Effect of Polyols Versus Sugar on the Shelf Life of Vanilla Ice Cream

Ice cream defects can be classified into many different categories such as defects in flavor, body and texture, color and shrinkage and melting quality characteristics. Quality degradation of packaged ice cream primarily involves body and texture, with the most common problem being the development of a coarse, icy texture. Accelerated shelf-life testing, which involves extremes of heat shock exposure under controlled conditions, is useful in evaluating shelf life; however, it will not provide information about the specific shelf life of the product, given the uncertain nature of the conditions to which it will be exposed. A 6-month study was conducted as a comparison of two vanilla ice cream samples, with the exception of the use of sugar as the control or maltitol as the experimental polyol variable to provide a profile of consumer or customer complaints received, combined with the evaluation of products purchased at or near the sell-by date. A random sample of 19 persons were used as taste panelists and were asked to rate the samples on the basis of sensory characteristics. The evaluation consisted of four distinctive categories such as taste, texture, appearance and overall sample. In this study, no significant differences for coarseness were found for each sample over the 6-month period. This shows that the no sugar-added ice cream retained the texture characteristics of regular ice cream during the 6-month testing period.