Measuring people’s happiness is a difficult task. But you can at least get close to it by counting the scoops of ice cream that slip through people’s mouths over the course of a year. Neuroscientists at the Institute of Psychiatry in London have long wanted to prove that sweet and iced cream makes you happy. Accordingly, the cool lick stimulates similar brain regions as, for example, the sound of your favorite song or winning the lottery. At least that’s what devices that examined the blood flow in the brain of test subjects showed.
If you follow this trail, the luck of the people in Germany has not been good recently. The average person ate about 113 scoops of ice cream last year. That was almost four percent less than in 2020, according to the Federal Association of the German Confectionery Industry (BDSI). announced in Bonn. The industry wants to have identified two culprits in particular.
On the one hand, the weather was too unstable for the world of stracciatella and lemon. So the desire for refreshment in the rainy July and August 2021 was limited. The season had already started with an unusually cold April, the association recalls, followed by a changeable May.
On the other hand, ice cream is not only taken from the Fürst Pückler family pack in the freezer at home. Instead, statistically, about every sixth scoop in Germany is sold in ice cream parlors. In addition, there are popsicles or those waffle cones that are sold, for example, at the station kiosk or the snack bar in the swimming pool. It was precisely this out-of-home business that suffered from the Corona crisis last year, along with restaurants and amusement parks that were closed for weeks. “Under the given circumstances, an ice cream per capita consumption of just under eight liters is still quite decent,” says Ernst Kammerinke, head of the BDSI’s branded ice cream division.
Of course, that doesn’t count when it comes to per capita consumption: an otter was served ice cream at Sea Life in Oberhausen. In addition to water, the ingredients included fish, crab meat and mussels.
(Photo: Sea Life Oberhausen/dpa)
However, there is still no need to worry too much about the livelihood of association members such as Langnese. The manufacturers bring new varieties onto the market, which are then just a bit more expensive than the ugly aromatic vanilla. Or they sell the trendy rice-based Mochi ice cream, which is spilling over from Japan to Europe, with a corresponding euphoria premium. Last year, sales in the ice cream industry only fell by a good two percent, as the BDSI reports.
The fact that the industry is asking higher prices on average is likely to continue this year. According to ice cream expert Kammerinke, raw material costs had already risen in 2021, especially for dairy products such as cream or milk. The ice cream industry is also increasingly concerned about sunflower-based lecithin, which they need as an adjuvant for their mixes; Sunflower products have become noticeably scarcer and more expensive as a result of the war in Ukraine. The extent to which manufacturers can pass on higher raw material prices to retailers is a matter for individual companies to negotiate, says Kammerinke.
Incidentally, for their study, the London scientists examined people who ate spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream from a large British consumer goods company. Purely for test purposes, of course. How often private individuals will repeat the health-hazardous experiment with their own brains this year will depend largely on the weather in the coming months. And whether leisure facilities can maintain their opening course during the pandemic.