PARTNERS in life as well as business, John Devine arrived in Cairns on a romantic round-Australia trip with his wife Lorraine and, after spotting a gap in the market for gelato, never left.

I'm a former motor mechanic, Lorraine was a paramedic. Originally from Adelaide, we were doing a tour round Australia up the east coast. Eventually we arrived in Cairns, loved what we saw, and stayed.

We'd been up here for six months on holiday, then had to go back down south. While we were in Canberra we saw a gelato shop and thought, 'We have to do one of those in Cairns'. We've been going five-and-a-half years now.

It just gets better and better. There's healthy competition on this street with four or five other shops selling ice cream, but we get heaps of tourists. They come to us after reading Trip Advisor, where we are rated number one in Cairns.

We start at 10 in the morning. I'll make ice cream until mid-afternoon. Our main trade is after dinner, that's when people are looking for dessert. In Italy you can get gelato until 1am.

We source all our fruits locally. We put fresh fruits in the sorbets, that's what makes them taste so fantastic; always fresh fruit.

The lemons come from Rusty's market, our mangoes come from a farmer at Mareeba, our passionfruits from Passion Patch at Bramston Beach. They're all having great crops this year.

Passionfruit and mango are the most popular sorbets; people absolutely love them. People associate the tropics with mangoes. There are a lot of mango farms here, it's one of the things visitors just have to try.

They're used to buying them from supermarkets at $5 each, but here we have an abundance.

The fruits are picked straight from the farm, the farmer pulps them for us and freezes them, but he always brings us fresh ones, for garnish and for us to make sure they taste fine.

Everything has to be weighed out exactly – too much fruit, it will develop icicles in the mix. If you've ever had ice cream that's too icy you'll know that you want to avoid that.

We make fresh ice cream every day. The product is usually sold and eaten within 24 hours. It hasn't got any preservatives in it; it's made here and usually eaten immediately.

We have 18 flavours on sale at any time, including sorbets – wild berry, mango, lemon and passionfruit, which are all non-dairy, gluten-free and very refreshing.

At the back are yogurts that have the texture of ice cream, but made with yogurt, not cream.

The rest of them are gelatos, or ice creams as we call them in Australia. They’re milk and cream-based, made with real products; so coconut with real coconut, vanilla crushed with vanilla seeds, coffee with real coffee, bananas with real bananas, that's the idea, we don't make them with toppings.

We didn't even know Trip Advisor existed until a couple of years ago. This really nice American guy was raving about our ice cream and kept on coming back every day.

He said, 'This is as good as when I go to Venice', and said, 'I'm going to put you on Trip Advisor'. We just said, 'Yeah, no worries'.

Now more and more people do it and say, 'This is the best ice cream we've ever had'.

We have very loyal locals who keep our business going. Service is what brings people back. Your quality has to be superior, and you should never skimp, but service is vital.

It’s a fun business and we love working together. People are always happy to get an ice cream. We have people coming back from all around the world, saying, 'thank God you're still here'. We’re not going anywhere.

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