Two siblings, their parents’ mochi and two years of recipes.

Little Moons was founded in London in 2010 by a brother and sister, Vivien Wong and Howard Wong. Its roots are in their family’s business. Their parents ran an Asian bakery that supplied patisserie to Asian grocery shops in Britain, and its signature product was a traditional mochi filled with red bean paste, Howard Wong told Just Food in 2023. That sweet rice cake was the starting point for the siblings’ idea: the same soft rice dough, wrapped around a ball of ice cream.

The company tells the story in similar terms. On its website it describes the founders as “two kids growing up in our parents’ bakery in London,” says they spent two years working on recipes and techniques before launching, and says that Little Moons began by supplying restaurants in London before word spread among chefs and the mochi reached menus and shops. In the same 2023 interview, Howard Wong named Wagamama, Wasabi and itsu among its early foodservice customers. Today the company describes each piece as a bite-sized ball of gelato inside a soft, chewy rice-flour dough, and says it uses fresh British milk and cream and makes its ice cream in small batches.

In 2018 it was given a new identity and packaging by the London agency Pearlfisher, which Transform magazine reported in July that year was meant to support an expansion into Europe and to unify the frozen and chilled ranges. In that design the “o” in “Moons” echoed the round shape of a mochi ball, a hand-drawn crescent moon was used as a pattern, and the packs carried the line “Enjoy the little things,” with bright colours keyed to the flavours.

A supermarket freezer, a phone camera and a sell-out.

The brand’s breakthrough came from social media rather than advertising. In early 2021 TikTok users began posting videos of themselves buying Little Moons in supermarkets. Grocery Gazette reported on 7 February 2021 that Tesco had seen sales of the mochi rise by 700% and Waitrose by 350% at the peak, that the product had sold out at Waitrose, Ocado and Amazon Fresh, and that four days of sales had beaten the whole of the previous December. Howard Wong said at the time that the videos had passed 31 million views. The same report said the company had recently invested £3.5 million in a new London production site.

The Grocer’s annual survey of top products found that Little Moons’ value sales grew from just under £2 million to almost £20 million over 2021. The brand followed the sell-out with paid advertising. In September 2021 the agency Lucky Generals, which had won the account at the end of 2020, launched a campaign called “Ice Cream From Another World,” directed by Em Cole, with two 20-second television films and a mural on Ferdinand Street in Camden, running in Britain, France and Germany, Creative Salon reported.

Outside investment came next. In March 2022 the US-based private-equity firm L Catterton took a minority stake in the company, The Retail Bulletin reported; the terms were not disclosed, and The Grocer reported that the deal valued the business at more than £100 million. Just Food later reported turnover of £64.5 million for the 18 months to December 2022, against £25.5 million for the 12 months to June 2021, and said the Wong siblings remained the main shareholders.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make ice cream, and all of them are sold in Britain: Wall’s, Carte d’Or, Mackie’s, Kelly’s of Cornwall, Little Moons, Viennetta and Solero. Ice cream brands sold in Britain in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a seaside kiosk to a supermarket freezer.

An ice cream brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its ice cream is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its ice cream is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new factory, a reversal and a new look.

Rapid growth brought a costly experiment with manufacturing. In October 2023 Little Moons announced a new 50,000 sq ft production site in Kettering, Northamptonshire, due to open in the first half of 2024, along with a head office in Farringdon, central London, and teams in France and Germany, the trade site Food Management Today reported. In March 2024 chief executive Mike Hedges left the company with immediate effect, and Vivien Wong stepped in as interim chief executive, Food Manufacture reported. Joanna Allen, previously chief executive of Graze and a global brand vice-president at Unilever, was appointed in March 2024 and started in June, Just Food reported.

The Kettering factory opened in early 2024 but did not last the year. In November 2024 the company said it planned to close the site and move manufacturing back to its two London plants at Park Royal and Wembley, with about 200 jobs at risk, Grocery Gazette and The Grocer reported. The Grocer later reported that sales rose 6% to £56.6 million in the year to 2 January 2026 and that the company had returned to an operating profit. In 2023 Howard Wong told Just Food that about half of the business was outside Britain, with Germany, Austria and Switzerland among its main markets, alongside Belgium, Italy, Portugal, France, Singapore and Australia; Just Food described him as leading new product development and his sister as the company’s “cultural guardian.”

The look changed again in July 2025, when a redesign by the agency JKR began rolling out across the mochi, the Refreshos sorbet range and the chilled cheesecakes and ganaches, Retail Times reported. It brought a new logo, brighter colours, “flavour waves” and ingredient photography, and its marketing director presented it as a bid to compete with chocolate bars and biscuits as a snack.

For a design guide, Little Moons shows how a family recipe, a moon motif and a freezer-aisle moment on TikTok can turn a niche dessert into a national brand. Compare Häagen-Dazs, another premium ice cream sold in small formats, and Mackie’s, a family ice cream maker in Scotland. For this guide we use a moon indigo, a mochi cream, a berry pink and a mango yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Little Moons’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.