No Stupid Questions

You aren’t imagining it, they add various types of gum and additives to slow melting rates of real ice cream, and a lot of ice cream is straight up fake - “frozen dairy dessert” is a euphemism for fake ice cream often padded out with cheaper ingredients like vegetable oils.

https://www.foodandwine.com/drumstick-ice-cream-doesnt-melt-tiktok-8635415

Honestly now-a-days one of the few ways we are going to protect ourselves is to rely on the ingredients list our governments mandate and familiarize ourselves with what products are actually what they claim they are, whether they contain anything questionable, and what euphemisms they use to hide undesirable ingredients. (Hydrogenated Oil == ~~Trans~~ Saturated Fat, Natural Sweeteners == Sugar, Corn Syrup == cheap substitute for sugar)

For those of us in the US (yes I know this is world - sorry) we can only hope the brain worm dead bear boy doesn’t gut the FDA as badly as he promises, or companies are going to start adding all sorts of fun stuff to our food.

Educate yourself and your friends about “the poison squad”, fascinating story of the kinds of crazy shit they used to put in food. Copper sulfate in canned peas and such.

Gums like guar and xanth. In small amounts they make ice cream better and help keep ice crystals small. I use them in my homemade ice cream.

Used in larger amounts they replace fat at the cost of taste and mouth feel. That's what makes the ice cream stay a gel at room temp.

One thing most have done is incorporate more air, as part of shrinkflation. That makes it more soft because it's less actual product.

They started using stabilizers in cheap ice cream a while back. That helps it have the fluffy texture you expect even though it doesn't have nearly enough fat to churn up nicely by itself.

Buy expensive ice cream with a higher fat content (more cream content and or egg yolks,) it's worth the extra money.

Also it helps to bring an insulated freezer bag when you go to the store, the melt and refreeze between the store freezer and home does unpleasant things to ice cream texture. If you've ever had icy or hard ice cream it has probably melted at some point during transit before refreezing.

Edit: if you feel like microdosing ice cream facts today here's a treat from 18y ago: https://archive.ph/2012.09.09-004911/http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/dining/26cream.html?_r=1. Cheap ice cream is a pretty heavily engineered food at this point.

Its 50% air now. Costs the same price but half the cost u manufacture cos it half air. Good ol shrinkflation.

It means you're getting the lesser quality ones. The ones that don't have as much cream in them and are filled with other stuff. There's some higher quality brands to look out for, like Kawartha. Also, you can get something like the ninja creamii and make some ice cream at home. The difference in taste is actually quite noticeable compared to store bought.

there is a segment on German public TV if that's any help https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-tricks-der-lebensmittelindustrie-mit-sebastian-lege-104.html#xtor=CS5-95

(Starts at 13:15 min). from what i remember it shows the same pattern mentioned by other commenters. vegetable fats instead of milk, thickeners, stabilizers, artificial flavors.

I'm more annoyed with the shrinkflation of increasing the aeration and how almost every brand shrunk their standard size from 1.75qt to 1.5qt (1656mL to 1420mL)

Umpqua was the last holdout in my area before they caved.

I will never get over Breyer's ice cream going cheap.

Have you looked at Häagen-Dazs? I only looked at their plain chocolate flavor, but the ingredients are only Cream, Skim Milk, Cane Sugar, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, and Egg Yolks. That's the real deal right there!

I like Ben and Jerry's, but I definitely know that it's not "real" ice cream. They shine because they have good flavor combinations.

Bruster's and Graeter's are ice cream shops that make their ice cream in-house. They also contain stabilizers but I prefer it over what's in the grocery store. I'm not sure if that is because I'm used to it or what. If you have a location for either of these near you, I would check them out.

Lastly, I would check if you have any local places that make their own ice cream. You might find what you're looking for there.

More fillers, less milk, less actual sugar, and no egg.

A trick I learned how to find better quality ice cream is to compare the weights on same liquid ounce packages. The one that weighs more will be the one with more real food ingredients and less artificial shit like fillers, emulsifiers, flavors and other additives.

Price can also be an indicator; cheap ice cream is almost always crappy ice cream.

Make sure the words Ice Cream are on the container, otherwise it is only a frozen dairy dessert. You will be surprised how many are not really ice cream.

Big ice cream figured out churning is a pain in the ass. So now they just whip it and freeze it in bulk. It’s not the same product at all.

Changed with ice cream in general? No. But there are things that have been possible to add to ice cream for a while that do what you describe. It could be that you're just starting to notice, you shifted brands, or the brand you liked shifted formulations.

Many people dislike the things that get added to ice cream, and so there are definitely brands out there that don't include those things.
In my opinion the worst of the additives is not nearly as bad as a lot of people would make them out to be.

In the broadest sense possible ice cream is sugar, fat, water and thickener where the fat has been cooled to a solid and allowed to just start to re-form into a lump, the ice hasn't been allowed to form crystals big enough to notice, and the thickener and sugars glue the fat and ice together such that they trap miniature air bubbles.
Some people insist that the fat and thickener have to come from cow milk in the form of milk fat and milk proteins, but that's a bit pedantic for my tastes.

The easiest way to cheap out on ice cream is to add a lot more air. Since we sell it based on volume, if we churn more air into it we get more ice cream to sell for the same quantity of ingredients, and the only effect is that the ice cream is lighter, softer and fluffier.
There's a legal maximum to how much air you can mix in though.

The next hurdle you run into is that milk proteins are actually kinda shit at keeping those air bubbles trapped. Adding things like guar gum or carrageenan will make it much gloopier and hold those air bubbles better.
This makes the ice cream last longer in a warehouse without the bubbles getting out and leaving your ice cream as a brick.

Next is rampant ice crystal spread, which can turn the ice cream into a brick in the warehouse. This can be slowed down using something called methylcellulose. It's basically processed plant fiber ground into a powder. It's also used in pills as the inert binder, and as a dietary fiber source.
It's popular because is known to be safe and inert, it's very cheap, it prevents ice crystal formation, and it has the fun quirk of getting thicker as it warms, for the added property of keeping your ice cream fluffy and areated as it warms up on your drive home.

Finally, you can tweak the fat blend. This one isn't as common because milk fat is already insanely cheap since we subsidize the hell out of the dairy industry.
Changing the blend to use fats that are solid at higher temperatures does have utility for things you expect to be eaten slower, at higher temperatures, or if you want parents to not be mad that your ice cream makes kids extra sticky.

By far the biggest way that I've cream will save costs is by putting as much air in it as possible. It lets them sell you less in the same size box for the same price.
It's a case where shrinkflation means making things bigger, which is fun.

The brands that didn't take that route invariably rebranded as "premium" ice creams, so they can charge more for the same thing without raising consumer ire.

Yes on both accounts. It is frozen whipped topping. It had enough air to hold its shape when it melts.

This reminds me of this ice cream I used to buy as a kid called the Snow Storm. I've eaten it over the years and one day the packaging slightly changed with a new emblem that stated now made with real ice cream. That's when I started questioning all ice creams. Nowadays I'm more aware of ice cream as opposed to a frozen dessert or treat which a lot of "ice creams" now have on their packaging here at least in the US.

The question has been answered, but How Stuff Works has a good article which goes into detail.

Ice cream is always about churning air into cream. But nowadays the air ratio has definitely gone up. Seemingly across the board.

And that assumes that you're not buying a brand that has gotten into the fakery.

I like to pay extra for a good ice cream that has just natural ingredients in it and not a bunch of chemicals.

As there may be regional differences, you might want to specify your area. For example, ice cream in the UK doesn't have to meet the same requirements as in the USA, so oddities like cheap ice cream made with no dairy or cream is possible, using vegetable oil instead. Evan Edinger has a video on UK ice cream in particular: https://youtu.be/CfM7yZD0PlE

Lots of stuff in the store isn't even labeled ice cream anymore...

You're not alone

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27022931

There are social media videos I seen where the cheaper brands of ice cream no longer melt, even after days of sitting on the counter. Same for the cheap ice cream sandwiches. Days and they don't lose their shape.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out they no longer need refrigeration beyond the preference of enjoying it cold versus warm.

Many parts of the EU often has North American travellers amazed how well they feel while eating *there during their vacations and how awful they feel when coming back to the north American diet. What's a few chemicals many will say.

It just seems everything from bread to pasta, dairy, meat, desserts etc doesn't seem to make you feel as awful as north American food can.

I love *Haagen Dazs vanilla bean ice cream. It's not the cheapest but it's one of the cleanest I can find among the big brands. Walmart etc usually has it the cheapest.

I've found that most generic store brand ice creams are high quality. Double check the label to make sure it actually says "ice cream" and not "frozen dairy dessert" or something. Ice cream is a regulated term and requires a minimum percentage of buttermilk to be called such.