Gelateria Naia is a small business.  No doubt about it.  But we do big things, and more importantly, we can make a lot of gelato.

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.

Guavasteens, also known as pineapple-guavas, and more commonly as feijoas, are a rare fruit in our area. They have a leathery peel and a sweet, tart and aromatic flavor. Their unique flavor is surprising and delicious.

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.

Now available.
Take a bite.

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.

Yep, that’s newly-elected governor Jerry Brown peering into our gelato cart looking at our flavors.

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.

When we opened our doors in 2002 we pretty much were the only artisanal gelato or ice cream around - and that’s changed! One of our first competitors was Sketch Ice Cream who opened up in the Berkeley 4th Street district a couple years later. When we heard, we charged down ready to sling some Stracciatella at them (we love a good fight - just ask Gelato Milano). But we were delighted to meet the cute couple that Eric and Ruthie are, just like a lot of other folks who became fans - and we were sad when they decided to retire Sketch last year.

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.

We were invited to give a demonstration on making gelato at home in The Cellar at Macy’s Union Square recently. Besides making a sobetto with beautiful, plump blackberries, I showed the crowd how to make pistachio gelato.

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.