Technology is at the forefront of every business. However, for an ice cream company, technology is certainly more than just managing factory operations and sales channels. It is what ensures that every tub, cup, and cone reaches consumers in the right shape, texture, and temperature.
That is the operational reality at Vadilal Industries, where CIO Dhaval Mankad says the single biggest challenge “is to ensure that the ice cream reaches the consumer at the right temperature and the right shape.” With a widespread distribution ecosystem, operational resilience is non-negotiable, he adds.
The Cold Chain is the Core
In ice cream manufacturing, the cold chain is not a backend function, it is the business itself. From the plant cold room to the cold storage facility, from the vehicle in transit to the final distribution point, every link must stay within strict temperature thresholds.
Mankad explains that the products are held at a certain temperature. Even small deviations matter because product movement in and out of cold rooms naturally causes some temperature loss. “There will be in and out of material from the cold room and there will be some temperature loss in the process,” he says.
Vadilal has deployed IoT-based temperature sensors across all plant cold storages, vehicles, and C&F (Carrying and Forwarding) locations. While the real-time reports are already available on the service provider’s platform, Dhaval mentions that dashboards with API integration is providing real-time visibility into every cold-chain node.
“The idea is that you should not have to struggle to find which C&F is facing trouble,” says Mankad. The system is designed to surface the riskiest locations first; any location drifting away from its target temperature is immediately escalated to the top of the dashboard so the team can act.
The data scientist team is working on a more scientific way to evaluate cold-storage performance by measuring process capability, or CPK, and sigma values. Instead of looking only at average temperature, the team analyses 1-minute or 2-minute readings to understand how stable each cold room or vehicle trip really is.
“With this IoT setup, the system gets a one-minute profile for each location,” Mankad says. “So for one location, for the entire day, you get 1,440 readings.” Based on those readings, the supply chain team grades cold-room performance and each trip by transporters into categories of A, B, C etc. across different % brackets.
Ensuring Product Integrity in Transit
The temperature journey does not stop at the warehouse. Special attention is given to ice cream transport units, and each truck carries a temperature monitor and is pre-chilled before loading, after loading, temperature is monitored before dispatch.
That discipline matters because once the product leaves the factory, recovery is difficult. A temperature lapse can directly affect shape, texture, and quality. Technology helps create control points that reduce the chances of such losses.
There are also strict utilization controls. If a truck is not loaded efficiently, invoicing does not proceed. “If vehicle utilization is below a certain %, invoicing will not happen,” Mankad says. The logic is simple: better load discipline means better economics, lower wastage, and a stronger cold-chain operation.
Digitizing the Shop Floor
On the factory floor, technology is reducing manual error and improving traceability. Vadilal uses SAP-based batch management along with barcode scanning to ensure that the product being invoiced matches the physical batch leaving the shop floor. That is especially critical in a business where product identity, expiry, and packaging details must be accurate.
Printing is now centralized and automated. Earlier, operators had to manually enter MRP and other information on multiple printers. Today, data is keyed in once and sent to the relevant printer through a central console.
Such change has eliminated a major source of risk. A wrong MRP or incorrect product code on a frozen product is not a small error; it can become an expensive recall or a brand trust issue. “If the operator has printed the wrong MRP, then you’re gone,” he says. “You can save a lot of money through such automation.”
Dhaval further adds that all paper-based quality and process logging is moved to tablets and mobile; data from these 30+ formats is collated on a cloud platform for real-time insights, saving an estimated 15,000+ hours a year.
Forecasting Demand for a Seasonal Business
For an ice cream company, demand forecasting is a moving target. Weather, rain, heat intensity, promotions, raw-material availability, and even external events can alter consumption patterns. That makes planning far more complex than in a stable, year-round category.
Vadilal is using historical sales data, material mapping, temperature trends, and rainfall patterns to improve forecasting. But the company has also learned that external factors can overturn even the best models. “The forecast is happening, but it is not 100% foolproof,” Mankad says. “You must have all the solutions in place.”
The firm takes a layered approach to forecasts to streamline things further; for example, the system generates its forecasts, which the sales reps supplement with their own opinions on the ground. That combined output is a consensus forecast. That then feeds into the annual operating plan, or AOP, and into SAP in multiple forms — by material, liters, pieces, and value plan.
This matters because different teams speak different planning languages. Sales thinks in value, production thinks in liters, and procurement thinks in pieces. Technology helps unify those views so the business can act on one version of the truth.
Building an Analytics Layer & AI Capabilities
Earlier in 2025, Vadilal Group initiated GenNext to attract talent. As part of that, a team of data scientists from leading engineering and digital-analytics background has been onboarded. This team is driving actionable insights from the data.
To bring all of this together, Vadilal is building a cloud-based in-house analytics platform named Drishti (Vision in English). The platform already includes CEO dashboards, sales analytics, plan-versus-actual views, procurement dashboards, inventory visibility, and live temperature monitoring.
The aim is not just reporting but decision support. The dashboards help users see which products are selling, in which geographies, and how inventory and procurement are tracking against the plan.
The next layer will add natural-language AI capabilities, enabling users to ask questions in plain language and receive instant insights. Dhaval added that an AI Usage policy has just been published. The company’s data scientists and internal IT teams have been leveraging AI capabilities to build prototypes, HTML portal mock-ups, and code.
In the frozen foods business, technology is not an abstraction. It’s what protects quality, supports operational stability, and defends the consumer experience – from factory floor to freezer; from IoT and SAP automation to forecasting, analytics and artificial intelligence driven decision support, Vadilal continues to employ technologies to remain competitive and ahead of the curve.
