Texas Water Buffalo Milk Creamery OroBianco Opens Austin Gelato Truck

A Hill Country Italian creamery known for using water buffalo milk is coming to Austin with a new gelato truck this year. OroBianco Italian Creamery’s gelato truck will be found at Hudson Meat Market on 1800 South Congress Avenue in the Bouldin Creek neighborhood starting in September.

OroBianco’s gelato truck menu will include its staple flavors such as the pistachio made with nuts sourced from Waco, single-origin chocolates that the business produces from raw cacao, and the citrus crema. There will also be seasonal options, like peaches from Fredericksburg and the newly popular maple-bacon bourbon.

Owner Phil Giglio believes in the creamy magic of water buffalo milk, its richness lending itself well to dairy products such as cheeses and gelatos. “Water buffalo milk’s just got a lot more fat content to it than cow’s milk does,” Giglio says, despite what people may think of milk coming from the domestic bovid. “This is not gross,” he continued. “It is a really nice, beautiful milk, and everything’s locally made.”

Giglio — who still works as a corporate lawyer — kept thinking about water buffalo milk, so he decided he wanted to get into the dairy game. However, despite the specific milk’s popularity internationally, especially in Italy, it wasn’t readily available in Texas. “Around the world, it’s viewed as this ultra-premium thing, but in the U.S., we just don’t have any context for it, because there’s not many people doing this,” he says.

Because of that, Giglio knew he needed to raise the animals himself. He connected with Jason Peeler of Texas ranch Peeler Farms, which was already raising water buffalo. They partnered to create a dairy farm in Floresville, which was completed in 2020. That’s where the water buffalo roam around eating grass and get herded by horses. “It’s [a] very South Texas kind of ranching tradition,” Giglip says, which is “a little bit unique for a dairy,” It’s now considered one of the biggest in America, according to him, but “we’re microscopic by dairy standards.”

OroBianco opened a physical shop in Blanco in 2021 along with its Italian-style creamery. They expanded with a second location in Stonewall in 2022, a gelato truck in Dripping Springs in 2023, and a third store in Fredericksburg in March 2024. (There was a gelato truck out in Dripping Springs from 2023 into July 2024. There had been a pizza truck at Stonewall, too, which made Neapolitan pies.) The shops sell its goods as well as other products, plus sandwiches, coffee, and spritzes.

OroBianco’s cheesemaker Adam Thompson and the team concoct that creamy mozzarella, but there are other cheeses, including spreadable blanco fresco; feta-like Bufaletta; and Bluebonnet, a take on blue cheese.

Giglio bought a defunct 1960s delivery truck known as a Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company (aka Divco), which had been used for milk deliveries often in the Northeast) from Pennsylvania.

OroBianco already worked with Hudson Meats on South Congress, which creates sausages using the farm’s water buffalo meat. So the business let Giglio park the mobile gelato truck at its shop.

The gelato truck is OroBianco’s first real expansion into Austin, outside of providing gelato and cheese for some Austin chefs and restaurants, like Italian restaurant L’Oca d’Oro. Depending on how well OroBianco’s truck does, Giglio is open to opening a physical Austin store.

Giglio also working on selling retail gelato pints, which will be launched in Central Market in April 2025. He’d like to expand into other markets and shops such as Royal Blue Grocery.

OroBianco Italian Creamery

OroBianco Italian Creamery [Blanco]