On a hot summer day, you walk into the freezer of a convenience store and see several ice creams with unique packaging. You think it would be nice to try new flavors, so you take them to check out, and it turns out! More than a hundred yuan!
After a while, the weather is familiar again, the convenience store is familiar, and the freezer is familiar. This time you deliberately avoid those beautiful and unique packaging, choose an inconspicuous ice cream in an inconspicuous corner, and take it The checkout turned out to be dozens of dollars!
What? ! ! ! Didn’t ice cream and ice cream cost two or three yuan each in the past? Are the prices so brutal now? After searching online, I realized that I had encountered an "ice cream assassin": the so-called "ice cream assassin" refers to some ice creams of unknown brands or packages that are quietly "lurking" in the freezer, waiting to be given to people at checkout. "The fatal blow". So why should they! Take my money! Selling so expensive! Does it taste better? Does taking it have any special effects?
Why does ice cream become more expensive as it sells?
According to the national standard "GB/T 31119-2014 Frozen beverage ice cream", ice cream refers to "a product made of drinking water, milk and (or) dairy products, egg products , fruit products, soy products, sugar, edible vegetable oil, etc. One or more kinds of raw and auxiliary materials, with or without the addition of food additives and/or food nutrition enhancers, are frozen drinks made through mixing, sterilization, homogenization, cooling, shaping, freezing and other processes. "
Ice cream can also be made. It is divided into clear ice cream and combined ice cream. Clear ice cream refers to ice cream that does not contain granular or lumpy auxiliary materials. Combination ice cream is a product made of ice cream as the main body and combined with related auxiliary materials (such as chocolate, etc.). Among them, ice cream The mass fraction is greater than 50%.
The most direct reason why ice cream is getting more expensive is that the cost is increasing. In the past ten years, the cost of raw materials such as milk and light cream has increased by about 80%. Some brands are pursuing the upgrade of pure milk, natural cream , cocoa butter and other raw materials, and the costs have also increased.
In addition, more and more people nowadays pay more attention to the nutrition and health of food, and ice cream is no exception. Some ice cream products have been labeled as low-fat, low sugar , minimalist formula, and zero additions by improving technology and changing ingredients. This also increases costs to a certain extent.
On the other hand, marketing gimmicks also contribute a lot. Merchants not only put a lot of effort into the "appearance" of the ice cream, the outer packaging is more exquisite, and even the ice cream sticks have copywriting designs. They also engage in cultural creation with attractions such as the Forbidden City, so that the appearance of the ice cream has both check-in and viewing value.
In addition, many ice cream brands also invite celebrities and big Vs to endorse them, and engage in cross-border co-branding with tea drinks, catering, liquor and even the Internet to create the "Internet celebrity attribute" of ice cream and push it into a high-end route.
In fact, most ice creams with serious price premiums are over-marketed.
Is the more expensive the ice cream, the healthier it is?
In theory, more expensive ice cream will indeed use better ingredients.
We can look at the ingredient lists of different ice creams. According to the "General Principles for the Labeling of Prepackaged Foods", "the various ingredients should be arranged one by one in the descending order of the amount added when manufacturing or processing the food." That is to say, the higher the position. Ingredients, the more you add.
It can be seen that for several ice creams with relatively higher prices, milk and cream are placed higher in the ingredient list, while in ice cream with a relatively affordable price, drinking water and white sugar are placed higher.
(Ingredients list of several ice creams with higher prices)
(Ingredients list of several ice creams with normal prices/Source: an e-commerce platform)
If we are pursuing healthy nutrition, in terms of ingredients, we are choosing ice cream. At this time, you can choose products with milk and cream at the forefront. For combined ice creams such as chocolate, give priority to cocoa butter, cocoa liquid or cocoa powder , and try not to substitute cocoa butter, hydrogenated vegetable oil .
In addition, ice cream, no matter how excellent its ingredients are, is essentially a high-calorie food with a low overall nutritional composition. Just eat one once in a while, but don’t eat it every day.
But having said that, even if the ingredients are better, an ice cream will not cost fifty, sixty or even hundreds of yuan. If you choose an ice cream with excellent ingredients and you find it is an assassin when you check out, don’t panic, just put it back. No shame either.
