alt Hacker NewsThe Golden Age of British Ice Cream
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The article refers to Magnum ice creams a lot, and makes it easy to infer that it is a British ice cream although it never actually says that. There's one clue in the article:
> The Magnum debuted in Germany in 1989, and hit the UK the year after.
Curiosity piqued, and one wikipedia article later [0], it turns out that it was originally a Danish invention developed in the late 1980s, first mass produced in Autumn 1988. It also mentions a Belgian needing to develop the needed chocolate in 1987.
Of all places I would not have guessed Aarhus was the home to Magnum, and it's celebrated with a gym called Friskohus (Frisko is the Danish Unilever sub-brand) on the site today.
There's a great sequence in Bill Forsyth's "comfort and joy" where somebody records their ice cream van jingle on a kids toy xylophone and plays it through a handheld PA. Just the right degree of mind-numbing repetitiveness and decibel ear busting noise.
It's fictionalised from very real British experiences with ice cream and fish and chips, working class communities, Italian family business, crime. And of course deep fried ice cream. I worked in an Italian migrants coffee bar/greasy spoon as a dish pig in 1970s edinburgh, the local chip shop and ice cream scene was almost entirely Italian, in some parts of Scotland going back to the end of the 19th century.
For some people the "99" from a van with a squirt of raspberry sauce is a key childhood memory, a lift from the darkness of intergenerational mass unemployment, and rainy day holidays on stoney beaches.
Gelato is posh. Mr Whippy is what poor people ate.
"Today’s essay by Ruby Tandoh..."
I'll take any excuse to recommend Ruby's essay on British Cheese, "How a cheese goes extinct: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/how-a...
> When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history. [...]
For anyone not from Britain, majority of parents, taken in by advertising, feed kids highly processed ice cream sold at low prices, no different to most other countries.
Ingredients are terrible for all the brands mentioned. And British children have high obesity rates and dental issues.
The golden age was pre-big food when ice cream was made naturally.
The celebration of targeted product design, branding and advertising is something we should move away from. The companies don’t care about its customer’s health, just its profits.
The Cornetto is truly important in British culture. For example, the Cornetto trilogy, which i'm surprised wasn't mentioned:
British ice cream is generally terrible because our laws are too lax. Previously (from 1996 until 2015), "ice cream" required a minimum of 5% milk fat and 2.5% milk protein. This is still low compared the the USA's requirement of 10% milk fat and 6% milk solids-not-fat (proteins and carbohydrates combined), but it at least met the common-sense definition that an ice cream must contain cream.
In 2015, this requirement was abolished, and now you can sell anything sweet and frozen as "ice cream" even if it contains no dairy at all.
An excellent article which I disagree with on only one point: the Magnum wasn’t really invented in 1990; the brand name might have been, but I was eating substantial, stick-mounted “Choc Ices” thoughout the late 80s.
I don’t want to deny Walls the credit for taking it global though: In the early 2000’s I met a very interesting and clever chap, with a PhD in material sciences who worked for Walls in Bangkok, whose job it was to ensure the Magnum didn’t melt too quickly in the south east Asian heat.
My great uncle worked for Walls after National Service; he died this year. He emigrated to Australia in the 60s so must have been before that.
Few stories I remember him telling me... part of his job was that he went out on the road giving freezers away to shops so that they could stock Walls ice creams (and only Walls ice creams). He said they had particular difficulty with this in Ireland where shopkeepers would accept the freezer for the shop but put a cheaper competitor's product in.
I was at a graduate recruitment event in the UK for Unilever around 1998 when he speaker told us about the Magnum story. The premise was that someone might pay £1 for an ice cream to eat at home which seemed ridiculous at the time, given that people were probably expecting to pay 25-50p per choc ice/lolly, and that it might be something that would appeal more to adults than children. The Magnum was a big success and drove the way to flashier and more expensive ice creams!
Ice cream is the one food we haven’t destroyed in America. In the rural areas around me I can go to a handful of farms and get the ice cream that’s made right there and find them in the local grocery stores too. It’s depressing how great the icecream is when the rest of the food supply has taken a sharp dive the other direction.
What a fantastic read into the history. I work with many food scientists and constantly track what's up with chocolate / ice-cream industry these days.
There's always a struggle between companies choosing profits (by adopting cheaper, more processed ingredients) and consumers wanting tasty but healthy foods. In UK things are improving because of regulations, but everywhere else things are not that good, and it's not just ice creams.
> At the end of the day, a Magnum is a choc ice
This feels like slander! No matter how true it is.
It's hard to describe just how much better the ice-cream in a magnum was than the competing products of the time.
It started with cream, to end up with additives
Those mass market ice cream are so tasteless and disgusting honestly. Do British even have any taste? As a French person it always astounds me what Britons can eat and proclaim they like it.
I’m not sure this is the story of “British” ice-cream. Unilever is a multinational company headquartered in London. But with their “Heartbrand” strategy they acquired local ice-cream brands and manufacturers and sell the same product line globally. So this story was the same in other countries as well. Cornetto was invented by an Italian company acquired later by Unilever and Magnum was from the Danish version. Currently they all belong to a Dutch multinational.
Also they dominated my local market (Turkey) not because they had better products than the local brands but because they had the distribution power of Unilever. Actually Turkish Competition Authority constantly warns and fines them [1]. Also their products with vegetable oils are not classified as “ice-cream” according to our laws. Actually one of their best selling products here is Maraş-style Turkish ice-cream, which is the only product line they use real milk and can be advertised as ice-cream.
[1]https://www.rekabet.gov.tr/en/Guncel/investigation-initiated...
[2]https://www.algida.com.tr/markalar/algida-maras.html