Lemon Curd icecream is newfor Morelli’s!

But that’s exactly the delicious opportunity that second year undergraduates on the BSc Hons Consumer Management and Food Innovation degree at the University of Ulster Ulster were given in helping the award-winning ice-cream producer Morelli’s to choose six new flavours to be launched onto the market in 2015.

The students spent the morning learning from Arnaldo Morelli about product innovation, retailing and the challenges involved in growing a now famous family business.

The students conducted sensory taste testing on 14 products at the new Food and Consumer Testing Suite (FACTS) on the Coleraine campus to identify the six best flavours.

And using the students’ feedback and after several commercial considerations were taken into account six new flavours were chosen to form part of the company’s 2015 Scoop range.

And ice cream lovers everywhere will soon be tucking into Lemon Curd, Coffee, Toffee and Chocolate Crisp, Vanilla with Salted Caramel Ripple, White Chocolate and Raspberry Supreme and a Luxury Caramelised Hazelnut.

Lecturer Dr Lynsey Hollywood told The Coleraine Times: “This was a great opportunity for our students to collaborate with a local company and learn more about retailing, sensory testing and the challenges involved in launching a new product onto the market”.

Arnaldo Morelli really enjoyed the entire process and said: “It was fantastic to receive the assistance of Dr Hollywood and her students in helping to choose our new flavours for 2015, this is something that is usually done in-house but the results and feedback have certainly got us thinking and we’ll hopefully be using sensory analysis to test even more new flavours in 2016”.

Morelli’s family owned ice cream parlours have been trading since 1911. Their award winning ice cream is available via franchised stores and retail scoop concessions right across Ireland. 2015 is set to be a record year for the company with their annual output set to top 500,000 litres of finished ice cream for the first time.