Since you and the OP are here, I have a random question: were the blizzards ever made with liquid plastic ingredients?
It probably sounds insane, but someone from a plastics company spoke at my high school and said this was the case since it was easier to ship and needed no refrigeration. Now, decades later, I'm wondering if this was just complete nonsense or had an element of truth to it. I've been able to find nothing online.
Not my field, but edible gums (guar gum, or xanthan gum for example) is "plastic" (adj.). Gums are used more and more, AFAICT as a consumer; presumably to allow products to be bulked out with air.
Basically take anything homogeneous, add gum, add air, create a foam. Basically like an Aero bar but with way smaller bubbles.
You just cut a quarter (I'm guessing on this figure) off your ice-cream ingredients by weight and you can now advertise "scoops from the freezer"!
It's genius but just a more complex version of putting all the pizza toppings in the little window, or having the coleslaw tub be much wider at the top, or putting everything in a wide plastic skirt so the box is 20% bigger than it needs to be, ... packaged food sellers are scumbags.
This 'bulking up with air' is most evident if you go to the yogurt or cream cheese section and look for the Yoplait Whips or Philadelphia Whipped containers. It's the same product, just as a foam, and seems to be marketed as a healthier alternative where users choose a satisfactory portion by volume, not by calories or weight.
And while I think the whipped foods are stupid, I don't think that packaged food sellers are necessarily scumbags. They're merely people responding to incentives, just like everyone else. The food market has razor-thin margins and consumers are ill-informed. Neither consumers (who are hard to inform) nor regulators (who are captive to the multinational conglomerates) have been able to push back more strongly than the profit incentive, so the so dark patterns like those you describe are inevitable.
Plenty of dieters do this themselves with protein fluff/"ice cream" (protein shakes with ice and xanthum gum). Overweight people almost by definition eat by volume not by calories (ie they eat more than their body needs for caloric maintenance).
It's not entirely true that regulators haven't plushed back: in the USA, there's a minimum amount of cream required before the vendor can call the product "ice cream".
The products in that category that have been puffed up with air (and don't meet this minimum) get sold as "dairy desserts".
(I don't work on the food industry, so I won't be shocked if I got details wrong.)
Which is exactly why McDonalds menus list "cones" and "sundaes". Not "ice cream cones". It's a frozen dairy dessert that is not legally ice cream. To be fair, McDonald's version is superior to any other fast food frozen dairy desserts that I've had.
The bulking aspect doesn't bother me so much, what does bother me is that it's not as good and the only major ice cream brands left that aren't like this are Haagen-Dazs and Talenti.
> "having the coleslaw tub be much wider at the top, or putting everything in a wide plastic skirt so the box is 20% bigger than it needs to be"
These days the trend seems to be to reduce the packaging, at least here in the UK. "Same size - less packaging!". So it seems like reduced packaging and distribution costs, and perhaps fitting more onto store shelves, outweighs any extra sales from customers who are fooled into thinking the product is bigger than it really is?
I think there are two things, one is a preference with some consumers towards less packaging (given two products about the same cost and one looks like less packaging I'll tend to pick that) and the other is there's been a lot of talk about taxing single use plastics so I've wondered if they've been trying to alter the supply chains before that point.
I'm not a chemist but I've recently come to realize that the meaning of the term in the popular psyche has probably changed over the decades, taking on largely negative connotations, because of its association with a small subset of materials (albeit large by volume), most of which are either toxic, a pollution problem, or both.
AFAIU, in industry "plastics" is just a blanket term for moldable organic materials that chemists are constantly inventing. They're not necessarily sourced from petroleum, nor necessarily toxic. It's a ridiculously huge category of material, and plastics really were and probably always will figure prominently in our future. And I would assume that some traditional, even edible materials have been subsumed into the plastics category given the general scope of the term and the industry itself.
Former chemist, yeah this always bugs me. Laypeople use "plastic" to refer to mostly inexpensive injection molded parts, but it really includes everything from LDPE bags to glass fibre reinforced nylon powertools to Rayon fibers to thermoplastic elastomers.
Maybe you mean McFlurry (Blizzards were Dairy Queen). Basically the same thing, but not sure if whoever said that was specifically talking about Blizzards.
Yeah! Whatever you do, never eat pretzels! They dip them in oven cleaner before baking, then they sprinkle them with those crystals they use for removing ice from roads!
And dihydrogen-monixide figures heavily in their production. Nearly everyone that's ever died had consumed DHMO in the 24 hours leading up to their death!
A solution of about 4% NaOH is generally recommended. Submerge the pretzels for a few seconds just before baking. It does something to the outside layer of dough that results in the brown crust of the pretzel. In addition to the pleasant color, it also affects the flavor. Also, it makes it easier for the coarse salt to stick to the outside of the pretzels.
NaOH immediately causes stains on clothes and wooden cutting boards and countertops. Obviously it's also bad for your skin and especially the eyes, so be careful.
Bagels are usually dipped in lye as well, it's how they get their bagel-y texture on the outside crust.
Sodium carbonate is sometimes used as an alternative to lye for those who don't want to deal with the safety aspect of handling lye, as lye is very caustic. Of course, lye still provides the best results.
Speaking about BK, the liquid they used to make the soft-serve was most certainly refrigerated.
Logically though, refrigeration based transport is not a concern for any fast food company. They use ingredients that absolutely must be transported cold, thus the cost of adding another menu item that must be shipped cold to that list is immaterial (even at scale).
That's actually incorrect, they list two plastics there. It's just that "plastic" isn't something that is actually necessarily toxic, and the media misuse the terminology all the time.
It probably sounds insane, but someone from a plastics company spoke at my high school and said this was the case since it was easier to ship and needed no refrigeration. Now, decades later, I'm wondering if this was just complete nonsense or had an element of truth to it. I've been able to find nothing online.