Protein or pickled garlic? What's new in ice cream

Inside Magnum’s research centre near Bedford, the future of ice cream looks part lab, part factory floor, and part nightclub prop. One corner is lit by a pale yellow glow from a glow-in-the-dark lolly aimed at clubbers and festival-goers in Ibiza. Its vitamin B2 gives off the light under UV club lamps. A gimmick? Maybe. But the company is treating innovation as a survival skill, not a novelty act.

That urgency comes from a brutal few years for pricing and costs. Georgia Rose of Kantar Retail IQ points to war in Ukraine, Covid, the cost of living crisis and now the Strait of Hormuz as part of a long stretch of instability. For ice-cream makers, the pain runs through dairy, cream, eggs, flavours and even the cold chain, where refrigeration and storage bills bite harder than most customers ever see.

Magnum, which was spun off from Unilever last year and owns Cornetto, Twister, Solero and Magnum, has the scale to keep pushing. The company says it owns three million fridges globally, some fitted with cameras that upload images to data centres. AI then identifies products and uses depth recognition to estimate sales and predict when a fridge needs restocking. The freezers have also become more efficient, with Lewicki saying the current ones are 40% more efficient than the company’s 2010 models.

But the real excitement, at least on the product side, is coming from Asia. Lewicki says the ideas and trends are flowing from Japan, Korea and China, where innovation is intense and the markets are growing fast. One example is Volcanics, now in the UK and Europe, with chocolate shell, biscuit pieces, chocolate and vanilla layers, and a caramel lava centre. In China and beyond, researchers are also reaching for flavours that would have sounded absurd in a Western freezer aisle: ham, pickled garlic, tahini, stinky tofu and liquor.

Health is another big shift. Mintel’s Honorata Jarocka says protein is moving into ice cream because people want more filling products, especially as weight-loss drugs change eating habits. That explains why protein bars are finding a place next to frozen desserts, even if they are expensive. Back in Bedford, Magnum is still fussing over the basics too, with a robot called Eric collecting data around the clock to help nail the chocolate viscosity on Magnum bars and get the crunch right.