Episode 17
• Ice Cream Treats: To make ice cream treats, you first have to make the ice cream. It all begins with fresh cream. The factory stores it in refrigerated silos such as a few degree above freezing. The silos feed a high-speed mixture that blend the cream with other ingredients. The main dry ingredients are powdered skin milk and plant-based stabilizers and mullsifiers. Stabilizers prevent the ice cream from crystalizing, and a mullsifier that bonds the cream with air during the whipping process. The other ingredients are sugar and corn syrup. To see what the mixing process of mixing looks like, see here. Then, the concoction is chilled and whipped for about 15 seconds. Whipping blends the mix with air, transforming it from liquid to a soft-solid without air. The finished product would come out looking like frozen milk rather than ice cream. The ice cream sandwich wafers are made of chocolate cake ingredients. A filling machine pumps loads of wafers towards an injection pipe. Just as two wafers come together, the machine injects 1/3 of a cup of vanilla ice cream in the pipe's head, fits the ice cream into a rectangular slab that fits perfectly between the wafers. All this happens at a rate of 140 ice cream sandwiches per minute. As the sandwiches move on to packaging, the filling is still ice-cold from the freezing faze, so there's no thread of meltdown. The packaging system raises each sandwich in a wrapper, then folds and tuck the ends. Once sealed, the boxes go directly to a storage freezer at -22 degrees. On the other line, ice cream cone production is under way. A feeder drops pre-wrapped sugar cones in a holder onto a conveyor belt. Sprayers coat the insides with a chocolatey layer, which adds flavor and crates of barrier between the cones and ice cream, so the cones remain crispy until you eat it. Next, nozzles squirt in the ice cream filling. One production line, two flavors: one row gets vanilla ice cream, the other chocolate. Now for a tasty surprise in the cone's core; an injection of liquid caramel. This factory also mix the ice cream cones with chocolate and strawberry sauce inside. Next, a chocolate-flavored liquid topping. Then, the crunchy finishing touch, a layer of chocolatey-coated puffed rice. Finally, the cones move onto a lid dispenser that applies a wax coat of paper lid to each one. The heating element instantly melts the wax, sealing the lids to the cone's paper sleeve. From here, the ice cream cones go into boxes, then straight into the freezer, ready to take a licking.
