Ben & Jerry’s cranks out 63 ice cream flavors across the US – but what does it really take to create a brand new pint? Eric Fredette, along with fellow Ben & Jerry’s food scientists Peter Lind, Chris Rivard and Kristin Schimoler, are the company’s official “flavor gurus”, whose job includes inventing the Vermont-based ice cream company’s new ice cream flavors. While traveling, researching food trends and engaging in copious amounts of taste testing sounds like a dream job, Fredette, Lind, Rivard and Schimoler say the job has its challenges too.
Failure is part of the process
To start, like any creative venture, only 20 out of every 200 ideas for flavors actually become ice cream, and only a handful of these make it to market. “That’s just part of the process,” says Lind, who once spent two and a half years on one product before Ben & Jerry’s killed the idea. “Wavy Gravy” went through 235 variations, and even then, cofounder Ben Cohen said, “No, this isn’t quite right.”
And while Ben & Jerry’s fans deliver 13,000 flavor suggestions to the gurus each year, many write discouraging emails about the flavors they hate. Eric Fredette describes fans as a “rare breed” whose feedback is the “ultimate form of quality control”. “Our fans are good, they know their favorite flavor, and if we change something as simple as the vanilla supplier and it’s not a perfect match, we hear about it and then fix it.”
Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Shops, locally owned and operated shops selling their products in 25 countries, including Israel, Greece, Italy and Australia, also offer tasting opportunities for customers and an additional level of flavor control. Lind recalls one rose-flavored trial phase ice cream met a doomed response when a US-based Scoop Shop customer retorted, “This tastes like my grandmother’s armpits.” “We pretty much stayed away from rose after that,” Lind admits.
Demand for excellent ingredients
The flavor gurus are also blessed – and perhaps cursed – by their quest for perfect ingredients: only natural and naturally processed ingredients go into their pints. Even the humble “Vanilla” pint, launched in 2012, contains cage free eggs, non-GMO ingredients and Fairtrade certified sugar and vanilla beans. Ben & Jerry’s also supports mandatory labeling of genetically modified organisms and consumers’ rights to know what’s in their food. This stand feels noble to Ben & Jerry’s employees at a time when the Grocery Manufacturers Association estimates 70 to 80% of US food contains genetically modified ingredients. Yet when Ben & Jerry’s converted 100 of its ingredients to non-GMO-sourced, the process was huge, Rivard recalls. “Working with suppliers we had to taste, test and prove every single replacement – it was basically like creating 100 new flavors in a year and a half.”
Incorporating cultural differences
Ben & Jerry’s global availability with new, limited edition flavors inserts additional challenges to finding the correct sweetness or chunk level, and even the packaging of the pints. Rivard notes in Japan, products must be pristine. “Store owners will reject a cup with an eighth inch scratch.” Lind recalls how distributors discontinued “Cherry Garcia” in Europe where the product never caught on. Whether European consumers disliked the name, the cherries or the premise – a tribute to Jerry Garcia – remains a mystery.
On the flipside, taking Ben & Jerry’s global inspires new, refreshing flavors. Ben & Jerry’s first Scoop Shop in Tokyo, which opened in spring 2012 in the trendy Harajuku shopping district, features a flavor lab in which in-house flavorists create unique flavors available exclusively in that store. Unique concoctions from the Tokyo Scoop Shop include: “Maccha Made in Heaven: Maccha Green Tea with Caramelized Pecans”, “Passionable Pine: Passion Fruit Ice Cream with Pineapple Chunks and a Raspberry Swirl,” and “Murasaki Imotion: Purple Sweet Potato Ice Cream with Purple Sweet Potato Chunks”.
American fans are already requesting these Japanese-inspired flavors make their way to the US.
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