Ice Cream Studies Part of University of Delaware Curriculum

University of Delaware students can study 125 different subjects, but now there's an unofficial new major students can pursue: ice cream.

Ice cream is serious work for students at the university, which has an agriculture school and its own herd of dairy cows. The school opened a campus ice cream store earlier this year, and students are now involved in nearly every part of the production process, from milking the cows to developing flavors and scooping ice cream.

"I've literally seen the milk from cow to cone," said Rebecca Sheahan, a junior who milks the school's cows and is business manager of the new UDairy Creamery. Sheahan said she probably puts about as much time into ice cream as into her two majors: agriculture education and agriculture & natural resources. She isn't the only one devoting serious scholarly time to the dessert. Animal and food sciences major Meghan Thompson wants to eventually sell ice cream cakes at the store. And sophomore Katie Williams, a food sciences major, dreams of creating new flavors like peanut butter and jelly with pieces of chocolate-covered potato chips.

The University of Delaware is hardly the first school to have a creamery, the more technical name for the ice cream store since it produces its own product on site. Penn State opened a creamery in 1865 and sells some 750,000 scoops a year. About two dozen other universities from the University of Connecticut to the University of Wisconsin also have creamery operations, producing ice cream or
other dairy products such as yogurt and cheese.

But Delaware's decision to open a new creamery is unusual, said Thomas Palchak, the creamery manager at Penn State since 1986. Palchak said that at one time, 50 universities had creameries, but they began closing from the 1950s through the 1970s because of the cost of modernizing them even as fewer students pursued dairy industry careers.

Tom Sims, one of the people who pushed for the University of Delaware creamery, said its creation has been talked about for 25 years at the school's College of Agriculture & Natural Resources, which has about 800 undergraduate and graduate students studying everything from agriculture to wildlife conservation.

"Everyone has always said, `Why don't we start a creamery?'"said Sims, the college's deputy dean who helped get a $400,000 grant to start the creamery.

The university actually sold its first batch of ice cream in 2008. At the time, however, the school's only involvement was providing milk from its cows to a dairy, which turned it into ice
cream.

Now, the creamery's 25 student employees do much of the ice cream making. Students help milk the school's 100 dairy cows twice a day. A tanker truck picks up the milk and transports it to a dairy. It returns as ice cream base, a sweetened liquid about the thickness of buttermilk. That's when students take over.

Students make hundreds of pounds of ice cream daily and sell some 18,000 scoops a month.