Thursday, August 24

Lobster ice cream, anyone?

It's confirmed. It's now cool to eat 'ethnic' ice cream. CBC said so, so it must be true. It's not weird anymore, it's an 'untapped market'. Statisticians have determined that the drop in Canadian ice cream consumption was directly correlated to increased numbers of people of colour who just weren't diggin' good ol' vanilla. So go on and enjoy that jackfruit ice cream along with your curry & wasabi chips. ps. maybe we should make a trip to Cochrane, AB, for a food review. anyone? anyone? via CBC:

Canadian scoops into untapped market with ethnic ice cream flavours

A Canadian ice cream maker says she has the scoop on an untapped market: flavours that appeal to a multicultural clientele.

Vanilla and chocolate are old news at MacKay's ice cream store in Cochrane, Alta. Now, workers are dishing out new ice cream flavours including jack fruit, purple yam, guava, avocado, buco, durian, green tea, lychee, papaya and passion fruit to appeal to a multicultural clientele.

Robyn MacKay, who runs the store, says that the new flavours are immensely popular.

"There are times when I look at the line up and the entire line out the door [and] we're the only Caucasians in the store," she said.

When MacKay was still in the stage of early product development, she went to Asian specialty stores in Calgary and asked store owners to suggest ice cream flavours and test her samples. Now, her customers are so loyal and varied, she can ask them for their feedback, she says.

Doug Goff, a professor in the department of food science at the University of Guelph, says he's tasted ice cream all over the world, trying everything from lobster to green bean. He sees a large audience in Canada seeking this kind of new specialty food.

"There are unique indigenous flavours that are part of a cultural community and those aren't necessarily catered to," he said. "Although what we're seeing in some of the more ingenious types of ice cream makers is that they're trying to get into that market by making Indian style ice cream or ice cream with Asian type flavours or the Latin American savoury types with chili and jalapeno and so on."

This new change may help to counter the increasing numbers of Canadians who are giving up ice cream.

A 2004 Statistics Canada food consumption study found that ice cream consumption had fallen to 6.2 litres per person per year, more than 25 per cent below the 1994 level.

1 Comments:

At 1:21 AM, Blogger rabfish said...

lol

 

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