There’s nothing quite like ice cream to cool you off on a hot summer day. It also puts you in a race to finish your scoop before it becomes a sticky puddle. But here comes Cameron (CJ) Wicks to save you from the mess.

Wicks, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Food Science, is working on a new technology that adds naturally occurring compounds to ice cream to prevent it from wreaking so much havoc.

“When you have normal ice cream, it will become a puddle of liquid in no time,” says Wicks. “However, we learned that adding polyphenols to ice cream can create a product that holds its shape for over four hours at room temperature. That’s pretty close to a no-melt ice cream.”

Polyphenols are compounds found naturally in foods such as green tea, blueberries, and cranberries and are known for offering health benefits. By incorporating these compounds into a standard ice cream recipe, Wicks was able to study how they interact with the ice cream’s milk fat and protein structures. She found that as she added more polyphenols to ice cream, its viscosity increased — meaning it became thicker.

While the ice in polyphenol-loaded ice cream does melt when left at ambient temperatures, the compounds help create a network between the cream’s fats and proteins that resists the flow of melted ice. In other words, polyphenols help the ice cream hold its shape and drip less in ambient temperatures.

After creating ice cream samples containing various levels of polyphenol extract, Wicks ran some meltdown tests. She placed ice cream on a wire mesh above a beaker and set each beaker on a scale that recorded the weight of any ice cream that dripped through the mesh as the sample melted. With this data, she measured the melting rate to assess how quickly each ice cream sample melted. Wicks also took photos of the ice cream as it melted over several hours.

These measurements and visuals — along with microscopic images of ice crystals, fats, and proteins in the samples — helped Wicks get a better understanding of what polyphenols do to ice cream.

Prior research shows that the compounds can decrease the melting rate of ice cream, but not much work has been done to explain how it happens. Wicks was able to combine expertise from the labs of food science professors Brad Bolling BS’02, PhD’07 and Richard Hartel. Bolling’s team studies polyphenol chemistry, and Hartel’s group has the scoop on ice cream science.

“Ice cream already brings delight and happiness to many people around the world,” Wicks says. “So, to be able to make a new novelty — and with this new technology — was an amazing opportunity.”

Polyphenols seem to have a similar effect as stabilizers already used in ice cream, she says. These stabilizers help to minimize ice crystal growth in ice cream and preserve its quality during storage, so it’s more resilient through its distribution from the factory to the supermarket and all the way to the back of your freezer. During that process, ice cream often melts and refreezes, too, creating a gritty texture that ends a product’s shelf life.

Right now, stabilizers in ice cream include guar gum, locust bean gum, and carrageenan. Wicks sees an opportunity to replace those stabilizers with more recognizable and natural ingredients, such as green tea or blueberry extracts that contain polyphenols. Polyphenols could also help in the distribution of other foods to areas that don’t have great access to refrigeration.

Wicks acknowledges that consumers currently expect ice cream to melt. Incorporating polyphenols into ice cream can also affect how it tastes, and Wicks is interested in investigating what an acceptable amount of polyphenols may be for a polyphenol-enriched ice cream — but that’s a project for another day.

“Ice cream is such a complex system,” she says. “Being able to understand all of the science behind it, you can make food items better, more sustainable, and you can make better systems that feed the world.”