Favorite quote that I'm not sure why the author included:
“You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.
Knew the person who ran one of the biggest ice cream factories on earth. Visited one time and there was a chocolate bar on their desk, untouched and melting. When I pointed it out they said they just want the chocolate coating so…
While that facility also didn’t let you put your mouth under the nozzle they did have mini fridges lining the walls so you could just grab some ice cream whenever you felt like. New employees gained weight as soon as they signed the contract.
This indeed the problem. I -love- ice-cream. I'd happily eat it every day. As a child I looked forward to growing up, and being able to.
Now I'm in a place I could afford to do that, but alas, my metabolism can't keep up with the calories. (Sigh).
If I buy it, I eat it, so I don't really buy it anymore. But at least I indulge on special occasions, and even more occasionally make a batch of my own.
Sure, I'm a lot thinner now, which is great. But ice-cream will always be my first love.
> Visited one time and there was a chocolate bar on their desk, untouched and melting. When I pointed it out they said they just want the chocolate coating so…
Read it a few times, think they meant an ice cream sandwich or chocolate popsicle. The employee was drowning in free ice cream, to the point of wasting a full bar (melting and throwing away) just to eat the coating.
> While that facility also didn’t let you put your mouth under the nozzle they did have mini fridges lining the walls so you could just grab some ice cream whenever you felt like. New employees gained weight as soon as they signed the contract.
It was included because it was hilarious. The mental image of a worker ducking under a nozzle and their stomach bloating like some sort of ice cream mosquito justifies itself. (Watch out for the ice cream headache. That may not be covered under the health plan.)
However, I bet it's also a question he gets asked a lot by people: "do you ever just snack on some of the ice cream yourself?" And the reality squashing the dream would be no, that would be unsanitary, often infeasible given the mechanism and scale, and so on and so forth.
It was made clear to me when I worked in a food factory that if I ate anything, I'd be fired immediately.
The exception was when a low pressure hose popped open, and squirted food all over my face. The line manager, who has been fiddling with it, said "please swallow that!" as spitting it out would be been much worse. (Having to clean and discard a lot of stuff.)
Once a week or so there would be leftovers in the canteen.
That seems so silly to me. Even all-you-can-eat doesn't seem like it would even make a dent. Even if they go nuts initially, people will get sick of it, and the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility will lower demand.
It would be allowed to take food out of the factory area and eat it in the canteen, which is exactly what they did once a week or so. Returning from the canteen to the factory area required putting on different boots, clean overalls and a hairnet, then cleaning boots, arms and hands.
I once lost track of a coworker at a coffee shop and eventually found her sitting on the floor under the bar spraying a tank of whipped cream into her mouth. It had been a long day.
Typically nitrous oxide gas is used to whip cream, not compressed air. Compressed does work, apparantely, but produces an inferior whip with a less stable texture.
> ”The only real cream in an aerosol can Ive ever seen was in Canada”
Aerosol cream (“squirty cream”) is a fairly common product in most countries, in my experience. Usually sweetened with some additives and nitrous oxide propellant, but mostly made from real cream.
Is that really a thing? I can only speak for here in the US, but all the normal whipped-cream-in-a-can I've seen has cream as the first ingredient. Even Reddi-wip.
I’m guessing it was just the author, but as someone who has done portraits in a food production facility…it’s not easy. I was using off camera lights but finding a backdrop that isn’t insanely busy, balancing that with the terrible overhead lighting, and trying to get good expressions out of people when it’s so loud you need to wear ear muffs is portrait photography on very hard mode.
About a decade ago, newspapers started laying off all their photographers and handing out iPhones to reporters. It's why the quality of photographs in almost all news stories absolutely sucks. Poor autofocus, huge depth of field, no perspective control because it's a fixed focal length lens and wide one at that...and at least back then, lackluster exposure control - all operated by someone with no experience in photography, much less an actual degree in photojournalism.
I wonder what it actually means to reverse engineer a program written in Dutch to understand the operating system in order to collect metrics.
“Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.
Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system”
If my experience reverse engineering PHP written in Dutch is anything to go by, it means the function and variable names, comments, database columns, logs... would all be in Dutch -- or potentially worse, in Dutch but using English words. Which in turn means they sometimes won't necessarily have an accurate translation to English, in most cases a single translation at any rate, and you'd have to do a ton of disambiguation to make sense of anything.
Yes, this. I do support for programmers and regularly get examples showing problems. Occasionally these are written by non English speakers.
Obviously I understand the programming language part, but all the variables and functions are just "random strings". It's really interesting to me how much that affects my ability to read the vode and make sense of it.
Turns out when my teacher said "use meaningful variable names" that was good advice.
I'd add that if you're too lazy to do that, use pronounceable names. I have no problem with loop counters being x or y or whatever. Just don't make it gedoogenshcpekel.
I thought that was what the article would be about. All those freezers are pumping out heat 24/7. I could see climate control being a huge issue for these facilities.
Mass-market supermarket ice cream tastes so bad in the UK now days. It's become some sort of aerated, whipped artificial goo, the taste and texture are no longer like real ice cream at all.
I reckon they need to do much better at this Unilever innovation centre, and focus more on improving the taste and quality, not just cutting their costs!
In Canada, and I’m sure elsewhere, you simply stay away from anything labelled “Frozen Dessert.”
There’s still a lot of positively phenomenal ice cream brands and varieties available here. But there’s a lot of that garbage too. This edible oil residue that somehow holds its shape even once it has melted.
In the USA at least, to use the name "ice cream", there needs to be a certain density of cream. If the product isn't dense enough, you need to use another name, like "frozen dessert."
The products called frozen dessert are whipped up to contain lots of air. There's several advantages to this for the manufacturer: You can fill the same size container with less material, so you can cut costs. You can also list fewer calories for the same size serving.
If you truly want what actually used to be called ice cream, you want 'frozen custard', which is legally required to contain egg, something ice cream used to be required to have, but industry lobbied the feds to drop it.
The enshittification of our food chain marches on, in the never-ending quest to milk every dime out of the cost of production.
Egg-free ice cream is a thing, you know. It's colloquially called Philadelphia Style, and has been around for a long time. I make it at home for reasons far removed from cost (I just like it).
When were eggs legally required to be in ice cream? Philadelphia style ice cream predates modern food regulation.
We still have some good brands, but I've noticed a few start to slip. Breyers used to make a nice chocolate ice cream that was milk, cream, sugar, and cocoa. It was just slightly dry because it had nothing added to counteract the dryness of the cocoa. Someone decided it neeeded to be creamier, so now it has more ingredients :(. I liked the dry, kinda flakey texture of the four-ingredient version we used to get. Now it kinda melts funny, and I'm not as happy.
In the US, for a brand available pretty much anywhere, Häagen-Dazs is decent. Despite the name, it is 100% an American company. They just thought it needed a European sounding name.
Breyers is now owned by UK-headquartered Unilever, the world's biggest ice cream producer, so I'm afraid it's likely to have joined the race to the bottom at this point.
While Häagen-Dazs was indeed founded in the US, now days the US operations are owned by Froneri, also based in the UK and the world's 2nd-largest ice cream producer behind Unilever!
Curiously the Häagen-Dazs brand outside the US is owned separately by General Mills, which is a US company.
This is the same in most of Europe. I invested in a gourmet catering class ice cream maker, and delved into the fine art and chemistry required to make the perfect ice cream. Making the perfect batch of ice cream takes a few days but it is so worth it, nothing beats the taste and creamy mouthfeel of made-at-home ice cream, and you know exactly what you are eating. I figure another 14 years of making ice cream at home instead of buying at the store, and I’ll have my investment back!
Which machine did you pick? I've got a Whynter that works pretty well, but it's pretty low volume (not that it's a huge deal — I eat too much ice cream as it is!).
Yeah, I realised this recently while travelling in New Zealand, where even the cheapo ice cream that comes in big, 2L tubs tastes amazing. And this is a country where dairy products are typically more expensive than in the UK.
Pretty much any ice cream in the UK that isn't a boutique or super-premium brand just tastes like crap by comparison. Why does a country that makes such good cheese (for example) do such bad ice cream?
I blame the trend of "Low Fat" being mistaken for "Healthy" - it's the fat that gives the smoothness of ice cream, and there was a spate of replacing that with various gums that just... didn't work IMHO.
Huh, the scrolling on this page has been tweaked to be... slower than usual? When you page up/down, there's a much larger margin of overlap than normal. I guess it's better than having too little overlap, but definitely took me an extra moment to find my place every time.
