Delmar woman honors family with Nani's Ice Tea business

Maria Gallo stands at the stove of her Delmar home the same way her grandmother (also Maria) did. The purpose: to make iced tea. A yellow and white bag of Domino brand sugar births sweet crystalline specs that release a whir of saccharine dust with each scoop. The sugar gets poured into the same pan Maria the elder used, handed down to Gallo to carry on the tradition. Water is added to form a syrupy base for lemons and black tea bags to steep in. Swirls of deep ebony form while the water simmers and the dried tea leaves release their flavors. She adds sprigs of mint, pierced and severed from their tapered stems by her fingernails, tossing them into the pot until limp and void of the essence they impart on the tea.
On a good day, Gallo makes the tea and remembers the loving, guiding hand of her grandmother. On the harder days, she takes a deep breath, reveling in the sensory experience — the smell of the lemons and mint, the way the sweet elixir coats her lips and tongue — and repeats a reassuring maxim.
“OK. I can do this.”
Gallo’s grandmother, Maria Lomonaco Rosano (known as Mary Rosano) made the iced tea recipe every day after doing her housework and showering, early enough so that it was chilled for dinner. “We would fight to the death for the last glass,” Gallo said. Gallo was an elementary schoolteacher in the Albany district but worked part-time at Yono’s restaurant, in Albany, and Saratoga Prime, bringing in batches of her homemade tea for the staff to enjoy. Though she always had brief thoughts of selling her grandmother’s iced tea en masse, it wasn’t until Angelo Mazzone, owner of Mazzone Hospitality, which includes Saratoga Prime, called her in 2011 to set up a meeting with a co-packer who was interested in her product.
“He wanted to bottle the tea in a plastic pinky jug bottle, but I always had the vision of a mason jar,” Gallo said. “He told me, ‘This is your story and I don’t want you to change anything.’ He was always a supporter of my idea.”

After several months of research and product development, Gallo began bottling Nani’s Iced Tea, replete in a mason jar with a black-and-white photo of Mary Rosano on the label, with locally owned Nelson Farms, in the spring of 2012. Achieving a shelf-stable product that could maintain its memorable flavor was a challenge that dogged Gallo throughout the process. “It tasted diluted, like Sleepytime tea and I called every chef I knew asking what I could do,” she said. Her kitchen was her research facility, making frequent trips to nearby Four Corners Marketplace in Delmar for one more bag of sugar, one more batch of lemons as she tinkered. John Hooper, an owner of the small market, was a steady cheerleader for her during this time, helping Gallo with regulation paperwork and giving her the nudge to push forth when it all seemed too daunting.
“This is not Pottersville, this is Bedford Falls. We want to support local people and products,” Hooper said.
When Nelson Farms closed in 2015, Gallo was left without a bottler for 10 months. Doubts about the survival of the company and her own ability to solve the issue were crippling, but she said, “If people love the tea and it’s up to me to figure out the loopholes, I’m not going to stop.” Her daughter asked, “Are you going to get a real job?” But Gallo reminded her —and herself — “I do have a job. I have an iced tea company.”
Authenticity to Nani’s legacy has been a point of contention in growing the brand, one that is more pronounced in the hard times. Many supporters remember her Rosano grandparents (her grandfather’s family owned an eponymous bakery on Grand Street in Albany, her grandmother lived on 10th Street, which was lost in the construction of the Empire State Plaza), and she strives to stay true to the recipe despite new-age requests.
“People ask if we use agave nectar or if our mint is organic. I laugh and say, ‘No! It’s the same mint that grew on the side of my grandmother’s garage!'”
Gallo sees what she does as a “grass-roots” business, thriving on local support and hand-picking where her product is sold. She delivers the product herself and has no marketing budget (“sometimes there isn’t even money for gas in the car,” she said) or website, relying instead on word-of-mouth. A single mother with two children (her daughter is 19, her son is 15 and has autism), she has completely drowned the concept of “balance” in each batch of tea produced. Her daughter helps with delivery and the workload at home. Gallo resigned from her teaching job in order to focus on Nani’s Iced Tea.
“It’s hard to keep it going when it all falls apart, hard to have to prove yourself continuously. You have to be out there every day,” Gallo said. “Everyone loves a rags to riches story, but people romanticize it. No one wants to be in the trenches with you when you have $4 in your checking account.”
The physical reminders of Nani are gone for Gallo. Nani died in 2003 at age 94, and the house where Gallo learned to make the tea no longer stands, but the presence of her grandmother lingers. “The pull is really my grandmother. My mother was present but my grandmother raised me. She was the single most important person in my life.”
The story of the company’s origins has been the biggest sales tool for Gallo, helping her to expand into Whole Foods and several Capital Region stores and restaurants. She is working with distributors to get Nani’s Iced Tea on shelves in New York City and hopes to find a local distributor, because as she said, “it’s nice to be able to fit both kids in the car without a dolly and iced tea falling on their heads.”
While Gallo still samples the mass-produced tea recipe for quality control, she uses Nani’s stove top method in small batches for family and close friends. If she closes her eyes, she can still feel Nani’s hand gently grasping her own, showing her how to stir the sugar into the water to avoid crystallizing it along the sides of the pan, showing her when it is time to add the tea bags and when it is time to chill the beverage to be ready for dinner. If she tunes out the demands of business and listens closely, she can hear Nani’s voice sweetly whisper encouraging words.
“I feel like she is still taking care of me. It keeps me going.”