How did the Talenti of the 2010s that I so admired become this inconsistent and often-disappointing mishmash in the 2020s?
It helps to understand how gelato is made.
Gelato gets its rich, creamy texture and full-bodied flavor from a long cook and a slow churn. It’s also often lower in fat than ice cream, because it’s primarily made with milk, unlike custard-based ice creams, which are made with cream and eggs. As a result, technically it’s not premium ice cream. In fact, the United States Department of Agriculture has no definition of gelato, and products that have less than 10% milkfat are considered “frozen dairy dessert.”
Talenti, therefore, exists in a netherworld.
“You can write ‘gelato’ on the container, and you can put any formulation you want inside,” said Dana Cree, author of Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: The Art and Science of the Scoop, in a video interview. “For something marked ‘gelato,’ you can definitely cheap out on the ingredients if you want.”
Since the screw-top jars are made of plastic with the ingredients printed right on it, and since plastic never dies, I invited myself over to the homes of a few Talenti obsessives who had been keeping the jars for years. I then cross-referenced the ingredients lists and the best-by dates on the bottoms of the jars.
Of the seven flavors whose jars I examined, with a range of best-by dates from 2015 to 2027, every single one had at least one change on the ingredients list, and they all added more gums. (The gelato was likely made 12 to 18 months prior to its best-by date, according to Hochschuler.)
Traditionally, gelato is eaten shortly after it’s made, more similar to soft serve. The idea of packing gelato in pints and blast-freezing it for transport is anathema to gelato purists, and in fact, when Hochschuler decided to pivot to packed pints, his Argentine business partner balked.
Adding gums and stabilizers to the recipe for a grocery-store pint allows it to better handle a freeze-thaw cycle and retain the soft scoopability that sometimes gets lost in the industrial processing. Talenti is not alone in including such things as ingredients. A spokesperson for Unilever told The New York Times back in 2013 that Breyers, a brand known for its “all natural” simple ingredients, had released a line of frozen dairy desserts that included additional gums and corn syrup due to customer feedback on texture.
One food scientist I spoke to was perplexed by the additional gums’ appearance in Talenti gelato over the years. The earlier flavors I examined contained carob gum; Talenti later added tara gum and guar gum, and in the case of the vanilla, all three.
Pandemic-era supply-chain issues could have been at play. Or maybe the company switched to a new supplier that offered a blend of gums. But still, using multiple gums is unusual, as carob, tara, and guar gums are all in the same family, and premium brands tend to want to have shorter, more recognizable ingredients lists.
By contrast, Häagen-Dazs, which was founded in 1960, uses cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, ground vanilla beans, and vanilla extract in its Vanilla Bean Ice Cream.
I discovered other Talenti recipe changes, too.
The company has had at least three iterations of vanilla-bean gelato. Hochschuler, during his tenure, went to great lengths to procure rare Tahitian vanilla beans. At some point, the company switched to non-varietal beans, likely around 2016 or 2017, judging from angry online reviews (unfortunately, the best-by date on the jar I examined had rubbed away). By 2018, Unilever was using more-common Madagascan beans. The ingredients list also changed from whole vanilla pods to vanilla extract and vanilla seeds. And the most recent recipe uses “vanilla specks,” which are the ground-up husks of vanilla pods, rather than the interior seeds.
Our tasting team found the specks off-putting. “They were gritty and bland,” said kitchen writer Maki. “The dried-out husks lack the warm, complex flavor of fresh vanilla beans.”
In addition, the Brazilian and Colombian coffee that Talenti uses in its Coffee Chocolate Chip was no longer listed on the jar as fair-trade sometime between the 2023 and 2025 best-by dates.
And the company switched from fresh mint to mint “extractives” in the Mediterranean Mint sometime between the 2015 and 2020 best-by dates.
While a Unilever spokesperson did not comment on any ingredient changes except to say, “We continue to evaluate and source our ingredients so we deliver the premium product our consumers have come to expect from Talenti,” manufacturing is not static. Ingredient availability, quality, cost, changes to the production equipment, and even a conflict involving the Strait of Hormuz — essential for petroleum-based plastic products — can all impact how something is made and what its retail price will be.