When it comes to ice, Luca de Rocco likes to experiment. Fennel coconut, dandelion blossoms, Parmesan pear, pine tips with forest honey – he has already created these rather unusual varieties, for example. In theory, everything is possible with ice cream, says the award-winning ice cream maker from Schwabach on the outskirts of Nuremberg. “But it also has to taste good.”
Other ice cream parlors in Germany also do magic in their test kitchens before the start of the ice cream season in order to tickle the palates of their customers with taste experiences – sometimes with quite unconventional results: currywurst, sauerkraut, asparagus or insect ice cream. But which varieties can become a trend this year? And what do most people actually like best?
“Tiziano” – strawberry grapes and Prosecco – has been proclaimed the Union of Italian ice cream manufacturers Uniteis, based in Berlin, as variety of the year 2023. “This is a fruit ice cream for adults,” says spokeswoman Annalisa Carnio. “It’s not yet possible to say whether this will be a driving force in the ice cream parlors.”
That also depends on the weather: fruit ice cream sells particularly well in hot summers like last year. “It’s lighter and very refreshing.”
“Beer ice cream is one of my best selling ice cream flavors”
Matthias Münz from Munich, who calls himself “The Crazy Ice Cream Maker”, also considers compositions with alcohol such as champagne raspberries, beer or gin and tonic to be promising. “Beer ice cream is one of my best-selling ice cream flavors and it’s also very tasty,” he says.
Münz does not even shy away from experiments with sushi, bull testicles or mealworms – sometimes he fully meets people’s tastes, sometimes not so much. Varieties of ice cream such as pizza, currywurst and cheese spaetzle are very popular, says Münz. Sauerkraut, on the other hand, is more for tough ice cream eaters. What always goes down well is fruit ice cream with herbs or spices and vegan ice cream.
“The vegan trend is very popular,” reports Carnio. “More and more varieties are being added because the demand is also growing.” Not only ice cream parlors feel this.
According to the Federal Association of the German Confectionery Industry (BDSI), the industrial ice cream manufacturers are also expanding their product range “because of the constantly growing demand” for vegan ice cream. For example, peanut-banana or sea salt-caramel are new. In addition to soy, almonds and oats, pea protein is also used as a vegetable source.
Best Seller: Vanilla Ice Cream
“The sorbets in particular are very popular,” Luca de Rocco noted. In 2017, together with his father, he and his father took second place in the international competition “Gelato World Tour” with a sorbet made from grapes and caramelized walnuts. The 33-year-old also sees infusions made from flowers such as elderberry and dandelion growing.
He collects the flowers for it himself in the area – so the ice is only available for a short time. But when the summer is cool, milk and chocolate ice cream are better, reports de Rocco. However, his bestseller is quite classic: vanilla ice cream. “It’s always a question,” he says.
Uniteis does not know how much ice cream is sold each year at the more than 2,000 traditional Italian ice cream parlors in Germany. The BDSI estimates that in 2021 around 84 percent of the ice cream consumed in Germany was industrially manufactured ice cream, 13.5 percent at ice cream parlors and 2.5 percent at soft ice cream, which is mainly sold through fast food chains and vending machines.
According to this, German brand ice cream manufacturers sold almost 538 million liters of ice cream in 2021. According to a spokesman, the figures for 2022 are not yet available. The most popular type of ice pack was clearly: vanilla. This is followed by biscuit, sherbet like lemon or strawberry, chocolate, caramel and walnut.
This could possibly also be related to the fact that there are often children among the ice cream connoisseurs. In the ice cream parlors, they usually showed little desire to experiment, says Carnio. “Children are conservative. They order strawberries, chocolate, mango.”
