Asking a new acquaintance what they do for a living is usually the most boring way to start a conversation.
But ask Alison Gray, Haagen Dazs’s “technical expert”, and you’ll get a delightfully fascinating answer.
“I usually just tell people that I make ice cream for a living,” she told News.com.au from Haagen Dazs’s main manufacturing plant in Arras, a northern region in France two hours drive from Paris.
Gray, a food scientist, creates new ice cream flavours for the international brand. When she’s not dealing with ingredient suppliers or answering emails (“that’s the boring part”), she slips on her white lab coat, her “special factory shoes”, a hairnet, hard hat and glasses, and experiments with new flavour combinations.
The tubs of ice cream we buy from the supermarket are the result of extensive testing, tweaking, and yes, sampling, by Gray and her team.
On an average day, they taste two or three different ice creams, or as many as 15 during a testing day. (For the record, she doesn’t get free tubs of ice cream. In the factory she can eat “as much as I like” and gets a big staff discount).
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“We probably create around 50-100 samples before we decide on the final flavour. One hundred [samples] is pretty normal,” she said.
“We make lots of samples because we have lots of ingredients to test. Then we start to narrow down the number of samples and the number of ingredients and we go back and forth with the supplier to fine-tune the flavour, or change it completely.”
Gray works with a consumer insights team to figure out what customers around the world like, and develops new products based on that information.
For example, simple flavours like vanilla, strawberry, and green tea sell well in Asia, while for Europeans “it’s all about caramels and chocolate”.
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Australians love sorbets and we gobbled down so much green tea ice cream at the recent Sydney and Melbourne Haagen Dazs pop-up shops that the flavour sold out here. (Haagen Dazs ice cream isn’t sold in Australian supermarkets).
One of Gray’s recent creations for the European market is a caramel ice cream made with a caramel biscuit called speculaas, which are to France and Belgium what Tim Tams and Milk Arrowroots are to Australia.
“These little biscuits are very famous here because you get them served on a saucer with a cup of coffee. We wanted to develop a great speculaas ice cream, but we had to decide what the ice cream base flavour was going to be — would it be vanilla or caramel?” she said.
“We tested a number of different bases before we decided on a caramel base, which contains real caramel made from milk. Then we have to decide how the biscuit pieces were going to be.
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“We didn’t want a swirl, because we wanted the biscuit pieces to shine through as the hero. We have to decide how big they will be and if they’ll be crunchy or soft. It sounds simple — ‘mix some biscuits with ice cream’ — but when you’re developing a product that you want to do well, it takes a long time. We decided on a mixture of very, very small biscuit pieces, plus larger pieces which have a special technology in them that keeps them crunchy.”
Not every ice cream Gray creates ends up on supermarket shelves. Flavours like chocolate and chilli, fennel and lemon and chocolate and pink peppercorn (a dried berry with a peppery flavour) never made it to commercial production.
“These kinds of things are in development, but we never manage to launch them because they’re a bit niche,” she said.
Others don’t get made simply because they just don’t taste good. “Some combinations of fruit, like watermelon and passionfruit, just don’t go well together. Passionfruit is quite acidic and it was too much for the watermelon. If you have something acidic you need something creamy,” she said.
Haagen Dazs creates limited edition ranges with more experimental flavour combinations that might not be commercially successful, like apricot and lavender, and rose and lychee, which Gray hopes will become part of the core range.
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“The rose and lychee has become one of my favourites. I’m going to be very sad if we don’t make it again.”
For those who think “tasting ice cream” is something anyone could do, Gray compares her job to that of a sommelier.
“It’s like tasting wine, as opposed to just drinking wine,” she said. “I would call it mindful tasting. We really savour the flavour.
“Also, we use all of our senses, especially smell, because the nose is really important when you’re tasting. When I eat ice cream I keep it in my mouth and breathe deeply from the nose, so that all the flavours are released.”
While eating ice cream everyday sounds heavenly, it doesn’t sound that healthy. But Gray says she doesn’t eat a lot of ice cream outside of work.
“I might have ice cream for pleasure once or twice a week. But many people who work at the plant, they have ice cream every single day. They have very active jobs and they’re always on their feet, so it’s fine. I honestly don’t think it’s something you really get sick of.”