extract. Why would you put almond in a pistachio gelato? I don’t know but maybe its because their pistachio gelato is full of almonds (because almonds are cheap) rather than pistachios.

Anyways, don’t bother buying the book and keep an eye out for the next time we are out showing people how to make real gelato at home.

Seriously, Gene and his producer Joel are a lot of fun to be around, and he had given us a whole half hour this time to talk about our recent gelato adventures including ones with the founders of Blue Bottle Coffee, St George Spirits, and Semifreddi’s Bakery. Gene is a magnificent host and he really puts folks that can get nervous (like me) at ease - the whole show went great, check it out.

If you’re wondering why we make gelato out of corn the answer is simple, it tastes great. Take a moment to think about how sweet a fresh cob of corn can taste. Think also about how delicious the flavor of yellow corn can be and you get why we make gelato out of it.

This year our corn is coming from Dwelley Farms in Brentwood. The Dwelley family has been been farming their land since 1926. As you can imagine, houses and other development now surround their farm but still they keep growing wonderful products for people to eat. Corn is one of their bigger crops and they don’t sell it to wholesalers, but instead, their own roadside stand, just 40 miles from our kitchen. I know because I have made that drive several times now to pick up the fresh from the stalk ears of corn. I also picked up a few peaches for the drive back.

Our first collaboration was with John Scharffenberger at Scharffen Berger Chocolates back in 2004. More recent collaborations include working with James Freeman at Blue Bottle Coffee, Michael Recchiuti at Recchiuti Confections, the team at TCHO Chocolates and Ahmed Raheem at Numi Tea.

Our current collaboration is with Semifreddi’s Hand-Crafted Bread & Pastries.

Here’s the story:
We were exhibiting our gelato at the Fancy Food Show this past January and a friendly man yelled at us from down the aisle, “Hey, Naia! I love you guys.” I said I loved him too and asked who he was. That is how we met Tom Frainier, of Semifreddi’s. We talked about bread, gelato and the Bay Area food scene. We told him we wanted to do a gelato with bread in it and he thought we were crazy. We liked him right away.

Tom and his brother-in-law, Michael, invited us to tour around their beautiful new facility in Alameda. Michael and Tom are not only smart and clever, but wise. We learned a lot from them that day. We also shared some really nasty gossip that I can’t repeat, as much as I would love to.

We left with a huge assortment of their products to experiment with and try to craft a few flavors out of. They still thought we were crazy about the bread and gelato idea. Chris and I took all of the samples back to our kitchen and tasted and tested. We chopped and blended, cut and diced, froze and thawed and tasted some more. It was pretty obvious to us that Semifreddi’s was going to work really well for us.

Our first go-around back at Semifreddi’s was fun. People were eager to see what we had made. We discussed the 14 flavors we brought and narrowed a few things down. They were impressed and surprised that gelato and bread do go together quite nicely.

The second tasting at Semifreddi’s was used to pick the final recipes for the new flavors. Finally, we got all the Cinnamon Twist Bread, Biscotti and other ingredients we would need and got down to business. On a sunny and hot Friday Cinnamon Twist Gelato hit our stores, and sold out. Now Biscotti is there, too, and soon it will be followed by more Semifreddi’s surprises.