While the popular ice cream brands, Peters and Streets, have lengthy histories in Australia, Podesta’s Ice Cream preceded both by several decades. An Italian immigrant, Giovanni Podesta, was supplying commercial quantities of ice cream well before either of those companies was founded. Arriving from a village near Genoa, he began his business in 1880 – in Melbourne, not in Sydney as some sources (including the National Library) suggest.
It wasn’t necessarily an auspicious beginning. Podesta sold his penny ices from a cart, which eventually saw him in trouble with the local authorities. In 1985, he was arrested for obstructing the thoroughfare in Flinders Lane and, according to The Herald, searched, stripped of his possessions and thrown into a cell. The newspaper suggested that this ill-treatment was because Podesta was “a foreigner”. The City magistrates eventually fined him £1.
Podesta subsequently moved his business to New South Wales. His naturalisation certificate, in the name of John Podesta, shows that he moved to the colony “overland from Victoria” in 1888. In Sydney, he opened a factory in Goold Street and was joined in the business by his sons Louis, Frank and John. His trouble with the law hadn’t ended, however. In 1901, he was fined for Sunday trading and the following year was convicted of receiving stolen goods after “feloniously receiving thirteen bottles of flavouring essences, the property of Messrs. Elliott Bros., well knowing the same to have been stolen”.
Despite this, Podesta’s ice cream went from strength to strength. In 1913, the three sons set up a company called Podesta & Sons Australian Iced Delicacy Co. They advertised “Ice Cream made in any Flavour you desire” priced from five shillings to ten shillings per gallon. An article in a Sydney publication The Newsletter in 1915 claimed that it was from J Podesta & Sons that the city had its first ice cream supply and waxed lyrical about the purity of the product:
These people know their business, and what they produce is real Ice Cream, and no make-shift compound of deceptive material. The firm’s works in Gould-street, City, are the most compact and clean to microscopic lengths, no purer of cleaner food factory being found in Sydney.
In 1923, the factory was offered for lease along with a dwelling, equipment and “a complete going concern with a large run of customers”. “Owner retiring,” the advertisement said. It appears, though, that the business remained within the family and was taken over by one of Giovanni’s grandsons who built a new factory in Goold Street in 1926. The company advertised that it was prepared to supply ice cream at a discount rate to Catholic convents, bazaars and fetes.
What happened next is a mystery. Although a Mr. F. A. Podesta was recruiting boys to sell confectionery and ice creams at sporting events through the 1930s and 1940s, it’s not clear whether he had any direct connection to the ice cream company. I can find no record of Podesta’s ice cream business being sold to a competitor, becoming bankrupt or even closing down. This once-respected but now-vanished enterprise has become yet another footnote in Australia’s food history.