BRAINFOOD: We'd love that job
Ice cream taster - Arnold Carbone, Ben & Jerry's, Vermont
What do you do?
I work on flavour development. Four of us will go on a flavour tour to a city to investigate neighbourhood markets, stores and restaurants to search for trends in desserts - we'll eat up to 30 a day. I'll eat a lot of snacks and beverages too, to come up with a new flavour - we translated a caramel macchiato into a caramel-swirled ice cream. And you have to be courageous: roasted ant tacos were a challenge to eat. We then take that information back to the lab, create concept designs and rework them.
We usually launch eight flavours a year, but start off with 80. We've had disaster flavours like Chubby Hubby Peanut Butter Pretzel, which never worked.
