We had the opportunity to spend time in our lab with Teresa, our Food Technologist. She helps develop flavors for Perry’s summer ice cream stand lines and any new flavors we would want to have available in grocery stores.

At Perry’s, we believe in a high quality product, as part of that we are working to eliminate artificial colors and flavors from our products, wherever possible. While this is a work in progress, it was fun to learn about the different ingredients that can be used as natural colors.

Specifically, we worked on the level of green in the lime sherbet. When we eliminated the artificial color from the product, we had received some complaints that we had changed the taste of it as well, when really nothing changed except the color, to white. We found a natural color alternative, so we were trying to identify the appropriate shade, to match the way it used to be.

We also looked at a naturally flavored cake base for some of our cake and cookie ice creams. We wanted to make sure we were still able to hit the right egg and butter notes with natural flavors and achieve the same color.  We tasted several options for each and decided on the best versions.