How Ice Cream is Made | Mackie’s of Scotland
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HOW WE MAKE

ice cream

from sky to scoop
Mackie’s ice cream is all made here on our farm in Aberdeenshire.
our cows
milk themselves - at any time of day or night to provide a fresh tank of whole milk ready for each day of making ice cream.
our people
start work in the ice cream dairy at 5am and the early team are joined by others throughout the day to help bring in tubs and ingredients, make the ice cream mix, fill and pack tubs, develop new products, manage the cold store and taste and carry out other quality checks.
fresh milk and cream
go into the tanks where we make the ice cream MIX by adding some other ingredients like sugar, skimmed milk powder, a little egg and other natural stabilisers and emulsifiers.
a little bit of ‘magIc’
We pasteurise at a secret higher temperature than is normal for pasteurisation – this helps create the unique, sweet, subtly caramelised taste of Mackie’s real dairy ice cream. The homogeniser machine makes the particles in the mix very, very, very small – which helps the mix become a smooth blend and also makes sure that the final ice cream will be smooth and creamy.
We (sometimes) add flavour
Our most popular flavour, Mackie’s Traditional ice cream has the pure and natural taste of fresh milk and cream – there’s no need for any added flavour, not even vanilla. To make the other flavours in our ranges, we do add other delicious ingredients like Madagascan Vanilla or pieces of our home-made honeycomb or a ripple of our own fruit compote.
THE BIG FREEZE
the freshly filled tubs go into our big spiral freezer, which quickly reduces the temperature of the ice cream, from -4°C to -18°C. Freezing quickly is best because the ice cream structure is captured as it has been made – with the very small particles – and that means that the ice cream will be smooth and creamy.
PACK AND DELIVER!
Our team have to work quickly to keep the ice cream cold, they wrap and pack it onto pallets, and it’s then kept under -18°C in the cold store - ready for dispatch.

the Sweetie kitchen

Our crunchy honeycomb pieces and some other sweet ingredients are hand-made using a traditional recipe and giant copper pots in the sweetie kitchen. The honeycomb is used to flavour both our Honeycomb ice cream and chocolate bars.

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT KITCHEN

Our “NPD” kitchen is a large kitchen in the ice cream dairy, specially equipped for ‘blue sky’ innovation so that we can trial recipes and new products and to carry out daily taste and quality checks - to ensure that our ice cream is consistently meeting our own standards.