"Icy Delight"

If there's one food that has universal appeal, for old and young, it's ice cream. To keep pace with an ever-increasing demand in the top half of the South Island, New Zealand's biggest ice cream manufacturers, Tip Top, have their Nelson factory in Waimea Road working at top throughout the summer. We visited the factory recently and saw the staff making and packing some of the 250,000 gallons of ice cream manufactured there in a year. We also saw the fascinating process used in the manufacture of Topsies, 750,000 of which are consumed each year in the area covered by the factory (from Kaikoura to Paringa). Here now is how your favourite dish is made.

Young and old, all love ice cream.

After homogenisation, the mixture goes to a holding vat where it matures for seven hours.

The process starts here, in the pasteurising vat, where the ingredients are pasteurised and, upon completion of the process, homogenised to increase and improve texture (factory manager Paul Driessen checks the mixture).

The mixture is then pumped to the churns where the liquid mix is whipped while under refrigeration before emerging as soft ice cream (being palleted by Lilian Roach).

Another churn, under the control of Peggy Kerry, is producing a fruit salad variety, the fruit being forced into the ice cream through the plastic pipe at top.

A packing machine operated by Ernie Anderson, Peggy Booker, Lilian Roach and Gail Lawrence, fills tubs with ice cream and with whole fruit flavouring in the one operation.

Topsies commence here, where Ernie Anderson is filling moulds from the 24-mould dispenser.

Gail Lawrence using the stick dispenser in another mould

The stick mould is now placed on top of the moulded ice cream, the sticks being frozen into the ice cream.

The moulds travel the length of a brine freezer tank kept at a temperature of -40 degs F, and emerge at the other end frozen hard.

The ice cream in Topsy form now emerges from the mould and is placed in a hardening tunnel.

The ice cream emerges from the tunnel where it is dipped in a chocolate bath

Last stage is the packing, done here by Shirley Wilding and Mrs Roach.

The company has huge refrigerated storerooms and hardening rooms and you can be assured that Pat Steans, shown here, is not.the warmest man in town.

After the ice cream is hardened in hardening rooms it leaves by way of conveyor belt to refrigerated vans (below).

That white stuff on Bruce Hawke's coat is not chalk – it's ice (brrrrrrrr).

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The Nelson Photo News

No 64 : March 5, 1966

"Icy Delight"