Sugar Central

Complete article can be found here.

By Preston Schmitt ’14

Nearly all UW–Madison alumni share a taste for Babcock ice cream. Since opening in 1951, the Babcock Dairy Plant has produced the same recipe for its ice cream base, which includes fresh milk, real cane sugar, a gelatin stabilizer, and 12 percent butterfat. We wanted to see how it all comes together to create such an unforgettable first lick.

Visitors can follow along from an enclosed observation deck, but we’re able to view the production up close. We don food-safety coveralls in the entryway. The concrete floor is painted yellow and flooded with soapy water for sanitation purposes, a scene that reminds me of a quarantine zone from the movies. But this place is no dystopia: it’s the home of Union Utopia (vanilla with swirls of peanut butter, caramel, and fudge) and nearly two dozen other delicious flavors of Babcock ice cream.

This morning, Babcock is producing two of its bestsellers: vanilla and orange custard chocolate chip. We watch the final step of production as the base mixture, prepared at least 16 hours earlier to allow the ingredients to fully hydrate, is pumped through a specialized freezer and into packaging. The orange custard batch requires a couple of extra steps: adding the orange dye, flavoring, and egg custard base to a mixture tank and dumping chocolate chips into an ingredient feeder.

The plant received its first major renovation in 2023. A new high-flow ice cream maker with touchscreen monitors replaced original equipment, automating key parts of the production process. But we still observe manual labor: technician Joe Chamberlain positions each half-gallon container under the dispensers at a timed interval, and student workers add the lids, box the products, and send them off to the blast freezer to harden at –20 degrees. The next destination: a store or dipping cabinet near you.

I can attest to the process’s results, as I can’t help but request a scoop of orange custard chocolate chip from the nearby Babcock Dairy Store after the tour. The ice cream somehow tastes even better after I’ve seen how it’s made.