Everything Nice but With Plant-Based Spice: Kaju Is Your New Go-To Vegan Ice-Cream Spot

If you’re vegan, on a plant-based diet or your tum tums just doesn’t always agree with dairy, your sweet tooth doesn’t really get curbed. It’s still alive, well and aching to sink into creamy goodness. So round of daily-free applause to Kaju for now making vegan ice-cream!

“I opened a vegan restaurant back in 2014, but it didn’t all go to plan and we shut down in late 2015,” Yasmine Nazmy, founder of Kaju tells SceneEats. “I continued to cater to our loyal customers long after we closed down. I’d continue cooking and trying to perfect the recipes we used to serve, from gluten-free pizza, cheese, burgers. It’s what I dub as the ‘healthy vegan junk’.”

“I never thought much of the ice-cream, until some of our customers started asking for it. The demand got me excited to toy around and experiment, then lo and behold, there was ice-cream!”

In addition to Kaju’s savoury items, their desserts also nab a coveted spot for Egyptian vegans due to the niche of finding sweet, vegan-friendly treats. She sought out to fill that gap for beautifully sentimental and health reasons. “I was never really the food connoisseur growing up, not a chef prodigy. None of that. I never really started cooking until I was studying in university,” adds Nazmy. 

She started cutting off meat and chicken around that time, and was a fully devoted vegan. The decision wasn’t just a lifestyle choice, but also because of health issues Nazmy had developed, going vegan just felt necessary at the time.

“My grandma, God bless her soul, used to be lactose-intolerant, and it used to be puzzling to doctors in the early days. So she had to swear off dairy, but she still wanted some icy sweet dessert even if she couldn’t have ice-cream. She’d make sorbet, which I’m honestly not a fan. It’s just frozen sweet water!” jokes Nazmy. “So I thought ‘OK, what if we can make ice-cream just minus the dairy?’ My grandma was the inspiration behind me venturing into vegan ice-cream, it’s just a shame she never got to try it,” she continues. 

Nazmy is also an engineering student specialised in pollution and contaminated lands. She mixed that background, along with her own plant-based diet, to make sure her ice-cream wasn’t just delicious, but possibly the healthiest treat you could come across.

“Instead of sugar, we use dates. They’re these God sent sources of sweetness that are also full of fibre and iron, and we’re contracted with an organic supplier who also makes sure her farmers are spearing the initiative to keep growing all the crops organically and with no pesticides, unlike sugarcane agriculture,” Nazmy adds.

So a saviour for the vegans, and agriculturally woke. The supreme skillset. The skillset is being put to great use, for this summer Kaju’s got nine different flavours of ice-cream including matcha tea, ginger, cold-brew coffee and the fan-favourite cookies and cream. You can check out their full menu and know where you can order from right here.