Double Dip: The Price Of Ice Cream Is Rising Growing Popularity Of High-Fat Foods Contributes To Increase

A gallon of ice cream this Fourth of July will cost about 10 percent more than it did on Memorial Day, and shoppers can partly blame their return to high-fat foods.

Nearly every ice-cream maker is about to raise its prices by about 20 cents a half gallon on regular ice cream and about 20 cents a pint on premium. Most price hikes will take place July 1.

The biggest problem is the soaring price of cream, or butterfat, which rose from 90 cents a pound in April to $2 a pound a week ago. Part of that increase is the American consumer’s return to eating butterfat.

Americans are eating 8 or 9 percent more butterfat now than 18 months ago, said Walt Wosje, general manager of the Michigan Milk Producers Association. That extra demand has pushed up prices at a time when dairy prices are climbing anyway.

“From all indications,” the price of cream “is heading toward record levels,” said Gary Giller, president of Detroit-based Stroh’s Ice Cream. He said Stroh’s buys 1.5-million pounds of cream a year and uses about 6 ounces for each half-gallon of regular ice cream.

“Butter pricing has just gone off the chart in the last five weeks,” said Bruce BeVier, senior vice president of Melody Farms in Livonia, Mich..

He added it’s about “90-percent certain” that Melody Farms will raise prices soon.

But ice-cream makers also have problems with rising ingredient prices.

Nonfat dry milk solids have shot up.

Corn syrup is jumping after corn prices doubled from $2.50 to $5 a bushel.

Problems with expensive ingredients started last summer, when corn crops fell short, raising the price of feeding a cow.

Since then, some dairy farmers have been thinning their herds. Others have kept their cows, but use less feed or cheaper feed, said Wosje. So milk production is falling.

The consumers’ trend toward more butterfat started last year, said Wosje, when some doctors announced that butter was OK in moderate amounts and no worse than some highly hydrogenated margarines. Also, consumers continued to eat more of such high-fat ice creams as Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s.

But most ice-cream makers say they will raise prices rather than cut back on their product’s richness.

“People who eat ice cream, they want a good ice cream,” said Earle Holsapple, chairman and CEO of London’s Farm Dairy in Port Huron, Mich.. “When you want to indulge, you indulge.”