From cow to cone: How MSU Dairy Store ice cream gets made

RJ Wolcott | Lansing State Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption From cow to cone. How ice cream is made at the MSU Dairy Store From cow to cone. How ice cream is made at the MSU Dairy Store

EAST LANSING - Stephanie Gardner guided a steady stream of Dantonio's Double Fudge Fake from a hose hanging above her into a succession of three-gallon drums.

Nearby, football-shaped chocolates and brownie pieces were mashed and dispensed into the chocolate ice cream mixture. A swirl of velvety caramel fed from a stainless steel vat completed the concoction.

Josh Hall, a dairy production supervisor, pulled open the doors to the freezer as Gardner, a biosystems engineering student, glided by with a rolling cart full of the football coach's namesake ice cream. Inside, drums were stacked on shelves and along a wall, accompanied by a corresponding scrap of paper identifying the flavor.

Izzo's Malted Madness, Cow Tracks. Honor's Coffee Toffee. And so on.

The MSU Dairy Store is an institution on campus, as associated with the university, by many, as Beaumont Tower and the Spartan statue. It's a place that continues to attract families and students willing to line up around the block for a scoop or three.

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Whenever crews from ESPN roll into town for a big game, Hall said, they stop by the store for shots of stacked waffle cones and the eager masses waiting for them.

The MSU Dairy store sells more than two dozen flavors of ice cream, ranging from seasonal offerings like Lemon Custard to mainstays like Buckeye Blitz.

In addition to being Sparty's favorite, Sesquicentennial Swirl is the most popular flavor on offer. The cake batter-flavored ice cream was created in honor of the university's 150th anniversary.

Not every flavor is popular. The University of Michigan-themed Maize N' Berry was unsurprisingly not a favorite among Spartans. Dairy store staff ditched the yellow coloring and soon enough, demand for the rebranded Blueberry Pie skyrocketed.

"People loved it," Hall said.

All of the dairy store's flavors start out as the same basic ingredients — milk, sugar, cream, non-fat dry milk and stabilizers.

The MSU Dairy Plant gets milk from university cows — either from the Dairy Cattle Teaching and Research Center on the university farms south of campus or a herd located at the Kellogg Biological Center — which is turned into cream by the Michigan Milk Producers Association.

The liquid mix is pasteurized and homogenized at the Dairy Plant. For flavors with chocolate ice cream, cocoa powder is added beforehand. Additional wet and chunky ingredients follow before everything goes into the freezer for hardening.

In addition to the Anthony Hall and MSU Union storefronts, the Dairy Store also has two carts available for rent and a trailer called the Dairy Store Express. Staff serve customers the most popular flavors from the trailer when the line at Anthony Hall gets long.

The university's dairy roots are deep, going back to a time before the MSU name, said Zeynep Ustunol, a food science and human nutrition professor who oversees dairy operations.

"Ice cream brings families to campus," Ustunol said. "It's a very family-oriented place."

Ustunol's predecessor, John Partridge, arrived on campus in 1980, back when the dairy store was "kind of a hole in the wall."

Partridge remembers having to shut down a soft serve machine after just a couple dozen cones to let it rest. There was no air conditioning, and the students took shifts working in the summer months because of the heat.

"We always used to say we majored in smiles at the dairy store," Partridge said.

Today, that storefront has been converted into bathrooms.

Production conditions were antiquated during Partridge's first decade at MSU. Prior to 1968, MSU's Dairy Plant supplied everything from milk to cottage cheese for the campus. It was shut down for about four years beginning in 1968, after which it reopened and produced a limited quantity of ice creams and cheeses.

In the mid-1990s, the plant received a $5 million shot in the arm from the state of Michigan, Partridge recalled. It meant no MSU Dairy Store ice cream for a few years, but the modernization boosted production and made the creation of new flavors possible.

If he had his way, Hall would bring back a death-by-chocolate-like flavor that was discontinued. There's also interest among staff in exploring more Michigan products, incorporating items like mint from St. Johns. The store does sell a black cherry flavor that uses Traverse City-grown cherries.

On a Tuesday shortly after noon, Misty Smaltz and her son Matthew stood in line with cups of their coconut chocolate almond and chocolate, respectively.

"We come to the dairy store when we are in town visiting family," said Smaltz, who lives in Clarkston.

Outside, Nick Adkins, Jill Hoort and Rachel Robinson commemorated the last day of helping students at the Spartan Writing Camp with ice cream.

The Dairy Store, Hoort said, "is an institution."

Contact RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.