It was a pleasure being interviewed by Tyler on Halo Top. Here’s the interview without edits as posted in Des Moines Register June 7, 2022.
Vanilla is the wine of ice cream. “It’s the simplest of flavors,” said Jon Oldroyd, senior director of research and development at Le Mars’ Wells Enterprises. “But in reality … it’s very complex. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of vanilla flavors. It’s pretty subtle.”
Nailing vanilla, without fudge chunks or peanut butter cups or caramel swirls, is the mark of a great ice cream maker. Like California snobs sniffing a cabernet, ice cream samplers detect different notes and flaws in an identical batch of the plainest flavor.
The vanilla is too floral. The vanilla is too caramel. The vanilla tastes too much like rum.
“Many, many nuances and life changes can lead you in a different direction,” said Oldroyd, who prefers the taste of salty black licorice ice cream, a remnant from a stint of working in Sweden.
For the last 21/2 years, a new vanilla has been Oldroyd’s greatest challenge. His 30-member research and development team needed to retool recipes for Halo Top, a once-insurgent, low-calorie frozen dessert brand that Wells bought in September 2019. The family-owned Iowa company, best known for its Blue Bunny brand, began introducing new blends of Halo Top in April.
The brand is an important piece of Wells’ goal to usurp British conglomerate Unilever, the biggest ice cream maker in the United States. But Halo Top poses a challenge. Though Wells doesn’t disclose sales data, research firms believe Halo Top is five years past its 2017 peak, when it staked a claim to being the nation’s best-selling pint of ice cream.
Wells executives made a bet: If they can improve the taste, they can revitalize Halo Top’s brand. That task is not easy, industry analysts say.
Customers know Halo Top for its low calorie count – about 300 per pint, depending on the flavor. That’s a quarter of the calories in a traditional-style premium brand like Ben & Jerry’s. Halo Top achieved the low number by shunning some basics of ice cream, like cane sugar and milk fat.
The ingredient mix does not meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition of ice cream, and Halo Top instead markets itself as “light ice cream.”
Its texture has not worn well with some customers, who have complained it is too dense, more like flavored ice than the thick and creamy ice cream they expect. Some leave Halo Top out on the kitchen counter, partially melting the product before they dig in. Others give their pints a brief zap in the microwave.
“People describe it as being too crumbly, or being too firm, too hard to spoon,” said Curtis Maughan, Wells’ senior sensory scientist.
Halo Top’s change starts with proteins
To fix that problem, Wells changed how it sourced the milk proteins in its blend.
The Halo Top recipe starts with skim milk. In a process known as ultrafiltration, specialty manufacturers run the milk through long tubes containing densely packed filters.
The milk’s water, salt and lactose run through the tubes into another container. The filters, meanwhile, capture the larger protein molecules.
The manufacturers “spray dry” the protein, essentially cooking the molecules until more water evaporates and they become powder. With its old recipe, Halo Top mixed the powder back into the other ingredients. The powder creates the grittiness that Halo Top customers complained about.
Nathan Price, an ingredients coordinator at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research, said Halo Top customers were getting that sensation because the manufacturer was doing too much work.
The liquid form of the proteins that the filters caught are better for creating a creamy texture. They mix more smoothly with the other ingredients, creating a feel closer to regular ice cream.
But companies use the spray-dried form of the proteins because they are cheaper. The filtration equipment is expensive, and Price said only a handful of companies in Wisconsin and Idaho extract and sell the milk proteins.
“The scale of these plants are massive,” Price said. “Once you get up to spray drying products and evaporating these products, you need a lot of equipment. The money it takes to do this is pretty expensive, limiting the process.”
Manufacturers charge less for powdered protein because that form is lighter than liquid protein, lowering the shipping cost.
But Wells is now opting for the liquid form. A company spokesperson declined to say how much more the company is spending on Halo Top as a result.
Changing the form of the milk proteins improved the texture, which the company boasts on new labels is “now creamier.” But Oldroyd said changing that process also altered the effects of other ingredients. Some old Halo Top recipes lost their flavor. Or the flavors became too pronounced, the artificial ingredients too obvious.
The team subtly tweaked the recipes, over and over. They tried dozens of versions, quickly tossing out those that didn’t taste right. They eventually narrowed each flavor to a couple of options, sending them to focus groups for reactions.
Overall, the team stirred together more than 200 recipes – more than 100 for vanilla alone.
“It’s been a huge process,” said Oldroyd, who is still working on some of the mixes. “It’s kind of been a journey, the last 21/2 years.”
Wells Enterprises swooped in as Halo Top’s sales slumped
Wells’ purchase of Halo Top came amid a wave of acquisitions by the family-owned company, which started in Le Mars in 1913. In addition to Blue Bunny and Halo Top, Wells makes Blue Ribbon Classics and Bomb Pops.
The company bought ice cream maker Fieldbrook Foods from private equity firm Arbor Investments in April 2019, giving it manufacturing hubs in New Jersey and New York. The company then bought an abandoned Unilever factory in Nevada in September 2019, increasing its total number of plants to five from two in half a year. The company bought Halo Top the same month.
Halo Top gave Wells a fourth well-known brand name, a key in the fight for supremacy. Unilever makes Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Magnum, Popsicle, Good Humor, Klondike and Talenti.
Prior to the Wells acquisition, Halo Top had been one of the hottest stories in frozen desserts. The brand registered $373 million in national sales in 2017, a 684% annual increase, according to IRI, a Chicago-based market research firm.
Unilever CEO Graeme Pitkethly told analysts in an October 2017 quarterly call that Halo Top had quickly taken 1.5 percentage points from the giant’s market share. The industry publication Food Dive named Halo Top its “Disruptor of the Year.”
Halo Top owner Eden Creamery worked with an investment bank to shop the brand in 2017, asking $2 billion, according to Reuters. Two years passed before Wells swooped in, paying an undisclosed sum.
By that point, though, Halo Top’s buzz had cooled. According to IRI, sales have dropped for four straight years.
Halo Top’s fall came amid a steep rise in competition. Unilever responded with low-calorie lines like Breyers Delights and Ben & Jerry’s Moo-phoria. The conglomerate also rolled out Culture Republick, a probiotic light ice cream.
At the same time, many customers were souring on light ice cream in general. According to Euromonitor, the global market for reduced-fat ice cream decreased to $1.96 billion in 2021 from $2.36 billion in 2016, a 17% drop. This came as the global market for ice cream and frozen desserts overall saw an 18% increase.
Jennifer Mapes-Christ, an analyst with the Freedonia Group, said in an email that consumers value a rich taste more than health statistics. They want locally sourced ingredients, seasonal flavors and the thickness that comes with fat.
Meanwhile, some customers who remain health-conscious have changed their priorities, she said. They want fewer total ingredients. Or they want healthy fats. Or they go for plant-based alternatives, such as frozen desserts derived from oat milk.
“There’s only so much room in the better-for-you market without addressing flavor and richness,” Mapes-Christ said.
Ice cream making is ‘a challenge’ with low fat, low sugar
Will the Halo Top revamp work?
Darryl David, owner of the consulting firm Darryl’s Ice Cream Solutions, is skeptical. He said Wells’ research and development team has had a tough assignment.
He said the brand’s creators reverse-engineered the product, starting with a demand for low calories before figuring out which recipes would work. The reduced calorie count is the hallmark of the brand. Halo Top displays the calories for each product in a big font in the front of the package, easily readable through a supermarket’s glass freezer doors, a marketing scheme David called “brilliant.”
But keeping the calorie count down requires some unavoidable compromises. A pint of Halo Top vanilla contains 22 grams of sugar, about a fifth of what customers get in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Thick Mint. Halo Top generates much of its sweetness with stevia leaf extract and erythritol, a sugar alcohol.
David said sugars are essential in ice cream for reasons other than their sweetness. Chemically, they help the product stay solid, preserving the creamy textures customers expect.
Milk fat is another key component of that solid structure. A pint of Halo Top vanilla has 7 total grams of fat – less than 10% of what Ben & Jerry’s contains.
To make an ice cream-like dessert without those basic building blocks, David said, the Wells team relies on untraditional alternatives like cellulose gum.
“I respect the formulators for putting this together,” David said. “Because it is a challenge.”
Still, he doesn’t expect the Halo Top brand to last long-term – at least as currently constructed. He said Wells should lean into a new, growing sector, such as plant-based desserts.
“If they think they need to change the formula and some magic is going to happen,” he said, “there’s going to be some disappointed people.”
Oldroyd, for his part, said the team is confident in what they have made.
Now they just have to wait for the sales figures to roll in. “Consumers are going to love it,” he said.
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