The Great American Ice Cream Conspiracy!

Lara

Lara

Friend of the Arts
Location
Mid-Atlantic Coast
Bad News: Companies like Breyer's Ice Cream are now pumping 100% of allowed AIR into their ice-cream for more volume and have downsized their cartons (without changing the appearance), yet not downsizing the price nor alerting their consumers. They also have artificial ingredients and other toxic ingredients....it's all causing gastrointestinal issues if you eat a large portion of it. Is it just in America or is it in your country too?

Good News: For the first time, I bought a 1/2 gallon of Trader Joe's French Vanilla Ice Cream for Thanksgiving's Pumpkin Pie and noticed it was noticeably heavier and creamier than anything I'd bought from grocery stores...so heavy! Yet the price was a fair 5.99. That's when I suspected extra air pumped into other brands because I knew that happens to other processed foods.

Let's back up: Before knowing about Trader Joe's ice cream, or about AIR allowances, my mother was healthy but occasionally needed her ice-cream fix and would eat practically the whole carton in a day about 3x a year. She used to get away with it but then it started making her extremely sick (terrible bouts of diarrhea - sorry). I wish I would have known about Trader Joe's ice cream back then. I think it was all the air in Breyer's and Turkey Hill ice-cream too. She died of pancreatic cancer. I don't know if that was related but certainly didn't help.

From their Flyer:
"Trader Joe’s French Vanilla Ice Cream has only 26% overrun (added air). It’s also made with quality ingredients like milk and cream from cows not treated with rBST, egg yolks, and cane sugar. Finally, it’s positively bursting with real vanilla flavor, courtesy of vanilla extract and vanilla bean – there are visible specks of vanilla bean in every bite.One of the attributes that makes our half-gallon of French Vanilla Ice Cream unique is the size of the carton itself. Used to be, ice cream came in half-gallon cartons. Then, somewhere along the way, ice cream companies made that container smaller. Similar looking, but smaller. They didn’t lower the price at the same time, though. Curious. At Trader Joe’s, ours is still a half gallon, and our price is about the same (or lower!) than what you’ll pay for those smaller cartons of lesser ice cream."

Ingredients: Cream, Sugar, Milk, Egg Yolks, Vanilla Bean, Carob, Guar Gum. (that's it!)

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We still have a couple of places that sell a full half gallon of ice cream, Byrne Dairy and Stewart's. It's great ice cream but the price reflects the size of the container.

I buy some of the smaller containers of ice cream with a high overrun because I want ice cream that is tasty but lower in calories and carbohydrates.

Ken's comment about the kick in the bottom of the containers made me think of the old rum and whiskey bottles with a high kick similar to this one. In the old days people thought that the merchant was cheating them so they would tip the bottle upside down and the merchant would fill the kick with the same booze that the bottle contained and the customer would drink it on the spot to insure that he was getting a full bottle. The truth is that the bottle was already a full measure, kick included, and the merchant was marking up his prices to cover the cost of the free drink.
kickup.jpg
 
Sometime, about 18 months ago, most Ice cream containers went from 2 qt's to 1.5 qt's...yet the price remained the same....giving them a de facto 25% increase in price/profit.
 
Don M. said:
Sometime, about 18 months ago, most Ice cream containers went from 2 qt's to 1.5 qt's...yet the price remained the same....giving them a de facto 25% increase in price/profit.
Click to expand...

They were doing their duty to combat obesity. (sarcasm)

Some wine bottles still have the indent. The ones that fit in those wicker baskets do. Wine and Beer bottles can be recycled here, but not Whiskey bottles. I'm not sure why.
 
I thought Breyer's Salted Caramel ice cream seemed "lighter" in some way, although delicious. My ice cream kick is a relatively new thing; I never ate a lot of it before the salted caramel came out, so I felt the difference- but couldn't put my finger on what it was. now I know. Thanks, Lara.

I just hope they make salted caramel.
 
Lara, I just looked at my container of Breyers. It's not even ice cream! It is labeled as

"FROZEN DESSERT" ! (as it should be, after your findings)

My container of Blue Bunny does call itself "ice cream".
 
I think certain flavors might show frozen dessert, but the vanilla I have in my freezer reads ice cream. Ingredients: Milk, cream, sugar, vegetable gum (tara) and natural flavor.

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Camper6 said:
Natural Vanilla?

Are they saying they are using the real vanilla, like the vanilla beans?

I use the artificial stuff. The real stuff is too expensive for muffins.
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Yes Camper, they use vanilla beans, it's not too expensive if you buy it on sale.

Natural Vanilla

Our Original Vanilla Ice Cream. The way vanilla should taste! Made with fresh cream, sugar, milk, and Rainforest Alliance Certified vanilla beans. Made with non-GMO sourced ingredients.
 
Mostly, the "Ice-Cream Conspiracy" referred to in the opening post is about the AIR allowed to be pumped into ice-cream to make it appear to be a larger quantity without notifying the consumer and that it causes gastrointestinal problems...and reducing the SIZE of the carton.

But apparently, Breyer's is evolving yearly (check what year they were labeled as "ice cream" or "frozen dairy") in order to make profit for their CEO's with it's many varieties of vanilla, one with enough milk/cream to qualify as ice cream and some not. Thus "Vanilla Frozen Dairy Desserts". There's Extra-Creamy Vanilla, Homemade Vanilla, French Vanilla, Lactose-Free Vanilla, and Natural Vanilla, etc. FDA standards are questionable also. Some manufacturer's use cows treated with rBST and some don't. There are no standards for that yet I don't think.
 
Cheap Ice Cream
DSC_0411_blog.JPG

"Back when it was hot out, we undertook a very serious scientific mission: gorging ourselves on seven types of supermarket vanilla ice cream in order to study the effects of overrun - the ice cream industry's practice of pumping tons of air into commercial ice cream".

"You can think of overrun as really just a fancy word for increasing profit margins, since the more air they pump in, the less actual ice cream they have to put in your container, and it's very crafty of them. But *just how different* are cheap ice creams from fancier ones? That's what we wanted to find out".

"While we were at it, we also rated them by taste, calculated the price per gram, and highlighted some "best buys," so basically this is just like a Consumer Reports article".

"To see which brands had the most overrun, we figured out the density, assuming:
Density = Mass/Volume".

Onto the results:
 
Interesting article. Yes, although Breyer's salted caramel feels a bit like the "soft-serve" they mentioned (because it's a frozen dessert) it still tastes wonderful. Just makes me so mad. Why would a vanilla be an ice cream while other flavors not?
 
Lara said:
Mostly, the "Ice-Cream Conspiracy" referred to in the opening post is about the AIR allowed to be pumped into ice-cream to make it appear to be a larger quantity without notifying the consumer and that it causes gastrointestinal problems...
.
Click to expand...

and here I thought it was the way I ate it

I get the ate it too fast headache
rather crippling
but
I recover
and proceed to repeat

found out a gulp of anything hot cures that almost immediately

joy

d6bVQpO.png


for some reason, I'm not caring about the qty of air in my ice cream

however

I do think spoon size is important
 
SeaBreeze said:
Yes Camper, they use vanilla beans, it's not too expensive if you buy it on sale.

Natural Vanilla

Our Original Vanilla Ice Cream. The way vanilla should taste! Made with fresh cream, sugar, milk, and Rainforest Alliance Certified vanilla beans. Made with non-GMO sourced ingredients.
Click to expand...

After all that, they don't sell it in Canada. If I travel to the U.S. in winter I can bring it back in the trunk. It won't thaw out travelling from Northern Minnesota.

Am I the only one who likes ice cream soft. I use the microwave for about 5 seconds.
 
I know the icecream changed, and first, I noticed the size of the cartons. The bottles being made like the pic Aunt Bea posted really piss me off too. I get over being pissed off pretty fast on these things because I'd rather eat, drink and be Merry rather than try to fight the system:(

It's all about money, and I'm guessing my ancestors got pissed off too, then bought and ate the dang stuff anyway.
 
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