Development of vegetable-flavoured ice cream

The aim of this study was to use sensory evaluation survey for developing a vegetable-flavoured ice cream which are carrot-based and cucumber-based ice cream. As consumer have pursued healthier lifestyles in recent years, consumption of carrot and cucumber foods product have risen steadily, encouraged by scientific studies showing health benefits from these product. There is a large market for ice cream in Malaysia. However, since the production of ice cream in Malaysia only focus to the favourite flavour and the taste of the ice cream without emphasizing the benefit of ice cream to consumer. For years, these groups of consumers have been able to substitute vegetable with soft drink containing vegetable such as carrot juice and cucumber juice as a substitute for vegetable, but there is no company in Malaysia that use carrot and cucumber as based in ice cream or frozen dessert formulation. Carrot-based and cucumber-based ice cream was developed and sixty respondents participated to rate the sensory evaluation of these two ice creams on their taste, texture, flavour, smoothness, aroma, colour, and sweetness. In addition, the conventional ice cream also provided in this sensory evaluation to compare the vegetable-based ice cream product with the ice cream that already existed in the market. This experiment was also conducted in order to determine the consumer acceptability on vegetable-based ice cream and preference between carrot-based ice cream and cucumber-based ice cream. Drivers or aspects for acceptance and preference were the taste, flavour, aroma, colour, and sweetness since majority of the respondents rate the high scale for this sensory evaluation for carrot-based ice cream.The p-value between carrot-based, cucumber-based, and conventional is 0.00 which is highly significant. Hence, there was a significant difference between the means values among 3 samples regarding sensory test based on taste, texture, flavour, smoothness, aroma, colour, and sweetness of ice cream.