Creating No-Melt Ice Cream

For her meltdown tests, Wicks positioned ice cream samples on a wire mesh, each above its own beaker. Michael P. King

Eating ice cream puts you in a race against the clock to finish your scoop before it becomes a puddle. But in the UW Department of Food Science, Cameron Wicks PhD’24 is working on a solution that adds naturally occurring compounds to ice cream to prevent it from coating your hands and new jeans.

“We learned that adding polyphenols to ice cream can create a product that holds its shape for over four hours at room temperature,” says Wicks. “That’s pretty close to a no-melt ice cream.”

Polyphenols are compounds found naturally in foods like green tea, blueberries, and cranberries and known for their health benefits. After creating ice cream samples with various levels of polyphenol extract, Wicks ran some meltdown tests. She positioned ice cream samples on a wire mesh, each above its own beaker. The beakers sat on scales to record the weight of the dripping ice cream. With this data, she assessed how quickly each ice cream sample melted.

Prior research had shown that polyphenols can decrease the ice cream’s melting rate, but little information was available to explain how that happened. At UW–Madison, Wicks was able to combine the expertise from Associate Professor Bradley Bolling ’02, PhD’07’s lab, which has been studying polyphenol chemistry, with the expertise of Professor Richard Hartel’s lab, which has the scoop on ice cream science.

“Ice cream already brings delight to many people around the world,” Wicks says. “So to be able to make a new novelty is a pretty cool thing to do.”

Published in the Fall 2024 issue