By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, M.B.A. ’18

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It’s 6 a.m. on a typical summer morning in Cache Valley. Mist from the cool night air hangs in low pockets on the west side of the valley as the sun-kissed tips of the Wellsville mountains preview the golden hue that will soon blanket the rest. 

Up with the sun, Eloise grabs breakfast with some friends before heading off to work. Her job isn’t glamorous, but her work brings joy to others. Plus, it’s tradition — somewhere her family has worked for generations. 

At nearly 7 years old, she may seem a bit young for the workforce, but she’s actually in the prime of her life.

You see, Eloise is a cow. A Holstein in fact, and the daughter of the 2018      Richmond Black & White Days Grand Champion. That pedigree is a major factor for why she — along with three sisters and two daughters — are now providing up to 15 gallons of milk a day as members of Utah State University’s 120-animal prized dairy herd. 

Once located directly on USU’s Logan campus where the University Alumni Center now sits, the herd is now housed in Wellsville at the university’s Caine Dairy Teaching and Research Center on the east side of U.S. Highway 89. 

It is here where the journey starts for the product USU is arguably most known for — Aggie Ice Cream. 

Eloise, along with her family and friends, provide all of the milk used to create the university’s beloved staple — plus a whole bunch more.

“Aggie Ice Cream is kind of that iconic product that brings back a very positive memory to every student, every alumnus, every family member who’s ever been at Utah State University,” says Dr. Ken White, USU’s senior vice president of the Statewide Enterprise and former dean of the university’s College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences.

“From an institutional standpoint we may have achieved things that, in a larger perspective, have a much bigger impact and broader outcome, but there’s probably nothing else that’s evolved out as a product of Utah State University that has this much ability to bring people together, to put smiles on faces, and regardless of what’s going on in their life, go back to a happy place.”

Starting in 1969 and up until 6 years ago, the USU herd — not to be confused with the USU HURD, the Aggies’ crazy student section — was comprised of only Holstein cows. But now, the herd is an even split of 60 Holstein and 60 Jersey cows. Dr. Bruce Richards (’04, ’06), who until August was USU’s Dairy Extension Specialist and an assistant professor, says the Holsteins are known for larger quantities of milk, while the Jerseys’ milk has a higher fat and protein content. 

At the dairy, Eloise and her friends can be milked up to five times per day and eagerly wait in line to participate in the automated process. The dairy is equipped with a pair of Lely Astronaut milking machines, and as the cows move into place the machine offers them a treat and gets to work. Some of the animals will go through the line as many as 30 times in a day, but they have a transponder on their collar that is recognized by the milking machine and if they come back through too quickly, or if they’ve reached their limit of five milkings, it will just usher them through.

“One of the things I think people don’t realize is that milk nowadays is never touched by human hands. It goes directly from the cow, through the milking machine through the hoses, to the line, to the milk tank,” Richards says. “When they come and pick up the milk, they hook up a hose to the bottom of the milk tank and take it directly to the Aggie Creamery and it’s kept clean and safe. And so, we really have the safest supply of milk that we’ve ever had in the history of the world and an abundant supply of milk.”

All told, the Caine Dairy sends out three to four truckloads of milk a week, but the Aggie Creamery only uses a fraction of that amount — roughly 5% — while the rest is sold to local cheese producer Gossner Foods. However, due to the Creamery’s limited space and size, when it separates the cream from the raw milk it can’t generate enough cream to meet its needs, so it purchases some of the USU herd’s cream back from Gossner.

Once the milk arrives at the Gary H. Richardson Dairy Products Laboratory on the Logan campus, though, the transformation to Aggie Ice Cream truly begins. 

From the truck, the milk is moved into the Creamery’s separator, where the cream is separated from the raw milk and then the milk is deposited into the bulk tank.

As a premium product, Aggie Ice Cream sports a relatively high fat content — around 12% — when compared to the average ice cream. Generally speaking, ice cream has to have at least 10% fat content to be considered ice cream, which is right where most ice creams stay. Some brands will push that fat content up to 14–16%, which can lead to more creaminess, but can also create a waxy mouth feel. 

Once the cream is separated, it’s   combined with milk, sugar, corn syrup solids, nonfat dry milk stabilizer, and cocoa — if it’s becoming chocolate ice cream — and then it takes a run through the pasteurizer to kill any potential bacteria. After the pasteurization process is complete, the next step is aging. However, unlike cheese where the aging process can take months or even years, the aging process for ice cream only take a few hours. 

“The aging is pretty critical in ice cream making because it makes your ice cream really smooth and creamy,” says Annalisa Broadhead (’22) who served as the Creamery’s research food scientist until the end of July when she left on maternity leave. “We’re looking at 6 to 12 hours, typically, for our aging process. We almost always do it overnight and that will give us that nice smooth mix.”

After the aging process is complete, the real fun happens. The ice cream mix heads to the flavor tanks where the white mix becomes huckleberry, lemon custard, salted caramel, or whatever the flavor of the hour is. Once the mix has been flavored, it’s pumped into the freezer tube, which is 3–4 feet long and has scraper blades on the inside to make sure the ice cream is frozen evenly throughout. 

And what happens inside the freezer tube is another area where Aggie Ice Cream sets itself apart with something called overrun. This is the amount of air incorporated into ice cream, which helps give it that fluffy, smooth texture and    ability to melt quickly in your mouth. The legal limit is 100% overrun, which is 50% ice cream and 50% air. If you’ve ever put a bunch of ice cream into a blender to make a milkshake and then mixed it up and wondered where all your ice cream went, there’s a good chance you were using a 100% overrun product.

“We typically will go at 80% overrun, which means we’re only putting 40% air into the same volume of ice cream,” says Taylor Oberg (’14), an assistant professor in USU’s Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences department. “So, kind of what it does, is it doesn’t make it so airy and foamy in your mouth. You’re still getting like the softness associated with whipping air into it, but still on that end where it’s not crossing over to kind of feeling like whipped cream as you’re eating it.”

At this point, the final pieces of the flavor puzzle — or inclusions, as the nuts, chocolate flakes, and cookie pieces are called — get added to the mix. If the ice cream flavor also calls for a variegate or flavor swirl, it also happens at this point before the final product, still the texture of soft serve, comes out of the lines. At the Aggie Creamery, they then hand pack all the quarts and half-pints, while all their 4-ounce cups are filled automatically. 

The final step is to freeze everything quickly at an extremely cold temperature to retain that signature smooth texture. The packaged products are moved into the Creamery’s negative-20-degree freezer where they reside until they’re moved to a tempering freezer prior to being served. 

And being served it is — to the tune of roughly 58,000 gallons per year.

Along with the Aggie Creamery’s traditional location on the east side of the Logan Campus, there is now a second Aggie Ice Cream location just west of Maverik Stadium at 1111 N. 800 East in Logan at Blue Square. However, Logan isn’t the only place to enjoy Aggie Ice Cream these days. The product can be found in grocery stores throughout Cache Valley, as well some outlets in the Salt Lake Valley, Heber Valley, and southeast Idaho.

Despite that incredible growth, what really sets the Creamery apart is that the production of its products is just a byproduct of its true purpose. Afterall, Utah State University, once known as the Utah Agricultural College, exists for the purpose of learning. 

“Aggie Ice Cream is part of our department and is a strong component of our food science program,” says Heidi Wengreen, the Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences department head. “There’s not a lot of places where students can actually do research and get training in a production facility like we have, especially during their undergraduate program.”

And it’s that student research — along with a little bit of fun — that led to the creation of one of the Creamery’s, and USU’s, most beloved and recognizable products. 

It was the beginning of the 2004 fall semester, and the university welcomed students back with its annual Day on the Quad event. The Aggie Creamery participated with a Design an Ice Cream contest and received over 300 submissions. From those, Don McMahon, who was the director of the Dairy Products Laboratory at the time, along with the students in his dairy technology and processing class, narrowed it down to five finalists:

• Chocolate ice cream with marshmallow swirl and graham crackers

•  Vanilla  ice cream with brownie chunks and swirls of chocolate and caramel

•  Peppermint  ice cream colored blue with white chocolate chunks

• Cake Batter ice cream with chocolate and brownies

•     Vanilla  ice cream with blueberries and swirls of raspberry and chocolate fudge

Submitted by Sarah Casperson and originally titled Aggie Iceberg, you can probably guess what the ultimate winner was. With a little tweaking, Aggie Blue Mint, the first USU-branded ice cream, was born. Now, 20 years later, that minty blue concoction makes up nearly 20% of all Aggie Ice Cream sales — more than double the next closest flavor. 

“Usually, mint is a divisive ice cream flavor because people either love it or hate it,” Richards says. They’ve done a good job of taking the milk that we that we produce out at the Caine Dairy and making an excellent, consistent product out of it in a variety of flavors that people love and enjoy.”

So, the next time you take a bite of Aggie Ice Cream — be it True Aggie Night, Aggie Bull Tracks, Caramel Cashew, Aggie Blue Mint, or this author’s personal new favorite, Aggie Joy — and indulge in that silky smooth sugary sweetness, tip your hat to Eloise and the herd of Aggies before her.