Ice cream is never far from the news and the month of May has been no exception. We have compiled our favourite news stories relating to ice cream.
Apparently, the singer-songwriter is so partial to the condiment he has a pic of it tattooed on his arm and insists his assistants always have a bottle on hand.
Step forward Gelati (it operates in Enniscrone, Co Sligo and Ballina, Co Mayo ); earlier this month it announced that not only is it stocking ketchup ice-cream, but that it’s giving away cones for free too.
Want to get a free ice cream? Gelati has confirmed that all “fans who produce a ticket for his upcoming gigs” will get a free Heinz cone.
Delicious? Well, own Michael O’Dowd assures perspective-customers that it really is “lovely” and tastes a bit like a Bloody Mary.
A private zoo in the Canadian province of Alberta is facing charges after a bear from the facility was taken through a drive-thru Dairy Queen in a pickup truck and hand-fed ice cream through the vehicle’s window reports The Guardian.
News of the outing emerged earlier this year after Discovery Wildlife Park, located about 70 miles north of Calgary in the town of Innisfail, posted a video on social media showing a captive Kodiak bear sitting in the passenger seat of a truck.
The video later showed the one-year-old bear, known as Berkley, leaning out of the truck’s window, enthusiastically licking an ice cream cone held by the owner of a local Dairy Queen.
Amid widespread criticism, the video – along with a second one showing Berkley licking frosting off an ice cream cake – was taken down. However, we have managed to find it for you:
Wildlife officials in Alberta said that the zoo and its owners are now facing two charges. “Under the terms and conditions of the zoo’s permit, the charges are directly related to the alleged failure of the park to notify the provincial government prior to the bear leaving the zoo,” Alberta Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
One count stems from the bear’s jaunt through the drive-thru, while the other dates back to 2017. At the time Berkley had just arrived as an orphan from a facility in the United States and the zoo allegedly failed to inform officials the seven-pound bear was being taken home nightly so that she could be bottle-fed.
The zoo’s owner, Doug Bos, said he planned to plead guilty to the charges, noting that this was the first time in the zoo’s 28-year history that it was facing such charges.
“We made a mistake. I’m embarrassed about it,” he told the Guardian. “Every time we take an animal off the property, we’re supposed to notify Fish and Wildlife, send them an email, and we forgot to do that in both instances.”
He said he had been happy to hear of the charges. “I’m glad that they followed through with it because it shows how strictly regulated the zoo industry is in the province,” he said. “Because there are so many people out there that think it’s not, they think anybody can just do anything they want.”
Bos said that wildlife officials had not necessarily taken issue with the bear’s outing to Dairy Queen but rather the zoo’s failure to request permission beforehand. “That’s all we did wrong,” he added, noting that the bears have been taken off the property many times for a range of reasons.
“We’ve done lots of TV commercials, Super Bowl commercials with bears and food … Some of them the bear was in a grocery store and wandered up and down the aisles.”
He emphasised the difference between bears in the wild and the zoo’s bears, describing those in the facility as hand-raised and well-trained.
At one point the zoo’s bears had even learned to pee in a cup, he said, in order to participate in a Scottish veterinarian’s study aimed at measuring baseline norms for bears. “These bears aren’t just your average bear that we go snag out of the wild and do this.”
In light of the incident, provincial officials said they had also revised the conditions of the zoo’s permit. The facility will now be required to provide more details when requesting permission to transport animals and will have to keep the animals in a cage, crate or kennel during transport.
Having analysed 67,157 premises in 500 town centres, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that, with nail bars, bookstores, coffee shops and craft beer bars, ice-cream parlours are one of a handful of growing sectors. Overall, the high street is shrinking. For every 11 new high-street units, 16 close. Yet the number of ice-cream parlours, historically seen as a seasonal seaside concept, rose by 20% last year.
Vanilla costs have hit record highs in the last two years and it’s beginning to impact the ice cream industry in Britain reports The Independent.
At approximately $600 (£443) per kilo, the in-demand ingredient now costs more than silver.
While the rise in price may not necessarily impact major retailers and brands – some smaller businesses are struggling to keep up.
One of these is artisanal ice cream maker Ruby Violet, which has been forced to stop selling its vanilla flavour due to the surge in costs.
Speaking to the BBC, founder Julie Fisher explained that her London-based outlets have taken vanilla off the menu “for the foreseeable future”.
Another UK-based business reconsidering its vanilla options is the family-run company, Snugburys Ice Cream.
Based in Nantwich, Cheshire, the farmhouse ice cream outlet produces 40 different flavours, a third of which contain vanilla.
They are now paying 30 times more for the ingredient than they have done in the past.
“It has really gone up, so last year we decided to buy it forward by a years worth,” said Cleo Sadler, who runs the company with her two sisters.
“We had to make a decision as to whether we would absorb the costs – which we did in the end,” she told the BBC.
It’s something they don’t want to have to compromise on in the future, regardless of the costs, given that their company uses all-natural ingredients and therefore using an artificial vanilla flavouring would go against their values.
Vanilla prices have surged since March 2017 when a cyclone hit Madagascar – where the bulk of the flavouring is produced – and subsequently destroyed a number of vanilla plantations.
This led to poor harvests and reduced production rates by 30 percent, causing the subsequent inflation and prompting fears of a shortage.
If this happens, it’s undoubtedly going to hit Brits pretty hard, considering that vanilla has been the most popular ice cream flavour in the UK for decades, according to the Ice Cream Alliance.
The Museum of Pizza, opening this autumn in New York, may or may not acknowledge this piece of history, and there’s a reason why.
It’s a selfie museum. Rather than hanging photos on a wall and outlining the chronological history of pizza, it’s a tourist-aiming pop-up space fit for a digital-savvy generation, featuring a pizza beach, a pizza cave and several funhouse spots to pose and celebrate pizza.
Call it the Kusama effect. Since Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room exhibition has taken off (the recent Los Angeles opening of her show at The Broad sold out their 50,000 tickets in less than two hours), it has fueled a debate around selfie-friendly art.
Although Kusama’s artworks were not necessarily made for the smartphone (many were made in the 1960s), it’s still part of the “made-for-Instagram” exhibits, or “selfie factories”.
The Museum of Pizza is not alone in its selfie-driven takeover. On 16 June, a new pop-up devoted to avocados opens in San Diego and the Museum of Candy opens this summer in New York, boasting a 15-room exhibition, a life-sized unicorn made of candy and “the world’s largest gummy bear”.
It was partly propelled by the Museum of Ice Cream, which launched in New York in 2016 and tapped into a serious demand. They sold more than 300,000 tickets priced at $18 in the first five days of its opening in 2016, resulting in a $5.4m haul. It has since travelled to Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco, where they almost doubled their ticket price to $38 and sold out six months’ worth of tickets in less than two hours.
Meanwhile, the “real museums” are struggling to pay the bills.
It seemed like a random act of kindness by a stranger who bought an ice-cream for a distressed child – but then social media got involved and the situation curdled reports The Guardian.
Picture the scene. A child is crying outside your house. Friends have money to buy ice-cream – but the child does not. What do you do? One obviously kind thing would be to step in, stump up the cash and ease the child’s tears with an ice-cream. And then, what with it being the 21st century, you might relay the tale on social media
Enter our “hero”. However, one man can’t help noticing that our good Samaritan has the word “vegan” in her bio, but he’s pretty sure the ice-cream product she gave to that child was not vegan. Time to message her and check. And when she doesn’t give an answer to his satisfaction, tell her that she has made “a severe mistake”, and, what with it being the 21st century, post all the messages between them on social media.
The internet goes to work. @7AnthonyDagher7 now has more than 9,000 replies to his tweet exposing those messages, the vast majority asking why on earth he is criticising someone for doing something nice like giving a crying child ice-cream.
And, because it is the 21st century, he sets about the Sisyphean task of replying to them. So far, almost a quarter of the 3,000 or so tweets he has sent in the six years he his account has existed are replying about vegan ice-cream.
Non-vegans may be thinking, what can possibly be so bad about ice-cream? Nothing dies to produce milk, does it? Vegans will profoundly disagree. The dairy industry relies on keeping cows pregnant and having calves to produce milk. The calves are taken from their mothers shortly after birth, causing distress. Vegan-friendly ingredients are among the fastest growing trends in the ice cream industry.
Still, after being in the eye of the social media storm for a day, @itsallzara put it succinctly: “All this because I bought a sobbing child an ice-cream, I guess next time I’ll leave the poor kid crying outside my house because Anthony didn’t like it.”
This is how 99 Flake ice creams got their names… and it has nothing to do with the price reports The Sun
It’s a popular myth that the cones got their name because they used to cost 99p, sending most Brits into a frenzy of moaning about inflation and the rising cost of Freddos – currently 25p, FYI.
But Cadbury introduced the first ever flake 99 in the 1920s when the cost was much closer to 1p than 99p.
So where does the name come from? Even Cadbury admit that the reason has been “lost in the mists of time”, but old quotes from a sales manager may shed some light on the issue.
In the article, which appeared in the Cadbury works paper, one Mr Berry said the name came from Italian soft ice cream makers in County Durham, back in 1928
He said: “They were trying ways of introducing other lines to increase their sales, which in those days were largely in the form of sandwich wafers.
“The possibilities were obvious if we could get a suitable line, both in shape and size and texture – and the most promising was Flake, which at that time only sold as a 2D line, and therefore had to be cut with a knife to reduce its size.”
At the time, the Italian king had a special guard made up of 99 men – and anything really special or first class became known as ’99’.
Hence the humble 99 Flake ice cream was born.
However, one Scottish family is debating the claims.
They said their ancestor Stefano Arcari, who opened his shop in Portobello in 1922, would break a large Flake in half and stick it in an ice cream.
They reckon a Cadbury representative ‘borrowed’ the idea after visiting his shop, and say the name came from its address – 99 Portobello High Street.
Either way, it has absolutely nothing to do with cost
For too long, ice cream has been relegated to the pudding part of our diets writes The Metro
So you may want to take inspiration from the ice cream makers at Windy Brow Farms, a small dairy farm in New Jersey, who have been busy creating an ‘Only in Jersey’ collection of ice creams. Flavours include ‘local maple syrup, house made challah French toast and caramelised Taylor ham’. Yep, French toast and ham ice cream – the summer brunch of dreams. But how do the ice cream makers ensure that you’re not just getting a bowl of soggy pork scraps? Apparently, the pork is cooked, fried and cinnamon-and-sugar-topped before it gets mixed into the ice cream – so the crispness is all locked in before it even touches the cream.
The saltiness of the pork is balanced out by the sweetness of the French toast and maple syrup, giving you that heady mixture of salt, sweet and cream. And for the vegetarians among us, the farm is also making sweet corn and tomato pie flavoured ice creams, which are going to be available later in the summer (because believe it or not, we’re still in spring…). Crack out your ice cream machines: maybe it’s time to put brunch on ice.
What a crazy month for news involving ice cream. Is the first outbreak of sunshine that has caused the surge? If so, here is to a hot and long summer of amazing ice cream news.