The bacteriological purity of ice-cream brickettes and their method of manufacture.

Abstract

Ice-cream leaves the freezer in a plastic, semi-frozen state and must be hardened for distribution by subjecting it to a sub-zero temperature. The initial process for making it into brickettes involved filling soft ice-cream into metal moulds, which were usually about 2 feet long and of the same cross-section as the finished brickette. These moulds were then placed in a hardening room or tunnel, after which the hardened ice-cream was removed from them, cut into suitable lengths and wrapped, either mechanically or by hand. It will be seen that a great deal of handling was involved and, even when the work was done mechanically, the machinery used was complicated and difficulty to clean efficiently. The next development was to dispense with metal moulds and to extrude the icecream in bars of the same size as the moulds; they were then hardened, cut and wrapped in the usual way. This eliminated the messy demoulding process with its attendant risk of contamination, but still involved the use of the same cutting and wrapping machinery with all its hazards. It was to give freedom from these hygienic hazards that the new &dquo; soft wrap &dquo; process was evolved (Figure 1). In essence, the process consists of depositing portions of ice-cream of the shape and size required on to a strip of waxed paper passing continuously beneath a vertical extruding head, the individual portions being severed by