AN ICE-cream kitchen will move out of Old Town - as favourite Rays Ice Cream sets its sights on expansion.

Couple Hadi and Dan Brooks opened their Devizes Road shop in 2011, after noticing a gap in the market for an ice-cream café.

Seven years later - and with another café in Royal Wootton Bassett under her belt - Hadi is preparing to grow her business.

Demand from shoppers and local businesses has outstripped the small kitchen in her Old Town café.

In April, Rays will move ice-cream production to a purpose-built new kitchen in West Swindon.

The move will enable Rays to produce twice as much ice-cream - and store five to six times as much.

Hadi, 40, said: “At the moment we can probably store as much ice cream for two to three days, whereas now we’ll be able to store much more.

“We’ve simply run out of room in the Old Town shop. In 2017 we opened our second shop in Royal Wootton Bassett and started supplying all of the ice cream for Desserts and More at The Crossing in the Brunel Centre.

“We just haven’t got enough space to make and store enough ice cream for these and our other wholesale customers.”

Heather Greenwood, assistant manager at Rays, said: “I’m really looking forward to this move. The ice-cream will still be made using the same ingredients and machines, to the same recipes. But we will have so much more space to make and store it. Hopefully, there will be no more making ice-cream through the night.”

Using machines imported from Italy, Heather can make 80 litres of ice-cream from a 60 litre mixture of milk, double cream and sugar set to pasturise for several hours.

Into this base ice-cream mixture is swirled all manner of flavours. The most popular varieties sold in the shop remain old favourites chocolate and vanilla.

But having just one set of machines can be risky. If one breaks, it can take some time to order replacement parts.

The expansion plans will also enable them to extend their Old Town café, with Hadi hoping to create space for more customers.

And ice-cream lovers will be delighted to hear that a bigger kitchen could result in an even wider range of flavours from the brand - which has already flirted with ice-creams flavoured with beetroot and even geraniums.

Former marketing manager Hadi said: “I always wanted to run my own business. I live in Old Town and it made sense to do it here. It was something nobody else was doing in Swindon.”

If she had just one piece of advice for someone setting up in business, it would be to “stick with it”, she said.

“It’s really hard work,” she said. “But stick with it and hopefully you’ll get there.

“When we opened this one little shop seven years ago I had no idea we would be moving our kitchen to new premises.”