Praline’s Inc. crafts its award-winning ice cream using high-quality ingredients — many of them made from scratch — and an impressive hand-mixing technique
You won't find any fancy feeder hoppers or blenders in Praline's Inc.'s Wallingford, Conn., ice cream processing, distribution and headquarters facility. The company believes that the old-fashioned methods still yield the best-tasting ice cream. So plant employees start with a high-quality base, then mix in the variegates and inclusions by hand.
The perception of any given added ice cream flavoring is influenced, for good or bad, by appearance, aroma, acidity, taste (sweet, salty, bitter, sour), texture (smooth, creamy, rich) and temperature, including appropriate temperature-related chemistries of any given flavor.
Imagine cheese carefully handcrafted by someone trained in a top artisanal cheesemaking course in Wisconsin. The individual is so passionate about cheeses that each vat of curd is stirred by hand, and the product is closely monitored throughout the entire cheesemaking process.
Sales of refrigerated yogurt, cottage cheese and kefir slide. Meanwhile, cream cheese and sour cream fare better, and shelf-stable yogurt/yogurt drinks take off.
The cultured dairy segment is seeing its ups and downs. Yogurt, once the driving force, has seen sales struggle of late. Concurrently, other cultured categories such as cream cheese and sour cream are holding their ground or trying to push ahead.
Bees are critical to one-third of the world's crops, including ingredients that are used in more than one-third of Haagen-Dazs ice cream flavors. However, their numbers continue to dwindle, an estimated one-third of honey bee colonies were lost between April 2016 and March 2017, Haagen-Dazs said.