A Danish ice-cream dairy

An ice-cream dairy is a food business that processes milk and cream into ice-cream products. This type of business became popular in the post-war years, when ice-cream production moved into the dairies. With the spread of centrifuges in dairies, it became possible to produce "pre-blended" milk, i.e. milk and cream that had been centrifuged at high speed, so that the fat from the cream was evenly distributed throughout the milk.

The pre-blended milk could then be mixed with other ingredients and stirred in ice-cream machines, and in this way be made into ice cream.

Kastbergs Gourmet-Is is a Danish ice-cream dairy that produces more than 40 flavours of dairy ice cream at its ice-cream dairy in Herning. The basic principles of the method are the same as in early ice-cream production: Kastbergs' ice-cream dairy in Herning receives pre-blended milk from Them Andelsmejeri, which is heated and combined with other ingredients to become "ice-cream mix". This mix is cooled and stored in the cooling tank before it is processed in the ice-cream machines.

While the ice-cream mix is stored in the cooling tanks, it is chilled to between 0.5 and 4 degrees. At Kastbergs' ice-cream dairy we use only batch ice-cream machines, which must be filled with ice-cream mix before each batch. The liquid mix hits a cylindrical container cooled to -30 degrees and freezes instantly into ice, after which the machine's paddle "massages" the hard mass into soft ice cream. The paddle keeps working until the ice cream reaches the right consistency at approx. -8 degrees.

The subsequent process, known as hardening, is exceptionally important, because in this process the temperature is lowered quickly, which minimises the risk of ice crystals. At Kastbergs we use efficient blast freezers. These hardening cabinets produce extreme cold and powerful air circulation, which guarantees fast and effective freezing.

Kastbergs has a number of trolleys that are continuously filled and then moved from the blast freezers to the freezer rooms, so that the finished ice cream can be repacked and later distributed.

There are also other technologies used for hardening. These are used more often at ice-cream dairies with large-scale industrial production, where speed and uniformity are decisive. They have a considerably larger capacity than the blast freezers used at Kastbergs' ice-cream dairy.

At the ice-cream dairies of the past, production relied heavily on manual labour, with very few technical aids and little automation. At Kastbergs, production is still quite manual. This means that the batch machines are emptied by hand, and several of the surrounding processes are likewise wholly or partly manual, such as stirring jam, chocolate and caramel sauce into the ice cream by hand.

If you would like to read more about Kastbergs, you can, for example, read more about our raw materials or our history.