Adam Duke, pastry chef and owner of Duke’s Bread, first started making vegan ice cream when he was entertaining friends with special diets. One of those friends was Matthew Martin, a vegan and the chef of farmer-and-restaurant-connector company Freshlist. The ice cream — which Duke made in flavors such as mango lassi and Mexican hot chocolate — was a hit with the group, and Martin and Duke decided to make a brand out of it.

They first called their burgeoning company BroYo, but decided to rebrand it Title Belt Ice Cream. The name is inspired by their shared love of wrestling and the fact that they launched the brand to try and make enough money to purchase tickets for All Elite Wrestling’s upcoming Charlotte event. Title Belt’s vegan ice cream is made with a coconut cream base, though Martin and Duke don’t brand it as strictly vegan.

“We aren’t advertising it that way, because we don’t want people to get weirded out,” says Martin.

Flavors so far have included cake batter, mocha, pineapple, peanut butter Oreo, and the mango lassi and Mexican hot chocolate that convinced the two to start the venture. The cake batter ice cream started with Funfetti, but will become a series of rotating cake flavors.

Title Belt made its debut as part of the VegFest afterparty in September, and the two realized they might have a viable business. They served their ice cream at the Piedmont Culinary Guild’s Farm to Fork event, and will be lacing up again for pop-up events in November. You can follow them on Facebook or Instagram to see their whereabouts. Their next appearance is on Nov. 3 at a grand opening event for tattoo parlor The Grey Ash.

To tie in with the wrestling connection, Duke and Martin each have wrestling personas — Adam Duxxx and Matty Scoops — and plan on cutting WWE-style promos to hype up their pop-ups. They also hope to connect with local wrestling circuit PWX to sell their ice cream at shows. They plan to focus more on growing the business next year.

“At this point, we’re kind of taking the winter to take things as slow as humanly possible and just test things out, make sure we have everything we need together and have the recipes down, then really trying to blow it up starting next spring,” Duke says.

According to Duke, they will let the business grow organically, as he did with Duke’s Bread, but are in talks with several restaurants about wholesaling their product. —Kristen Wile

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