Want the scoop on the coolest job? Robert Roberts, Ph.D., associate professor of food science, is Penn State’s resident authority on ice cream: He’s the director of the university’s annual weeklong Ice Cream Short Course. Dating back to 1892, the program is the oldest and best known of its type in the United States. Dr. Roberts, director since 1999, has the tasty task of leading the course into its second century. He took the time to school us in what the course covers, how it has evolved over the past 119 years, and where he believes the ice cream business is headed.
Gourmet Live: When people hear that you are the director of an ice cream school, what do they say?
Robert Roberts: There are two typical reactions. One is, “That must be cool,” and the other is, “There’s really enough to learn about ice cream that you can take seven days to teach it?” And the answer is, yes, it is cool—in a punny way and in reality. It’s a lot of fun. And, oh, yes, absolutely, there is enough to learn that it takes at least seven days, and that just cracks the surface.
GL: How has the mission of the Ice Cream Short Course changed since its founding as a resource for Pennsylvania’s dairy farmers and pioneering ice cream makers?
RR: One of my colleagues, former director Phil Keeney, tells me that when he started doing the Ice Cream Short Course, in the 1950s, there were more ice cream manufacturers in Pennsylvania than there are in the U.S. today. So at that time they were teaching the basics of the manufacture of ice cream—how do you compound a mix, how do you process a mix, what’s the function of different ingredients—with the expectation that everybody was going to be doing everything. Now, it’s very similar, but the expectation isn’t that everybody is going to be doing everything. We cover more of the science, technology, and physical chemistry now, because as the industry has both grown and consolidated, small problems have become larger, because you are distributing the ice cream over longer distances and you have many more people involved in handling the product.
GL: Who is the typical student for the program?
RR: The Ice Cream Short Course is aimed at the industrial manufacturer of ice cream and is also for anybody who wants to get into the nitty–gritty of how ice cream is put together. The class will be made up of manufacturers, people in the ice cream industry (they may work in processing, freezing, new–product development, quality assurance), but they’ll be taking the course to really understand their product. I’d say somewhere between a third and a quarter of the students will be entrepreneurs who are thinking seriously about making their own ice cream mix and really want to know what that entails. And we have a lot of ingredient suppliers. Then we get—and I mean this with all affection—ice cream junkies. We get people who just want to come in and learn everything they can about ice cream, just for fun. Routinely, we get doctors and lawyers who are in the class on vacation. They’ll say that they’re thinking about it as a second career and they’re looking for something that is happy. And people who are in ice cream are happy.
GL: What’s the geographic makeup of your student body?
RR: We make a sweatshirt every year, and on the back it will have the names of the states and countries, and it’s usually about 25 or 30 states and about seven countries. We get Mexico, Canada; we have had Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Venezuela, India, France. When you look at a map of the United States, we can verify that someone has attended the Ice Cream Short Course from every state—except North Dakota. So, we haven’t figured out what’s going on in North Dakota, but we really want to finish the map, so if somebody wants to contact me, we can talk.
GL: How does the newer Ice Cream 101 program you introduced differ from the Short Course?
RR: Ice Cream 101 is designed for entrepreneurs—the mom–and–pop operator. It’s a two–day course, run over a weekend. It’s not the same level of detail—not nearly the same level of science. It is designed for folks who want to open an ice cream shop in the more traditional way, and by that I mean that rather than making your ice cream mix, you purchase a mix that has been manufactured by a dairy and then you flavor that. When you make your own mix, you fall under another set of rules: You have to get a pasteurizer, you have to do a number of things that don’t have to happen if you buy the mix in a bag. There are lots of really good mixes out there for use by shops, so we talk about how you make an ice cream mix, but we also have somebody come in and talk about how you choose an ice cream mix supplier.
GL: What percentage of students, would you say, enjoys the experience but decides to stick with their day job?
RR: I don’t have good numbers on that, but I would say probably 50 percent, at least. People are thinking about getting into the business, but they don’t realize that it is a business. Let me put it this way: If you are going to have an ice cream shop and prepare fresh ice cream on a regular basis, you are going to be open from, let’s say, 10 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night. Somebody is going to have to make the ice cream. Your cash flow is going to be such that you’re probably going to be making the ice cream.
We have a number of success stories, and to put it frankly and brutally, sometimes the success is that somebody comes with the dream of making ice cream from scratch—particularly with the Ice Cream Short Course—and sometimes we squash that. Because they are taking the time—responsibly and very smartly, I think—to do their due diligence and learn what it means to do this.
GL: What about people who say, “I make great ice cream at home, so naturally I can make it on a larger scale”?
RR: Most homemade ice cream is lousy. I guess it’s unfair to say that—but it doesn’t last as long. People also have to understand that there is a difference between making something fresh and serving it right away and, even on a small scale, making 10 or 20 gallons of something and serving it over the course of a week or two. So when people say they want homemade ice cream, they want some aspects of homemade ice cream. They may want the freshness, the flavors, the ambience, but in most cases, if you take that ice cream and you store it for a week, which is a very short shelf life, it’s not very good. If you want to make really good ice cream, you need to have a really good ice cream freezer, and really good freezers are expensive.
GL: What are the keys, then, to making great ice cream?
RR: In the Ice Cream Short Course, one of the things that most of the instructors will say is that there are no secrets in ice cream. People think there is a secret formula or a secret recipe. “Can we have the Penn State Creamery’s recipe for ice cream?” Sure! We’ll give you the formula. We’ll tell you what the ingredients are. You could take what I am telling you for ice cream and apply it to any food: The best ingredients combined in the proper way in the proper ratio and processed properly will give you the best product.
GL: What are some trends you’ve noticed in the ice cream industry and customers’ tastes over the years?
RR: There was a craze for a while to get the fat out, and then there was the Atkins craze of getting the carbohydrates out. And you started to wonder what you were going to get. No fat, no carbohydrates—what are we going to do?
One year it was custard, and something that has come up in the last three or four years has been gelato. You also see a lot more intense flavors—and Ben & Jerry were really the pioneers in that area, with lots of inclusions and lots of sauce.
I can’t say this is a national trend, but in the past five or six years, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people who are very interested in getting into the small ice cream business. These people are able to make small batches of unique flavors, unlike national companies, which need volume in order to manufacture products—they have to have the demand in order to make a particular flavored product. How many people want kumquat ice cream? You are not going to do a million gallons of kumquat ice cream this year.
Probably the biggest trend I’ve seen over the last eight to ten years has been growing acceptance of what I would call “non–standardized products” that look a lot like ice cream but don’t say “ice cream” anywhere on the package. They are non–standardized for a variety of reasons—they might not contain enough fat, they may not contain enough milk solids, they may not contain any milk solids, they may not contain any milk fat.
GL: Can you share some predictions for what’s next in the world of ice cream?
RR: As the population ages, I expect that we’ll see more products—and good–tasting products—that are developed to deliver concentrated nutrition in frozen–dessert format, much like any other functional food.
I also think you’ll continue to see regional, small players who are able to meet the niche needs of particular markets. You are going to find more people trying to go with local, or all–natural, or organic, depending on their point of view. And I think that will continue to grow and become a small but persistent segment of the business. The idea that you could go to some farm and know the area where your product came from—that’s going to grow.