"I" is for ice cream and innovation

The Iona Dairy in New Plymouth would give the parlour a decent run for its $4.50 a scoop. Here they roll more than 150,000 scoops of Tip Top ice cream — about 30,000 litres — a year.

On the chilly Russian island of Sakhalin, a former Tsarist prison camp, they’re serving our ice cream in a New Zealand Natural parlour. The Russians are relishing the creamy taste and texture of our best dairy products.
In terms of innovation, little could beat Fonterra’s collaboration with doctors at the University of Auckland to create an ice cream that will help combat the debilitating side-effects of chemotherapy.

And the cherry on the top — Kiwis are still among the world’s biggest ice cream eaters; per capita we lick, swallow and crunch around 23 litres each a year, right up there with the Americans and Australians.

Sounds like our ice cream industry is in good stead? The industry players say, generally, it’s smooth rolling. But statistics show that after a major growth spurt in exports in the early 2000s, ice cream sales have gone flat, here and offshore.

In 2003, the industry exported almost $40 million worth of ice cream — a jump of 22% on the previous year. But in recent years it has undulated like a boysenberry ripple — in the year to March 2008, export earnings were $37,004,668, down almost $3 million on 2007.

In fact, some of the major players say the only real growth sector in New Zealand freezers in recent years has been multipacks — those boxes of novelty ice creams on a stick or a cone from the supermarket.

Our biggest ice cream maker, Tip Top, says the lull is largely due to the industry failing to keep up with changes in consumers’ lives — family demographics, lifestyles, shopping habits and attitudes to health. Now it, along with other manufacturers, is investing in innovation to meet our changing desires.

Tip Top — owned by Fonterra, along with the premium Kapiti ice cream brand — has about a 50% share of the local ice cream market. It alone produces around 50 million litres of ice cream a year, almost all of it for the New Zealand market.

Tip Top’s managing director, Alastair de Raadt, is the first to admit the ice cream market is “pretty flat”.
“We don’t believe that should be the case, because fundamentally it’s a wonderful product. But if ice cream isn’t growing, it’s because as an industry we haven’t kept up with our consumers in making changes,” he says.
“Unless you ideally stay ahead of it, you’re going to slowly lose relevance. As an industry, we’ve been a bit slow to respond to the trends.

“Look at the products today in terms of responding to people’s changing concerns for their health. There really hasn’t been a lot of innovation in that area; some companies are doing organic ice cream, and there are some new products in the lite, low fat area. But as an industry, we have to do better.”

In doing its bit, Tip Top launched its biggest range in recent years of new products this summer — among them, a 99% fat free, 97% pure fruit product called Fruju Fruit Whip, to join the 97% fat free creamy yoghurt ice cream in a tub.