Is it actually hard to scale or just expensive? Breyers mass-produced "non-fake" ice cream for years (at a high price point) before switching to the fake stuff more recently.

I'm guessing most people just aren't willing to pay $8 for a quart of real ice cream when there's "almost" ice cream for $3.

It is hard to scale. The taste and texture of ice cream depends a lot on things like fat content, air content, and ice crystal size. Every time you scale up you need to use different equipment to make your ice cream. Getting the settings right on the new equipment to match the product you had on the old equipment is difficult at best. The article points this out when it talks about their attempt to switch to a continuous process.

This seems like a startup opportunity for a group with the chemistry / food science / mechanical engineering chops. Build machinery that can make consistent ice cream at scale in a turn key operation. Sounds incredibly hard and capital intensive.

Not quite so simple.

It's not like mega-ice cream companies like Breyers don't already have an army of chemists, food scientists and mechanical engineers on staff to solve these problems - and yet they still have a tough time producing real ice cream at everyday prices.

The silicon valley wiz-bang startup crowd often forgets... sometimes an industry's incumbents are not lazy and incompetent.

There is machinery that can make consistent ice cream at scale. The problem is that it is very different from the machinery you would use at smaller scales so matching the results of the two processes is very hard.

It's the ice cream with mix-ins that is specifically hard to scale (it doesn't flow well at all). This was Ample Hills' main thing, and they never got the continuous production method to work.

Haagen-Dazs does well at scale, but obviously is quite expensive.

Wait is Ben & Jerrie's missing those good fats? it's obviously huge scale, tastes way better than cheaper stuff, but still not as good as my local shop.

Anecdotally the premium ice creams (McConnell's, Haagen Daaz, Strauss, etc.) taste better to me than Ben and Jerry's.

If it's covered up by flavoring/sugar, then it may be hard to notice the difference. But if you just have vanilla or chocolate (with chips, nuts, etc.) then I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference.

I am not a fan of ice cream, but perhaps I have never had the "good stuff."

In addition to some of the premium brands you mentioned, are there other even higher-end labels? And what is it, experientially, I should be looking for? What are the signs, good and bad, in the ingredients list of proper ice cream?

Best ice cream i ever had was at an Amish auction where they were making 2 gallon batches as fast as they could. Unpasteurized eggs and cream FTW.

Best meal I ever had was in an Amish farmyard during a bicycle event. Chicken and biscuit with fruit salad, followed by iced cream made in a churn run by some boys up by the house. On Amish home-baked peach pie.

I still felt a rush when I wrote those lines, and its been 5 years.

My opinion: low end ice cream usually has more sugar. It makes it taste good superficially but it wears on me after awhile. I like it creamy/fatty and I think that is harder to make? (never made ice cream myself)

I look for the fewest ingredients. If I see preservatives or coloring I generally don't buy it. Haagen Daaz is one of the few national brands that is really good about that. Jeni's is really good IMO

I learned a lot about ice cream by watching this expert talk through the pros and cons of different ice creams: https://youtu.be/lma9TNjj_O8

She is the founder of Jeni’s, which is probably the highest-end ice cream I’ve come across.

Jeni's is great! The dark chocolate and peanut butter flavor are awesome.

oh that could 100% be it I love the chunky stuff. But hands down the store by my house that makes there own a league of its own compared to even like the fanciest gelato at whole foods