What’s your first memory of ice cream? For me, it was walking up to the local soft serve, Frosty Freeze, across from my old high school in Metro-Detroit. On top of their broad flavor assortment, Frosty Freeze offered an impressive selection of unique dips for customers to indulge in, like cherry, butterscotch, peanut butter, blue raspberry, and even cotton candy! Consumers are continually seeking out flavors that permit them to relax and indulge. Flavors provide a sense of comfort or even spark a new taste adventure.
Trend-watchers and industry experts predict that interest in enjoyable and indulgent food will rise this year. Consumer insight research from Mintel suggests that you can deliver indulgence in several ways, from full-on decadence to permissible or healthy indulgence. When you’re creating frozen desserts, use flavor, variegates, and inclusions to elevate the taste experience.
Make Customers Grab A Bigger Spoon with Fantastic Flavors
Flavor is an essential driver of trial for frozen dessert launches. Taking your flavors to the next level of indulgence doesn’t always require complexity.
- A well-crafted butter pecan flavor transforms into something special with notes of bourbon.
- Combining a rich blend of caramel flavor with the velvety taste of chocolate invites you to take one more bite.
- You can evoke memories of grandma’s classic pie with a strawberry rhubarb blend or reconnect with your inner child through a birthday cake flavor.
Twirl Delight in with Delicious Variegates
A variegate is another way to add indulgence through texture and flavor dimension. In finished products, variegates appear as a ribbon.
- Introduce a variegate as it’s drawn from the batch freezer, either with a variegating pump or by folding it in layers.
- You can achieve the striping by swirling or injecting the sauce-like ingredient through the base while it is still semi-soft but before hardened.
Notably, variegates allow customers to indulge as they dip their spoons into swirls of fudge, spirals of strawberry tartness, and decadent caramel. You can ignite ice-cream with innovative variegates with local flavors like Michigan Blueberry or Michigan Cherry, or put in a unique sweet twist with Lemon Cream or Huckleberry.
Mix Up Traditional Flavors with Inclusions
You can mix up classic flavors with an extra pop of inclusions. Launches with various bits of fun have shown steady growth during the 2019-2020 ice-cream season at +1.8%. Whether it’s chocolate chips, multi-colored sprinkles, or crumbled pecans, inclusions provide customers the opportunity to discover new taste mixtures and textures. How should each product look and taste? Identify your target audience and decide how the inclusion contributes to the flavors of various products.
Ways to Satisfy the Indulgent Cravings of Health-Conscious Consumers
Each of the tactics for delivering indulgence in dairy-based frozen desserts can also succeed in non-dairy applications. Look for flavors, variegates, and inclusions or toppings that pair with your coconut, almond, soy, oat, or avocado base.
- Think about a true-to-fruit Michigan cherry flavor combined with non-dairy thick chocolate fudge. Chocolate-covered cherry on a spoon!
- Or recreate the fresh taste of a lemon blueberry muffin by swirling Michigan blueberry variegate through your lemon-flavored oat milk base.
- Build a must-have limited time offer by topping your pumpkin-flavored coconut base with crystallized ginger and a hint of sea salt.
To explore flavor solutions for your next indulgent frozen dessert, contact our team.
