With temperatures hitting a sweltering 36C across parts of the country and yellow heat health alerts blanketing both the East and West Midlands this week, the UK’s fifth major heatwave of 2026 is officially pushing us all to our limits.
If you have been out networking recently, whether at a Business Buzz event in Northamptonshire or a BNI breakfast in Coventry, you will have noticed that the heat is the only thing anyone is talking about. It is the ultimate operational friction point. Offices are stifling, supply chains are sluggish, and trying to maintain business momentum feels like running a marathon in a sauna.
However, in the midst of this sweltering August, there is one sector experiencing a golden age: the artisan ice cream market according to Anna Shepard in The Telegraph.
As business strategists, we are always looking for the lesson in the landscape. How do certain businesses not just survive the heat, but use it to scale? To answer that, we are taking a tour through the Greater Coventry area, Solihull, Birmingham, and our broader Midlands operational footprint. We are looking at the region’s most popular ice cream flavours, not just to make you hungry, but to serve up four distinct metaphors for business growth, agility, and product-market fit.
Grab a cold drink, find a desk fan, and let’s dig in.
1. Leicestershire (Mango): The Friction of Product-Market Fit
If you want to understand how to truly serve a local demographic, look at Leicestershire. In Leicester, the top-selling flavour at both branches of Gelato Village (recently crowned Best Local Food & Drink Producer at the county’s hospitality awards) is Mango.
Who can resist this gloriously sticky, sunshine-bright tropical fruit, particularly when it’s whipped into a silky frozen treat? But this isn’t just about taste; it is about hyper-targeted demographic alignment. This flavour is the city’s diversity speaking, directly reflecting Leicester’s large South Asian community and multicultural food scene. It offers a refreshing tang that serves as the ultimate hot-weather antidote.
The Business Rub: Are you selling what your market actually wants, or are you aggressively pushing what you think they should buy?
So many founders experience massive operational friction because they try to force a generic, one-size-fits-all product onto a diverse, nuanced local market. Gelato Village didn’t just churn out standard vanilla; they looked at the cultural fabric of their community and created a flagship product that resonated deeply with the local palate.
If you are struggling to gain traction this quarter, do an audit of your “Mango.” Do you understand the specific demographics, cultural nuances, and immediate pain points of the business community you operate in? When you align your core offering with the actual DNA of your target market, sales friction melts away.
2. Northamptonshire (Plum): Capitalising on the Surplus
Let’s head south to the Welland Valley in Northamptonshire, where agility and resourcefulness are the flavours of the month.
At Ganders Farm, stone fruits thrive. Thanks to this year’s bumper harvest from a local plum tree, founder Lauren Horton has created a hyper-local, small-batch pink ice cream by combining a rich plum sauce with the farm’s goat’s milk. But the real lesson is how this business started. Ten years ago, her goats started producing more milk than expected. Instead of viewing this surplus as a waste management problem, it prompted her to use the extra milk to launch a gelato-style ice cream business.
The Business Rub: How are you monetising your surplus?
Every business generates a byproduct. For a farm, it might be extra goat’s milk. For a B2B service-based business, your surplus might be internal training documents, proprietary software scripts you built to make your own life easier, or excess warehouse space.
Too often, businesses ignore these byproducts or view them as administrative waste. The Ganders Farm model teaches us to look at our operational “overflow” and ask: Can this be packaged, repurposed, and sold? We have worked with countless founders to turn their internal onboarding manuals into paid digital courses, or their excess office space into profitable co-working hubs. In business, your greatest new revenue stream is often hiding in your surplus.
3. Warwickshire (Blackcurrant): The Sweet and the Sharp
Over in Warwickshire, Henley Ice Cream, a long-established parlour and tea room in Henley-in-Arden, understands the delicate art of balance.
Their summer favourite is Blackcurrant Sorbet. These tart little berries are perfect for frozen desserts because their natural sharpness perfectly balances the sweetness of a sorbet or creamy ice cream. As a family-run business that uses fresh whole milk and double cream from Midlands farms, they know that if a dessert is entirely sweet, it becomes cloying and sickly. You need the sharp, acidic bite of the blackcurrant to make the experience complete.
The Business Rub: You cannot build a £20m+ turnover business by only being “sweet.”
In the early startup days, founders tend to be incredibly sweet. You bend over backwards for clients, you undercharge for your services, you answer emails at 11:00 PM, and you say “yes” to out-of-scope requests to keep the peace. It feels good in the moment, but it rapidly leads to a cloying, suffocating level of burnout.
To scale sustainably, your business operations must introduce the “sharpness” of the blackcurrant. You need sharp, clearly defined boundaries. You need sharp contracts that define scope creep. You need sharp pricing models that actually reflect the value you deliver, not just the desperation to win a pitch. The best business relationships, much like the best desserts, require a meticulous balance between delivering exceptional, sweet service and maintaining sharp, professional standards.
4. West Midlands (Chai): Evolving the Core Asset
Finally, let us look at the heart of our operations in Birmingham and the broader West Midlands, where South Asian food culture is a fundamental, integral part of the region’s culinary identity.
This culture brings with it the daily, comforting ritual of chai drinking. But how do you sell a hot, spiced tea during a 36C August heatwave? You evolve the asset.
Our affection for this fragrant, spiced tea has inspired a new generation of frozen desserts, transitioning from traditional kulfi to scoops of spiced gelato. Karak Chaii, an Indian street food and chai café with multiple branches across Birmingham, has brilliantly taken its signature hot brew and turned it into ice cream, bringing along those warming, traditional flavours of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and clove.
The Business Rub: Are you stubbornly clinging to an outdated delivery method for a brilliant core product?
The essence of the Karak Chaii success story is asset evolution. The core asset wasn’t the temperature of the drink; it was the specific, comforting blend of spices. When the environmental “climate” changed (whether a literal summer heatwave or a shifting economic landscape), they didn’t abandon their core product; they simply changed how it was packaged and delivered.
We see companies fail every day because they refuse to evolve their delivery methods. If you are a keynote speaker, your asset is your intellectual property, not just your physical presence on a stage; can it become a webinar or a consulting framework? If you are a traditional retail distributor, can your logistics network be pivoted into a dropshipping model? Do not let your business melt because you refused to put your traditional asset into a new freezer.
The Great Glenn: Navigating the Heat
The grand vision “The Great Glenn” requires recognising that environmental friction, like an intense summer heatwave, is merely a stress test for your business strategy.
When the heat is on, the businesses that thrive are the ones that deeply understand their local demographics (Leicestershire’s Mango), aggressively capitalise on their operational surplus (Northamptonshire’s Plum), maintain firm professional boundaries (Warwickshire’s Blackcurrant), and proactively evolve their core assets for changing conditions (West Midlands’ Chai).
We believe that everyone finds their ‘tribe’ through networking and shared experiences. But to lead that tribe effectively, you must be willing to adapt. You cannot control the market conditions, just as you cannot control the August sun. But you can absolutely control what you serve when the temperatures rise.
The Wee Hurdle: This Week’s Actionable Step
Do not let the heat stall your Q3 momentum. Your Wee Hurdle for this week is to perform a Core Asset Heat-Test:
- Identify the “Hot Tea”: Look at your current product or service suite. What is the one offering that is currently struggling to sell or feeling heavy and outdated in the current market environment?
- Extract the Spice: What is the actual underlying value of that product? (e.g., Is it the specific industry knowledge? The proprietary software? The customer service relationship?)
- The Ice Cream Pivot: Brainstorm one way to repackage that underlying value into a new, more accessible format for Q4.
Stay cool, Camerons. We will see you out on the networking circuit, hopefully somewhere with excellent air conditioning.