Hamamat Montia brings her seventh-generation legacy to Geppetto Gelato in a collaboration that reimagines what African heritage tastes like.
There is a woman in Ghana who has spent her life turning one ancient ingredient into a global movement. Her name is Hamamat Montia; former Miss Malaika Ghana, Model of Africa Universe, founder of the world’s only Shea Butter Museum, Ghana’s newly appointed Cultural Ambassador for Shea Butter, and by all cultural accounts, the most compelling storyteller in the country’s beauty and heritage space. Now, she is doing something nobody saw coming: she is making ice cream.
Not just any ice cream. Shea butter ice cream. And she is doing it in partnership with Geppetto Gelato; the artisanal Italian gelato brand that brought Africa’s first gelato museum to Ghana, operating out of Spintex. The result is a collaboration that feels, at once, completely unexpected and completely inevitable.
Think about what is actually happening here. On one side, you have a woman who has spent years repositioning Ghana’s shea industry from a raw export commodity to a globally respected cultural and economic treasure. On the other, a gelato brand that built an entire museum around the art and story of Italian ice cream; right here in Accra. Two institutions. Two museums. One shared philosophy: that food and craft are culture, and culture deserves to be experienced, not just consumed.
The Hamamat x Geppetto Gelato collaboration brings shea butter; that rich, ivory-hued fat extracted from the nut of the African shea tree, into the gelato churn. Rooted in centuries of tradition, shea butter production begins with hand-harvesting the nuts from wild trees, roasting them over an open fire, then grinding and kneading them into a thick, creamy paste. That same creaminess; the thing that makes Ghanaian shea butter the gold standard in skincare, turns out to be extraordinary inside a frozen dessert. The fat content is dense and luxurious. The flavour is quietly nutty, gently earthy, unmistakably African.
Hamamat is a seventh-generation shea butter heir; the craft has been in her family since her great-grandmother first practised it. For most of her career, that inheritance expressed itself through jars and calabashes, through skin and hair, through the carefully preserved ritual of production. This gelato is a new expression of the same lineage. A different vessel. The same soul.
When you encounter Hamamat’s shea butter, you are not just engaging with a product; you are reconnecting with the roots of a family, with Africa’s traditions, and with the wisdom of generations of grandmothers. That philosophy carries directly into the gelato. Each scoop is, in its own way, a calabash; a container for memory, for identity, for something that has always been here, now offered in a form that stops people in their tracks.
It is the kind of cultural object that Accra has been quietly building toward. A city that has spent the last decade asserting itself as a creative capital, through its fashion weeks, its galleries, its restaurant scene, its diaspora homecomings, now has a dessert worthy of the conversation.
Shea butter production in Ghana is dominated by women, particularly in northern communities; yet these women are often excluded from the value chain and global profits. Hamamat has spent her career pushing back against that exclusion, sourcing her shea butter from women-led cooperatives in Ghana and working closely with these communities to support their economic development and empowerment. The gelato collaboration extends that logic. Every scoop sold is part of a supply chain that runs back to northern Ghanaian women who hand-harvest, roast, and knead. The ice cream is the end of a very long and very intentional journey.
This is the thing about Hamamat’s world: the glamour and the politics are inseparable. Her appointment as Ghana’s Cultural Ambassador for Shea Butter in February 2026 was framed by the government as a way to highlight indigenous knowledge, support local producers, and position Ghana’s shea sector on international markets. The Geppetto collaboration is exactly that positioning made edible; a product that anyone can hold, taste, and understand in thirty seconds, regardless of where they are from.
Geppetto Gelato has already proven that Accra has an appetite for artisanal, story-driven ice cream. With its gelato museum in Spintex, the first of its kind on the African continent, the brand has made the case that gelato is not just a treat but an experience worth travelling for. Hamamat brings that same museum energy to the flavour itself. Now the experience is not just about Italian craft in Ghana; it is about Ghanaian craft, period.
The collaboration arrives at a moment when the world is paying attention to Ghana in a way it hasn’t quite before. The tourism wave, the diaspora conversations, the creative industries boom; all of it has created an audience that is hungry, literally and figuratively, for something authentic. Shea butter gelato, made by a seventh-generation heiress in partnership with the city’s most ambitious ice cream brand, is exactly that thing.
It is traditional and modern at once. It is soft and bold. It is Africa in a cup and it is absolutely worth the drive to Spintex.
Geppetto Gelato is located at Manet Junction, Spintex Road, Accra. Follow @iamhamamat and @geppettogelato