About 25 years ago, Prayoon Kultee started the business accidentally when one of his debtors decided to sell out an ice-cream factory in Bangkok and taught him how to make ice cream.

Prayoon, then the president of Freeze Land Products, gathered more experience by working at an ice-cream plant for another year, to add to his 20 years of experience in managing industrial plants.

Finally, he launched his ice-cream business with the brand name "Beta (1989)", and targeted female blue-collar workers as his consumer group. It wasn't long before he accepted that the target group was the wrong market. He decided to stop the business and went to Trat province for a while before moving again to Surat Thani, where he decided to resurrect the ice-cream business.

"There were banks in the provinces and local people tended to deposit their money there, and I decided that this money could help me to build the business," Prayoon recalls.

He was lucky that his business had no competitors. The plant was labour-intensive and the manufacturing process simple. The brand was still Beta (1989). He was convinced that the ice cream needed an English name to attract Thai customers. Using a Thai name could have resulted in failure.

Then, in 1995, he decided to import ice cream-making machines from Italy to enhance his company's production capability. He began a serious search for business knowledge to help him develop the company. He attended many training programmes, including the Industrial Promotion Department's SME development programmes.

From that point, Prayoon began to improve the company's internal operations, including its management and accounting systems. He also began paying more attention to his workforce and to enhancing cost efficiency, as well as research and development, to create new products.

The changes also involved the brand name. The family brainstormed for a new name and eventually came up with "Holly", which was used for five years.

When he was confident that the business was strong enough, Prayoon handed control over to the next generation - his son, Peerasak.

Peerasak has significantly modernised the business, its products and its marketing strategies.

The family attended a trade exhibition in Germany and once again decided to import new production machinery. The brand name of the machines was March, so they decided to forget about the brand name Holly and call their ice cream March. The objective was to shift from a local to an international image and at the same time to convey the image of a parade of delicious ice cream.

Peerasak says March ice cream has developed from just a few flavours to more than 40 today. Like other brands, it comes in cones, cups or sandwiches. However, a major difference is that March uses local fruit as ingredients.

"We place emphasis on producing high-quality ice cream and using local ingredients," Peerasak says. "For example, other manufacturers might use vanilla as an ingredient in Indiana Supreme ice cream, but we use coconut, which is a fruit for which Surat Thani is renowned.

"This offers the flavours that really suit Thai people," he says. "We now have a separate department for research and development."

Being a local company, the Kultee family has decided against big marketing budgets. Instead, it focuses on cooperative advertising through its distribution channels. Agents and distributors have been appointed in many southern provinces, and the company has a sales centre in Nakhon Pathom province.

"We don't measure our success by the number of ice-cream freezers we have in the marketplace. Instead, each freezer must have a higher sales volume than those of our competitors," Peerasak says.

Lately, the company has begun a brand-awareness campaign through advertising and staging road shows. It started by appointing five main distributors, then cooperated with the dealers to arrange the advertising and marketing activities. Nevertheless, it plans to use other media channels, such as radio, in the future.

Today, March ice cream holds a 30-per-cent share of the ice-cream market in Surat Thani and a 15-per-cent share of the whole southern region market. This means it has about 3 per cent of the Bt7-billion countrywide market.

March has a staff of 100 and an annual production capacity of 2,000 tonnes to cover more than 30 provinces. This year, it expects to achieve 40-per-cent sales growth.

Meanwhile, the Kultee family's dream of standing on the ice-cream front line, beside global brands such as Wall's, has moved a step closer. It is negotiating with a dealer in Malaysia, and this first step into international territory gives the Kultee family hope that one day their March brand will make Thailand proud by becoming known around the world.

Cheerawat Khongkaew

Bizweek