The Science Behind Those Never-Melting Ice Cream Sandwiches

If you find the idea of ice cream that doesn’t melt after sitting out for hours in 80-degree heat unsettling, you aren’t alone. And because you can’t believe everything you hear on the news, our knowledge-thirsty compatriots at Consumer Reports decided to test out those never-melting ice cream sandwiches for themselves.

As well as observing how fast ice cream sandwiches melt on a hot day, Consumer Reports food scientists enlisted the aid of professional tasters to try the five different brands of ice cream sandwiches and describe them.

The Nestle ice cream started to drip 10 minutes in, with the Klondike bar joining in after 15 minutes in 100-degree heat. Ice cream sandwiches from Blue Bunny, Walgreen’s Nice! brand and Walmart Great Value were still holding together after 30 minutes, with the Walmart brand sandwich mostly intact after an hour.

And the common observation about all five? Gumminness, said testers.

“Higher quality ice cream melts clean on the mouth,” one tester noted, adding that these left an “almost foamy feel on the tongue.”

And while Walmart had said that its sandwiches melt slower due to having less cream than other ice creams, it’s no surprise the ice cream tasted gummy, because all five brands have gums added to them to prevent melting and ward off crystallization when freezing.

Check out Consumer Reports’ video of the science experiment below:

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