Mass-market supermarket ice cream tastes so bad in the UK now days. It's become some sort of aerated, whipped artificial goo, the taste and texture are no longer like real ice cream at all.
I reckon they need to do much better at this Unilever innovation centre, and focus more on improving the taste and quality, not just cutting their costs!
In Canada, and I’m sure elsewhere, you simply stay away from anything labelled “Frozen Dessert.”
There’s still a lot of positively phenomenal ice cream brands and varieties available here. But there’s a lot of that garbage too. This edible oil residue that somehow holds its shape even once it has melted.
In the USA at least, to use the name "ice cream", there needs to be a certain density of cream. If the product isn't dense enough, you need to use another name, like "frozen dessert."
The products called frozen dessert are whipped up to contain lots of air. There's several advantages to this for the manufacturer: You can fill the same size container with less material, so you can cut costs. You can also list fewer calories for the same size serving.
If you truly want what actually used to be called ice cream, you want 'frozen custard', which is legally required to contain egg, something ice cream used to be required to have, but industry lobbied the feds to drop it.
The enshittification of our food chain marches on, in the never-ending quest to milk every dime out of the cost of production.
Egg-free ice cream is a thing, you know. It's colloquially called Philadelphia Style, and has been around for a long time. I make it at home for reasons far removed from cost (I just like it).
When were eggs legally required to be in ice cream? Philadelphia style ice cream predates modern food regulation.
We still have some good brands, but I've noticed a few start to slip. Breyers used to make a nice chocolate ice cream that was milk, cream, sugar, and cocoa. It was just slightly dry because it had nothing added to counteract the dryness of the cocoa. Someone decided it neeeded to be creamier, so now it has more ingredients :(. I liked the dry, kinda flakey texture of the four-ingredient version we used to get. Now it kinda melts funny, and I'm not as happy.
In the US, for a brand available pretty much anywhere, Häagen-Dazs is decent. Despite the name, it is 100% an American company. They just thought it needed a European sounding name.
Breyers is now owned by UK-headquartered Unilever, the world's biggest ice cream producer, so I'm afraid it's likely to have joined the race to the bottom at this point.
While Häagen-Dazs was indeed founded in the US, now days the US operations are owned by Froneri, also based in the UK and the world's 2nd-largest ice cream producer behind Unilever!
Curiously the Häagen-Dazs brand outside the US is owned separately by General Mills, which is a US company.
This is the same in most of Europe. I invested in a gourmet catering class ice cream maker, and delved into the fine art and chemistry required to make the perfect ice cream. Making the perfect batch of ice cream takes a few days but it is so worth it, nothing beats the taste and creamy mouthfeel of made-at-home ice cream, and you know exactly what you are eating. I figure another 14 years of making ice cream at home instead of buying at the store, and I’ll have my investment back!
Which machine did you pick? I've got a Whynter that works pretty well, but it's pretty low volume (not that it's a huge deal — I eat too much ice cream as it is!).
Yeah, I realised this recently while travelling in New Zealand, where even the cheapo ice cream that comes in big, 2L tubs tastes amazing. And this is a country where dairy products are typically more expensive than in the UK.
Pretty much any ice cream in the UK that isn't a boutique or super-premium brand just tastes like crap by comparison. Why does a country that makes such good cheese (for example) do such bad ice cream?
I blame the trend of "Low Fat" being mistaken for "Healthy" - it's the fat that gives the smoothness of ice cream, and there was a spate of replacing that with various gums that just... didn't work IMHO.
I reckon they need to do much better at this Unilever innovation centre, and focus more on improving the taste and quality, not just cutting their costs!