NAS (No Added Sugar)

A few years ago, Ottawa-based musician Allie Goodyear reached out to us with a jingle she wrote for The Merry Dairy. Titled, Ice Cream for All, it’s a catchy, fun way to describe the kinds of ice creams we make – all year round – nut-free, with dairy and vegan options. We loved the jingle so much, we turned it into this video! 

We love the idea of ice cream for all. After all, we started this business as nut-free because our son is peanut anaphylactic and his friend was the same, but with tree nuts. For both of them (and especially their parents!!) going to an ice cream shop was hit or miss – always asking, always checking, and worst of all, always hoping that the nuts weren’t there. So we said, let’s make the ice cream really really good and let’s make it peanut, tree nut and sesame-free.

So we were nut-free. Then people said to us – why not vegan – lots of allergy questions there too, and also an ever increasing part of ice cream choices. So we said, yes, and let’s make it really really good. So we tested and tested with coconut cream and milk, and came up with what we liked – premium vegan ice creams and sorbets!

And then came the hardest question of all – can you make sugar free? And at first we thought, maybe that might be too hard. There are a lot of reduced and sugar free ice creams out there, but finding one we liked was very hard.

Then we met Gabi – Gabi had done work on natural substitutes to sugar. And so, Gabi won the assignment – make a premium, delicious ice cream without adding sugar.

And so the tests began (and yes we should have photographed and recorded them all – lol)! And we found that by using a combination of two natural sweeteners – monk fruit sugar, & erythritol, polydextrose (a fibre) and tapioca maltodextrin (a food starch), we could reduce the sugar and keep the taste.

And so they came to be – dairy and vegan chocolate and vanilla flavours. The vegan flavours have the least amount of sugars per 3/4 cup serving – just 5g each. The dairy flavours, because of the cream and milk we use, have sugar counts of 15g. They are being offered at an introductory price of ten dollars – the same as our other pints.

But we hope we have solved the reduced sugar challenge, thanks to Gabi. And we can sing Allie’s song again without that feeling that we were missing a big part of the “for all” part.