Everything I Thought I Knew About Ice Cream Was Wrong
What's actually in my scoop, why it got there, and why I'm still not giving it up.
Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.
Editor’s note: Hello, this is Samarth. Today’s piece is by my colleague Charul Bhakre.
When she joined my team a couple of months ago, I gave her my copy of the book ‘Ultra-Processed People’ by Chris van Tulleken (strongly recommended) to induct her into the world of packaged food (and all that's broken there). The opening chapter has a story of the author realising how his ice cream is simply not melting, and then figuring out why.
This was all new to Charul. And as she went deep down the rabbit hole to figure why a four-ingredient food like ice cream now has twenty, I witnessed her emotional and learning journey to decode it. And I knew there is a TBT story here.
Before you ask: no, this is is NOT a case against ice cream. Charul loves it far too much for that. :)
— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)
As a kid, I grew up eating Kwality Wall’s ice cream. Only to learn, as a thirty-something adult, that what I’d been eating wasn’t technically ice cream at all.
The company said so itself. In a recent interview with The Economic Times, Peter ter Kulve (the global CEO of The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which now owns Kwality Wall’s) announced the brand was switching from vegetable fat, like palm oil, back to dairy fat. In his words:
“We are not a frozen dessert company anywhere in the world. In India, we changed everything, everything.”
Give me a break. My ice cream didn’t have milk fat? And frozen dessert? What’s that?
In my head, ice cream is a simple dairy-based dessert: why was there oil in it?
So I looked up the ingredient list of my favourite ice creams—the chocobar especially—and oil turned out to be just the first surprise. There were gums (xanthan gum, guar gum), emulsifiers (soy lecithin and others), glycerine, liquid glucose, artificial flavours, food colours and so on.
I didn’t understand any of it. What’s an emulsifier or a stabiliser? Why does one small cup need four of them? And if there’s already sugar in there, why add liquid glucose too? Isn’t that just more sugar?
This article is me trying to understand what happened to my dear ice cream. Because I really love ice cream.
On bad days, it’s been like a friend who doesn’t ask any questions, just shows up with a warm hug. On good days, it’s made the occasion even more special, simply by being there. And in my head, it was always something simple and wholesome. I guess that’s why I never checked what was in it. I never thought I needed to.
Which is why this feels a little like a betrayal and the ingredient revelation made me feel foolish.
So I spoke to ice cream manufacturers and did my own digging (reading a lot and watching way too many YouTube shorts than I’d like to admit) to find out what changed, why it changed, and what it means for us as consumers.
Here’s what I found.
To make sense of that long ingredient list, I first had to understand what ice cream actually is.
And it really is simple. To make it at home, you need three things: milk fat (whole milk, cream, milk powder, or condensed milk), sugar, and flavour (e.g. cocoa).
The trick is in how you mix them.
If you dump everything into a container and freeze it, you will get a hard, icy, brick-like block. That’s not ice cream.
Because we want ice cream to be smooth and creamy. And that only happens if you freeze the mix while constantly stirring it.
Emphasising again: Freezing and stirring, at the same time. This is called churning.
Churning does two things at once.
First, it gets air into the mixture, which makes the ice cream light enough to scoop it out.
Second, as the mix freezes, the constant stirring motion breaks up ice crystals as they form, so you end up with tiny ones instead of big crystals, which is why it feels smooth on your tongue.
This combination of air plus tiny ice crystals is what gives ice cream its structure. The challenge is to keep this structure intact.
At home, it’s easy: you make a small batch today, keep it in your freezer, and eat it within two or three days. You’re fine.
But the moment you ask that ice cream to travel, the structure starts to break down. And that’s where the ingredient list begins to grow.
Imagine you want to open a small, artisanal gelato shop. You’re no longer making one special batch for an evening party. You’re making it in bulk that has to travel to different outlets across the city, sit in different freezers, and may not be eaten the same day, or even the same week.
We spoke with Darshak Solanki, co-founder and chef at Nuvola Gelato in Mumbai, about exactly this problem. His gelato is made in a central factory and sent out to all 13 of his outlets. That’s a journey: factory freezer, truck, cold storage at the outlet, display freezer, and finally into your hand—sometimes after one more stop in a Swiggy or Zomato delivery partner’s bag.
Every one of those stops sits at a slightly different temperature, Darshak explained. And every time the temperature rises, even a little, the ice cream melts a tiny bit. Then it cools and freezes again.
But it doesn’t freeze back into those millions of tiny crystals. With no stirring happening this time, the water refreezes into fewer, bigger crystals. Do this enough times and your smooth, creamy ice cream slowly turns coarse and icy.
This is the melt-and-freeze cycle. To protect the ice cream through it, you need something extra. And this is where stabilisers come in.
Their job is to hold onto water tightly enough that it can’t move around freely. Less free water means the ice crystals grow more slowly as the temperature fluctuates, and the ice cream stays smooth for longer.
Darshak uses guar gum, which shows up on labels as 412. It makes up less than 0.5% of the mix. A whole kilogram of ice cream might contain around three grams of it.
There’s a small family of these you’ll spot again and again on packs: locust bean gum (410), carrageenan (407), xanthan gum (415), and a few cellulose-based ones (466, 461, 460). All are stabilisers, all of them holding water in place.
Solving the ice crystal problem, however, is only one part of making a stable ice cream.
Now imagine a brand selling ice cream across the entire country.
The shelf life has to stretch from a few weeks to several months. And the journey gets longer: factory, truck, warehouse, supermarket or neighbourhood kirana freezer, delivery bag, and finally your freezer at home, where it might sit for days, or weeks, before you get to it.
The same melt-and-freeze problem now repeats itself many more times, at every stop along the way. But in India it comes with a twist, as an ice cream maker explained to us: the lack of a proper cold chain infrastructure. It is patchy: erratic electricity, long distances, warehouses and trucks that don’t reliably hold their temperature.
So an ice cream travelling a long way melts more often, and for longer stretches, and the structure breaks.
This is where vegetable fat—like palm oil—enters the scene. It does two jobs.
First, it holds up better through the supply chain. Because vegetable fats like palm oil have a higher melting point than milk fat. It takes more heat to melt, so it holds its shape slightly better through the fluctuations.
And second, oil is much, much cheaper than dairy fat. And lower cost of ingredients means a lower price on the shelf, which is what makes ‘mass-market’ ice cream mass-market in the first place.
Make no mistake: while oil helps with the cold chain, cost is the primary driver why this replacement happens. And the moment you do make this replacement, the regulations say you can’t call it ‘ice cream’ anymore.
So what exactly is the line that FSSAI draws?
It comes down to one number: 10% milk fat.
To be called ‘ice cream’ in India, at least 10% of the product’s weight has to be fat that comes from milk. If that fat comes from palm oil, the product is now a ‘frozen dessert’.
Brands are supposed to declare it on the pack. But honestly, until I worked on this article, I didn’t know I’d been eating ‘frozen dessert’ (and not ice cream) all this while.
Because yes, the law changed the name, but it didn’t change the context in which I consume ice cream: everything about it looked the same. It sits in the same freezers, the same aisle at the supermarket, the same restaurant menus and wedding buffets. So how is one supposed to know?
And that’s why, even though I can now follow the logic, it still feels like an act of betrayal.
Now there is oil in the ice cream. But that creates a new problem.
Oil doesn’t mix with water on its own. Left alone, it would just float on top, the same way it sits on top of a dal or a sabzi. So how does an oil-based ice cream come out creamy at all?
Something has to force the fat and water to hold together. That’s what an emulsifier does.
On labels, the most common by far is E471 (mono- and diglycerides), which shows up in nearly every list. And you’ll also spot E433 (polysorbate 80), E477 (propylene glycol esters), E435 (polysorbate 60), and E322 (lecithin).
To be sure, this isn’t only true for oil-based ice creams. Fat and water don’t mix easily whatever the fat is, so many dairy ice creams use emulsifiers too. But it doesn’t have to be a lab-made E-number. And Italy proves it.
Traditional Italian gelato uses egg yolk. The yolk contains lecithin, a natural emulsifier, and brings richness of its own.
Darshak, who trained with Italian chefs, told us it works there partly because Italy has an entire supply chain built around it: egg whites go to the country’s bakeries and the yolks go to its gelato makers. He doesn’t use yolks himself (or any emulsifier at all) because many of his Indian customers simply don’t want eggs in their ice cream.
By this point, I’d started understanding why the labels are the way they are. Everything on it was solving a real, physical problem, which both felt “yeah this makes sense” but also made me realise how ice cream was being optimised for the supply chain and not for my body.
And yet, when I dug into the next thing, it again caught me off guard.
The latest trend in the ice cream market is a whole new wave of “healthier” ice creams: guilt-free, sugar-free ice-creams. And I’ll admit it: I’d been reaching for these more often myself lately, treating them as the safer choice.
And I expected these “healthier” ice-creams to have a shorter ingredient list.
But turns out, they were even longer. Why is that?
Ajay Joe, co-founder of Ulo Ice Creams in Bangalore, told us that sugar does more than just sweeten the ice cream: it helps control how much water freezes into ice and plays a role in giving the ice cream its body and texture.
If you remove that, you will have to add something else to make up for those functions. And that’s why sugar-free ice creams rarely contain just one replacement.
So you will see multiple sugar substitutes—maltitol, stevia, erythritol, sucralose, and so on—and fibres like polydextrose or fructo-oligosaccharide. All of them, in some combination, to bring the sweetness and the body that sugar was adding.
Ajay told us he stays away from erythritol even though plenty of other brands use it in their sugar-free ice creams now. In an interview, he told us:
“We believe ice cream, like most “treats,” should be treated that way. Eat a small portion instead of binging on a ‘healthy’ version with a lot of extra ingredients to make it seem like the real thing. This thought process made us never look into sugar free variants of our ice cream.”
After all this, I can’t look at an ice cream cup the same way again. I read the label now, and I see what’s doing what.
And still, for all of it, I’m not giving up on ice cream. Not at all. What’s changed is how I eat it.
I won’t fall for the “healthy” claims and will read the label and know what I’m putting in my body. I’ll have the frozen dessert when I’m craving childhood nostalgia, and the premium gelato when I want something rich and flavourful. I’ll choose the brands that are honest about how they make what they make, and I’ll tell people about them, so more of us end up enjoying and appreciating the real thing.
And most of all, I’ll just stay mindful. I will eat it once in a while, slowly and properly, whatever I’m craving that day. And let ice cream be ice cream again. Joy. And nothing else.
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Hi, thanks for this article! I was wondering if you could throw light on how these ingredients really harm. I get that their presence is taking the product away from what it’s actually supposed to be, but what harm is it actually causing us?
Asking out of curiosity :)
My rule of thumb is that fewer the ingredients in the ingredient list that read like the ingredient in actual unprocessed form, the better it is to consume. Tragically this does reduce my options when it comes to ice cream and processed food.