Last month I stood in the biggest ice-cream factory in Britain and watched a 5-metre Viennetta mint-flavoured ice-cream cake get made. The factory – which is owned by the Magnum Ice Cream Company and produces nine different brands of ice-cream – is based in an enormous building in Gloucester, where the air is thick with the scent of custard. I walked past the Twister and Solero sections on my way in, through clouds of tangy fruit, before arriving at the Viennetta assembly line, where everything smelled minty fresh. A Viennetta is built on a conveyor belt by a fully automated system, and watching it take shape was oddly hypnotic. Every few inches a nozzle attached to the belt squirted out a frilly layer of mint ice-cream, then another nozzle smoothed a flat layer of vanilla on top of that, then came a squirt of chocolate sauce, and it was back to frilly mint again. On and on it went, layer upon layer, popping out finished Viennettas at the end of the line at a rate of 200 cakes every 60 seconds.

A slop bucket full of Viennetta overrun stood at the side of the conveyer belt and I fought a strong urge to squelch my fingers into it. Later, the factory operations manager allowed me to push my whole hand into the slop bucket up to the wrist and then lick my hand at a sink, before washing it and resuming the tour.

I had travelled to the factory at a tricky moment for ice-cream. Magnum – which owns Viennetta, Ben & Jerry’s, Solero and Twister, along with most of the other lollies you can buy from an ice-cream van – reported falling sales in the last quarter of 2025. The global ice-cream industry is worth £85bn and Magnum controls 20% of it, so the stakes are high. In June, Magnum was the most shorted large cap stock in Europe, with investors betting against the company because of doubts about how ice-cream will survive in the age of Ozempic. Magnum’s sales rose in the most recent quarter, driven by record temperatures, but the stock price remains volatile because investors fear people will not be eating much ice-cream in the future, says markets analyst David Hayes from Jefferies investment bank. In the US – where one in eight people are now taking GLP-1s – ice-cream sales have fallen in the past year, according to consumer research firm NielsenIQ. The British ice-cream industry looks set to suffer the same fate: 1.6 million UK adults used weight loss drugs between 2024 and 2025, and that number is predicted to jump after this month’s release of the UK’s second, and much cheaper, weight-loss pill.

Such drugs are not the only problem ice-cream makers have to contend with. In recent years, as wellness culture has gained momentum, a growing obsession with protein and fibre has changed the way we eat. Protein is touted as a magical cure for all manner of ills: perimenopause, anxiety, the urge to have a nap at 3pm. The price of whey – a yellowish, dusty, protein-rich powder made from curdled milk – is at an all-time global high and the US is in the grip of a shortage of cottage cheese, which is higher in protein and lower in fat than normal cheese. Demand has become so frenzied that people trade conspiracy theories about its scarcity online.

GLP-1 users eat less, but they are advised to eat more protein so they don’t lose muscle mass – which creates a problem for the ice-cream industry. (A Twister contains just half a gram of protein.) Protein mania has become so widespread, it affects even those who would never take a weight-loss drug. In the UK, one in 40 people now have gout, with some dietitians blaming the uptick on men overconsuming protein in an attempt to bulk up. On TikTok, fitness influencers chug egg whites and toy with the idea of eating dog food for its enviable protein-to-calorie ratio. In response, Magnum has developed a new range of protein- and vitamin-enriched lollies and tubs which they plan to release in the UK soon. As appetites change, can the ice-cream industry find new ways to coax us into buying treats?

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A few days before my trip to the factory, I travelled to Magnum’s innovation hub in Colworth, Bedfordshire, to sample the company’s new, nutrient-rich ice-creams. The hub is a sleek, wide-windowed sequence of labs where scientists and chefs experiment with new recipes. I was led into a spotless demo kitchen and seated at a conference table opposite a colour-coded model of the human brain (ice-cream “lights up” different parts of it). A chef appeared, bearing a platter with what looked like a lipstick but was actually a tiny red ice lolly, hiding inside a lipstick container.

After I had finished this lolly – which I ate so greedily, I didn’t really taste it – Zbigniew Lewicki, Magnum’s chief research, design and innovation officer, spoke to me about some of the UK’s first factory-made ice-creams. Wall’s, one of the oldest brands under the Magnum umbrella, started selling ice-cream from a factory in Acton, London, in 1922. Wall’s was originally a butcher’s, and the company pivoted to ice-cream as a kind of summer-proof sausage equivalent, because meat wasn’t selling well in the heat. Ice-cream street traders have existed in the UK since the 1850s, when they used horse-drawn carts. But with the advent of mechanical refrigeration in the early 20th century, it became possible to mass-produce ice-cream. As British people began to buy freezers in the late 70s, it was rolled out to supermarkets. The 80s – which food writer Ruby Tandoh has called the “golden age” of British ice-cream – saw the invention of Twister, Viennetta, Calippo and Feast.

The job of the innovation hub is to come up with new ice-creams that will become just as iconic as the 80s classics. Lewicki said one of the major changes he’s seeing is a new emphasis on “health and diet shifts compounded by transparency”. They are now dealing with a new kind of consumer who is deeply concerned with finding out precisely what is in their ice-cream. “A lot of people, particularly the younger generation, read labels at the moment,” he said. Lewicki is a smiley, charismatic man, and he insisted the industry has changed “mostly in a good way” – but there was a slight note of anxiety in his voice as he spoke of this new generation of label readers.

Another platter appeared by my elbow and I was handed a new ice-cream Magnum is calling Hydro:Ice. Label readers scouring the back of this ice-cream packet will find a long list of vitamins and minerals: C, magnesium and so much B2, it glows in the dark. A chef invited me to place my hand holding the ice-cream inside a UV-illuminated box and I watched my lolly light up and glow neon green. Michelle Neville, a behavioural scientist employed by Magnum to get inside the heads of ice-cream eaters, talked me through the profile of the Hydro:Ice customer. “They’re very big on their appearance,” she said. “Hair is on point, nails are on point, brows on point.” Hydro:Ice launched in Ibiza last summer, with a campaign taglined “Ravers Are Athletes Too”. As I ate mine, Neville showed me a promotional video of a thin woman on a treadmill, licking an ice lolly.

Next I was invited to sample tiny ice-creams called Bonbons – minuscule versions of Soleros and Magnums that have been specially designed for consumers who want to eat a “controlled bite”. These tiny Magnums – which look a bit like large sheep droppings – were developed before Ozempic gained popularity, and are not specifically made for GLP-1 users. Lewicki said they were more about appealing to a “collective mindset” where it had become about “the type of pleasure you can get from a relatively small amount of food”.

Listening to Lewicki, now on my fifth Bonbon, I realised I had never felt so deeply aware of my own body when eating an ice-cream. For decades food companies have employed scientists to work out how to keep you eating without stopping long enough to remember you have a body. Food technologists have learned how to balance carbohydrate-to-fat ratios so a food can slow down or bypass the brain’s “satiety signal” which tells you you’ve had enough. Technologists know how to design energy-dense food that dissolves so fast on your tongue, you immediately crave more. Ice-creams are usually too cold to emit odour, so Mars has worked out how to rub chocolate and caramel scent molecules into the ribbing of their ice-cream packets; they want you to begin salivating from the moment you tear one open. Magnum has hired technologists to engineer the chocolate casing on its ice-cream, so when you bite in, it doesn’t shatter into too many pieces and distract you by falling down your top. Everything has been specially designed to make you forget yourself – and your flesh – and keep chasing the next bite.

By contrast, the selling point of Magnum’s new ice-creams seems to be they will keep you laser-focused on your own body. Neville explained that the brand is trying to sell ice-cream to a customer who sees their “food as medicine”. “Now, even with a basic cereal bar, some people expect it to help metabolic resilience, control glycaemic index, improve gut health,” she said. “Functionality” is a word that came up a lot during my visit to the hub; the requirement that your ice-cream should be seen to materially benefit you in some way.

In a way, this pivot to selling diet food is nothing new. As the journalist Tomas Weber has written, Big Food is adept at capitalising on diet culture. In the 90s, when “fat” was the macronutrient singled out as the enemy, fast food companies sold low-fat burgers, crisps and biscuits. The Scottish brand Mackie’s released a low-fat ice-cream in 2004. But this latest drive to market ice-cream as a “functional” food – something you eat not because it tastes nice, but because you believe it has some kind of nutritious, medicinal value – still feels striking. Because more than any other food – more even than chocolate – ice-cream’s only real reason for existing is pleasure. A perfect mix of fat, sugar and at least 20% air, ice-cream was not invented to nourish you. First served in Europe in the early 1500s, it debuted in England as a magical kind of “table trick”. Guests would look on while a servant churned, and a mass of sugary ice was transformed before their eyes into a strange, sweet foam. The Victorians ate ice-cream at balls and whittled it into enormous, campy ice sculptures, modelling pineapples, huge swans and whole bunches of flowers. With the arrival of the motorised ice-cream van in the 1920s in the UK and the birth of the 99 Flake, ice-cream became ever more connected in the British imagination with holidays and summer. The fact that ice-cream is essentially frivolous is a key part of its allure. It melts, so it almost demands that the eater give themselves up to the moment. The period between unwrapping an ice-cream and it collapsing into a puddle is a window in time, specially cordoned off for pleasure. You have to enjoy it or it will disappear without you. An ice-cream is a bit like a lit cigarette in that way.

The last ice-cream I ate in the show kitchen was the Yasso, and it was the most functional of all. The Yasso looks a little like a classic Magnum, after you have peeled its chocolate casing off; it is made from Greek yoghurt and non-fat milk, and contains 4g of protein a stick. Yasso, which tastes fabulously sweet, is selling well in the US and will launch in the UK soon. Lewicki said he has grand plans to roll it out to gyms, and told me there are 100,000 across Europe: “And the best kind of nutritious ice-cream for people leaving the gym? Completely not available. Would it need to be a soft ice? Would we sell it as an ice-cream protein bar?” Lewicki’s eyes sparkled. “We have at least 10 prototypes of high-protein ice-cream, hardcore healthy formulations just to test the limits. We have ice-cream with collagen.” He gestured excitedly to the ceiling, to take in the whole of the innovation hub. “This place I would compare to James Bond when he comes back and says to his science guy, ‘I need this shooting pen.’”

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Curious about how nutritious Magnum’s new ice-creams really are, I called Professor Chris van Tulleken, author of the 2023 bestselling book Ultra-Processed People. In it, the doctor and academic elucidates the science that shows a diet high in ultra-processed foods – which he defines as any product containing an ingredient you could not typically find in a kitchen cupboard – causes weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other health problems.

The first chapter is largely about ice-cream, and the fact that most on the market (one notable exception being Häagen-Dazs) are ultra-processed. From the 50s on, as the ice-cream market grew, producers began to add chemicals and additives to the mix to make it more tolerant to heat, so it could be transported long distances – from the factory floor to the supermarket aisle to your home freezer – without breaking down into icy shards. To increase profit margins, expensive ingredients such as egg yolk and cream were stripped out and replaced with things like glycerine and sodium alginate, additives that mimic the effect of food but are technically not food at all. In the second half of the 20th century, ice-cream went from being a pudding you bought freshly made from a local producer to an almost indestructible substance designed to live in your freezer for years.

Over the phone, Van Tulleken told me that while Magnum’s new ice-creams might appear to be healthier options, we should be suspicious of any vitamin, protein or fibre claim on an ice-cream packet. We discussed Hydro:Ice and Van Tulleken cited scientific research showing that taking supplements, unless you are prescribed them for a specific condition, has no health benefit. “There is a library of data that shows adding B2 to an ice-cream will not improve your health,” Van Tulleken said. “It’s just put in to make an unhealthy thing seem healthy. If you want B2, eat some eggs.”

Next I called the food scientist Barry Smith, who used to work as a sensory consultant for fast food companies – including ice-cream makers – advising them on how to engineer food to make it as irresistible as possible. He is now a professor of philosophy and sensory expert at the University of London, and campaigns about the health risks posed by products made by some of the companies he used to work for. Smith told me when fast food companies release a diet product, they don’t remove artificial chemicals. Quite the opposite. If you strip out real sugar from an ice-cream to make a “low sugar” claim, you have to replace it with artificial sweeteners. “Quite a lot of these taste a little bitter in the finish, so they need something to mask that.” Chemical is layered upon chemical, Smith said, to counterbalance nasty side-effects and improve the texture in order to make the “healthy” treat taste bearable.

Artificial sweeteners also cause the brain to expect that it will receive sugar, jacking up your insulin levels. This, Smith said, is why drinking Diet Coke with your meals might actually make you put on weight. “When the sugar doesn’t come, the body feels cheated. So it stores as much of the fat and carbohydrate from the meal as it can”. Smith has a lilting Mancunian accent and he was animated during our call. He made this last point, about Coca Cola, with the air of a conjurer producing a particularly juicy rabbit from a hat.

While we spoke, Smith scoured the online ingredients list of the Yasso Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice-cream lolly. He said it has fewer artificial chemicals than a classic Magnum, but there are still some “horrors”. He pointed out guar gum and locust bean gum, which disrupt some bacterial colonies in the gut, irritating the bowel, and was particularly worried about maltodextrin – an artificial carbohydrate used to make a food product taste richer and more satisfying. The problem, Smith said, is that, unlike a real carbohydrate, maltodextrin disrupts the eater’s ability to recognise that they are full. “We tend to just want to go on eating it.” (When I put Smith and Van Tulleken’s claims to Magnum, a representative said, “We take the conversation around diet, nutrition and wellbeing extremely seriously and recognise that both consumer expectations and scientific understanding continue to evolve.”)

GLP-1s have been touted as a kind of immunisation shot against the lure of ultra-processed foods because they seem to make users crave sugary, salty foods less. But when I spoke to Van Tulleken, he made the point that fast food companies are capitalising on the widespread uptake of the drugs by releasing new ultra-processed products that masquerade as health food. “We might think of this as hyper-processing,” he said. “To get around the GLP-1s and other health concerns, they’re using more and more processing and additives to keep selling food to people who want to stop eating.” Nestlé has already launched a line of frozen meals targeted at people taking GLP-1s called Vital Pursuit – and now ice-cream is cashing in on the action.

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When I visited the ice-cream factory a few days after speaking to Smith and Van Tulleken, I kept thinking about the futuristic ice-creams at the innovation hub. My head was full of ice lollies on treadmills. I found it hard to shake the image of soft-serve at the gym. After watching the Viennetta whiz round on its conveyor belt, I was led to another production line so I could see Soleros being dipped by robotic arms into orange sauce. Then I went to look at the Twisters. The factory manager assured me they had been selling well, but as I watched the Twisters being squeezed out of a machine and bundled into little boxes, I felt both hungry and strangely sad. They looked like a relic from a simpler time. A time when no one would ever think to scan the back of an ice lolly packet in a vain attempt to hit their macros; when an ice-cream was just an ice-cream.

Scrolling on TikTok after I got home from the factory, my algorithm was full of muscled influencers concocting their own “healthy Magnums” – ice-cream-shaped frozen slabs made from cottage cheese and chalky mountains of whey. Online, mums post videos of themselves using a viral ice-cream machine called the Ninja Creami to make “protein” ice-creams to feed to their toddlers. People competitively swap recipes in the comments section, trying to hike up the nutrient content while shaving calories. In one TikTok, viewed 85,500 times, a man shows his followers how to squeeze 40g of protein into a mud-like substance he is calling “Oreo Ice Cream”. Ice-cream’s only real appeal, in these clips, seems to be that it is soft, so you can force it down easily. Watching these videos, you get the sense that the whole experience of eating an ice-cream – and eating generally – is becoming divorced from joy.

But recently I had a banana split that made me feel more positive about the future of ice-cream. On one of the hottest days of the summer, I travelled to Morelli’s Gelato in Broadstairs, which opened in 1932 and is one of the oldest ice-cream shops in the UK. Morelli’s makes all its ice-cream fresh every day in the factory beneath its shop, with no additives or ultra-processing. The ingredients for its signature vanilla ice-cream, for example, haven’t changed since the shop first opened: sugar, eggs, cream and water.

As I walked down to the seafront from the train station, I could tell I was on the right track because I kept seeing people holding huge, dripping ice-cream cones. I saw a woman sitting outside the shop with her dog, who was also eating an ice-cream – out of a classic cardboard one-scoop pot. Morelli’s, which does a roaring trade with dog owners, started selling special ice-cream for dogs in 2020. Inside, everything was decorated in pink and cream, largely as it had been in the 50s. There were squishy banquette seats, and flowers arranged on some tables. It felt a bit like sitting inside a giant ice-cream.

While I browsed the menu at a little silver table, I spoke to Chris Chalkin, who has worked at the shop since he was a teenager. Now in his late 60s, Chalkin told me customers’ ice-cream orders haven’t altered much since the 70s. “If you haven’t got chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, forget it,” he said. “You can have 20 other ice-creams, but don’t bother.” He told me he had seen trends for healthier ice-cream come and go, but “they’re all a fad”. What people want from ice-cream doesn’t change, Chalkin said. “I want it indulgent, I want it sickly!” – here he scrunched up his fists and mimed the urge to gobble an ice-cream, in a way that reminded me strongly of what I had felt right before I pushed my fingers into the slop bucket of Viennetta.

High VAT rates and soaring cocoa prices make it difficult for independent ice-cream parlours to turn a profit, and the period from June to August is relied upon to keep businesses afloat. But independent ice-cream sellers aren’t as worried about weight-loss drugs as larger manufacturers are. “It’s a luxury treat for the consumer, it’s not something they have every day, so it’s not as affected by weight-loss drugs as a supermarket ice-cream,” said Catherine McNeil from the Ice Cream Alliance, the UK’s sole trade association for the industry.

My banana split arrived and Chalkin talked me through the ice-creams customers keep ordering, year after year, decade after decade: knickerbocker glory, strawberry sundae, peach melba. I ate my ice-cream – which was light and sweet, and topped with airy swirls of whipped cream – and as the sugar rush hit, I felt hopeful. Perhaps our collective appetite for ice-cream, and for pleasure, is not so easy to suppress.