Ice creams undergoing tests to cope in warmer freezers in bid to reduce carbon footprint

Split image. Left image: A person holding two Magnum ice creams. Right image: Pots of Ben & Jerry's ice cream for sale in a supermarket.
Unilever wants to warm its freezers up by 6C. Credit: PA/AP

Ice cream recipes are being reformulated to stop them from melting at higher temperatures in a bid to reduce Unilever's carbon footprint.

Brands including Ben & Jerry's and Magnum - owned by Unilever - are being tested to see if they can cope in freezers, which have their temperatures set at around -12C. Freezers are typically maintained at a temperature of -18C.

Unilever said it is pushing ahead with the tests in an effort to reduce its carbon footprint by around 20-30% per freezer.

Global sales could also be boosted by the move after the company suffered a slight dip in profits for Q4 of 2022, as rising energy bills led to some businesses switching off their freezers earlier in the year than usual.

The cost of Unilever's project, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has not been made public, with the firm instead saying it has been incorporated into existing research and development budgets.

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"When my boss initially said, 'Why don’t we just do this?' I said 'You're crazy, it's just not possible'," Andrew Sztehlo, Unilever's chief research and development officer, told the WSJ.

Initial pilot tests have already taken place in Germany, where it was determined which products were naturally resilient to warmer temperatures and would not require reformulation.

Unilever said that, depending on whether the pilots are successful, it will need to manually increase the temperature for most of its three million strong fleet of freezers, spread across 60 countries.

No plans have been announced for when this could begin to happen, but the company has said the project could last for up to 15 years.

A second round of testing is slated to begin in Indonesia, and will involve testing both the melting and sensory properties of the reformulated ice creams. The round will also take in results from blind taste tests.

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