Low fat ice cream
In order to accommodate the calorie conscious who nonetheless couldn’t give up their ice cream, the commercial ice cream industry introduced low fat ice creams in the late twentieth century. In reality, these weren’t a new invention of the industry, they were merely a relabeling of products which had been available for many years, known as ice milk. The term ice milk was applied to products which weren’t qualified to be labelled ice cream.
Under federal standards, a product called ice cream must contain a minimum of 10% milkfat. Some premium brands contain higher percentages of milkfats, up to 16% in some cases. Those products which contained less than ten percent were labeled ice milk. Ice milk usually contained the same amount of sweeteners and flavoring as ice cream, but the lower content of milkfats allowed it to be produced and sold more cheaply than its richer cousin.
In the 1990s, in step with America’s steadily growing healthy eating movement, the dairy and ice cream industries successfully lobbied the government to allow them to change the designation ice milk to the more health conscious low fat ice cream. Where ice milk had usually been less expensive to the consumer buying it prepackaged, low fat ice cream usually carried the same price as regular ice cream from the same producer.
Frozen desserts which carry less milkfat than the low fat ice cream were usually sold as sherbets, and those with no milkfat at all were sorbets, in the United States. Some products which resembled ice cream but weren’t were simply labeled frozen dairy or non-dairy desserts. Typically ice creams and other frozen desserts are more than 50% water, often up to as much as 60%, most of which comes from the milk used to produce the ice cream.
Ice cream in the United States was often labelled as being Philadelphia style. That is a reference to its ingredients; true Philadelphia style meant that it was made from cream, flavoring (such as fruit) and sugar, and nothing else. Ice creams labeled French style, such as French Vanilla, are made from custards made from egg yolks which are then frozen, and are usually higher in calorie content as a result.