The ice cream bar for people of all ages

I love ice cream.

Not most industrial Indian ice cream perhaps but rich, creamy ice cream with a nice fattiness to coat the tongue and a distinct flavour that hits the palate.

 

The basic problem with mass produced ice cream is that it’s usually not very good. In markets like India ice cream is still regarded as a children’s product. This means it does not have to be very good as long as it can be sold at a relatively affordable price.

 

   I often question whether adults in our country realise that most of the ice cream is pretty terrible because otherwise, I can’t see why customers pay so much at restaurants and hotels for industrial ice cream that they could buy at a shop for a fraction of the price that restaurants charge for it. Not everyone realises this but most hotels and restaurants do not make their own ice cream. They buy it wholesale from mass manufacturers. Often they buy cheap brands because they know that customers don’t really care. (Don’t order an expensive portion of ice cream at a restaurant without ascertaining its provenance.)

 

   My solution has always been to buy ice cream from smaller, more artisanal brands that make it in small portions. (My current favourite is Rêvasser, a small Delhi-based brand that home delivers and I am a regular customer of the better known Chubby Cheeks.) There are only a few hotels where the house-made ice cream is outstanding. (Current champion: the Vanilla ice cream at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai.) Usually pastry chefs know very little about ice cream.

 

   Market experts will tell you that the Indian trajectory is not unusual. In most of the world ice cream was always a low-cost, low-price children’s treat and that only started to change around the late 1980s when the market for adult ice cream began to take off globally. (America was always ahead of the curve.)

 

   For a while, the distinction between the expensive brands like Häagen-Dazs and the kiddie stuff was enormous but bit by bit the large companies have tried to narrow the gap creating ice cream that children and adults can both enjoy.

 

   In many ways the ice cream that became the bridge between the kids and the grown ups was the Magnum.

 

   As is intuitively obvious most kids like ice cream that you can eat off a stick while adults prefer ice cream that comes in cups and tubs.

 

   But there is one kind of ice cream that works best on a stick: vanilla ice cream covered with a thin layer of chocolate. You can’t really replicate that effect with a cup or a tub.

 

"By the early 1990s by which stage Unilever had introduced the Magnum around the globe it became one of the largest selling ice creams in the world."

   The idea of an ice cream with a chocolate covering is not new. They have been making something like that for over a century in America. In India we used to call it a chocobar (it still exists) and an American company took the idea to Europe decades ago, calling chocolate covered ice cream bars Eskimo Ice Cream till political correctness forced them to change the name.

 

   The importance of the Magnum was that it was the first significant non American ice cream on a stick to be aimed at adults. All of its advertising focused on grown ups and in 1990 thousands of Magnums were handed out free of charge to adult commuters on the London Underground. This was revolutionary in European terms though it was not so unusual in America where Dove, a chocolate covered bar, had taken aim at the same market in 1985.

 

   It was the technology behind the Magnum that marked a huge advance for the UK ice cream industry. For a start it was made from dairy ice cream at a time when the market was dominated by palm oil ‘ice cream.’ But the real breakthrough came in the chocolate covering. The chocobar type of products did not usually use real chocolate. It was easier to make the ‘chocolate’ covering from a more flexible synthetic chocolate imitator. The Magnum, on the other hand, not only used good quality chocolate, but Unilever, its manufacturer developed a process by which the chocolate could be deep frozen and would break into large shards when you bit into it (often with a satisfying crunch). If you did not bite and just sucked on the Magnum then the chocolate would slowly melt along with the ice cream with the two flavours merging deliciously on your palate. None of this was true of the Magnum’s chocobar type predecessors and it gave adults a double mouth-feel (crunch plus cream) that the older ice creams had never offered.

 

   By the early 1990s by which stage Unilever had introduced the Magnum around the globe it became one of the largest selling ice creams in the world. Price wise it had found a sweet spot. It cost more than kiddie ice creams but less than Ben & Jerry’s and other sophisticated ice creams.

 

   Now there are so many Magnum product extensions that the brain reels: mint, double caramel, white chocolate, mini Magnums, almond and even a Magnum cup.

 

   It’s become such a legendary ice cream that when Unilever spun off its ice cream division last year it called the company Magnum. As I wrote here some weeks ago the new entity has now pledged to stop selling the congealed vegetable fat it makes under the Kwality Walls brand and will only make real ice cream in the future. We shall see.

 

   I would argue that small batch artisanal ice cream is still the best. But I can’t help admire the large multinationals that spend millions to develop new ice cream technologies. The secret of the Magnum’s success is the process that creates the perfect chocolate covering. The men who invented that technology deserve credit for innovation and for expanding the market so that the same ice cream bar appeals to people of all ages.

 

   Why should kids be the only ones to get to have all the fun?