Fruit prosecco or classic vanilla? The ice cream trends 2023
Vegan ice cream will continue to be trendy
When it comes to ice cream, Luca de Rocco likes to experiment. Fennel coconut, dandelion blossoms, Parmesan pear, fir tips with forest honey - he has already created these rather unusual varieties, for example. In theory, anything is possible with ice cream, says the award-winning ice cream maker from Schwabach on the outskirts of Nuremberg. "But it also has to taste good."
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Other ice cream cafés in Germany are also working their magic in their test kitchens before the start of the ice cream season to tickle the palates of their customers with taste experiences - sometimes with quite unconventional results: curry sausage, sauerkraut, asparagus or insect ice cream. But which varieties could become a trend this year? And what do most people actually like best?
"Tiziano" - strawberry grape and prosecco - has been proclaimed the variety of the year 2023 by Uniteis, the Union of Italian Ice Cream Manufacturers based in Berlin. "It's a fruit ice cream for adults," says spokeswoman Annalisa Carnio. "It's too early to tell if this will be a draw in ice cream shops." That also depends on the weather, she says: In hot summers like last year, fruit ice cream sells particularly well, she says. "It's lighter and very refreshing."
Matthias Münz from Munich, who calls himself "Der verrückte Eismacher," also thinks compositions with alcohol such as champagne raspberry, beer or gin and tonic are promising. "Beer ice cream is one of my best-selling ice creams and also very tasty," he says.
Münz even doesn't shy away from experiments with sushi, bull testicles or mealworms - sometimes he fully meets people's taste with them, sometimes less so. Ice cream dishes such as pizza, currywurst and cheese spaetzle are very popular, Münz says. Sauerkraut, on the other hand, is more for ice cream eaters who are tough. What always goes down well, he says, is fruit ice cream with herbs or spices and vegan ice cream.
"The vegan trend is going strong," Carnio also reports. "There are more and more varieties being added because demand is also growing." It's not just ice cream shops that are feeling it. Industrial ice cream manufacturers are also expanding their product range "because of constantly growing demand" for vegan ice cream, according to the German Confectionery Industry Association (BDSI). New are for example peanut banana or sea salt caramel. In addition to soy, almond and oat, pea protein is also used as a vegetable source.
"The sorbets are particularly popular," Luca de Rocco has noted. In 2017, he and his father had won second place in the international "Gelato World Tour" competition with a sorbet made from grapes and caramelized walnuts.
The 33-year-old also sees infusions made from blossoms such as elderberry and dandelion on the rise. He collects the blossoms himself in the area, so the ice cream is only available for a short time. But when the summer is cool, milk and chocolate ice cream go better, reports de Rocco. His best seller, however, is the classic: vanilla ice cream. "That's always in demand," he says.
Uniteis does not know how much ice cream goes over the counter each year at the more than 2,000 ice cream parlors of Italian tradition in Germany. The BDSI estimates that in 2021, industrially manufactured ice cream accounted for about 84 percent of the ice cream eaten in Germany, ice cream parlors for 13.5 percent and soft ice cream, which is sold primarily through fast-food chains and vending machines, for 2.5 percent.
Accordingly, German branded ice cream manufacturers sold almost 538 million liters of ice cream in 2021. According to a spokesman, the figures for 2022 are not yet available. The most popular flavor in ice cream packs was clearly vanilla. This is followed by cookie, fruit ice cream such as lemon or strawberry, chocolate, caramel and walnut.
This could possibly also be related to the fact that children are often among the ice cream connoisseurs. In the ice cream parlors, these usually showed little desire to experiment, Carnio says. "Kids are conservative. They order strawberry, chocolate, mango." (dpa)
Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.
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