Beach Plum Cornell Tests 'Beach Plum Comfort' Ice Cream Home page Ithaca, N.Y. March 19, 2003 -- What do you get when you swirl together ice cream, chunks of chocolate and jam made from a native American fruit? Beach Plum Comfort®, a new ice cream flavor that had its first trial run today at the Cornell Dairy. "These stressful times give us all the more reason to celebrate this small triumph - our first ice cream product made with beach plums, a promising new crop for the Northeast," says Thomas Whitlow, a plant ecologist in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University. With the help of a grant from the USDA's Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (NESARE), Whitlow and his colleagues have been studying beach plums from seed to harvest to market for three years. Even more American than apple pie, beach plums grow on small wild trees in coastal areas from Maryland to Maine. Native Americans harvested them before the arrival of Europeans, and early settlers were quick to tap the natural bounty that plums offered free for the picking. A small regional jam and jelly industry based mostly on wild-harvested fruit peaked in the '40s. Whitlow, along with research assistant Rick Uva, have been working to rekindle the industry. With help from the University of Massachusetts Extension, they formed a consortium of Cape Cod farmers interested in growing the crop, and established several small orchards where they set up plots to test production practices and observe new, improved beach plum varieties. "This is part of a larger effort to support agriculture in the Northeast by developing production practices and markets for crops that have a niche in our region," says Uva. Developing high-quality, value added products like Beach Plum Comfort® ice cream is one of several innovative steps this collaboration between growers and researchers is taking to promote on-farm entrepreneurship. "Cornell's Dairy Plant is ideally positioned to develop new ice cream flavors and test market them in undergraduate residences and the Cornell Dairy Store," observes Whitlow. "Judging from the reaction of the morning's production crew, it's going to be a hit." Larger image The day starts at 5 a.m. for the ice cream production line crew as they prepare to make the first batch of Beach Plum Comfort® ice cream. Larger image Not all college students sleep until noon. Cornell Food Science Majors helped work the line to be sure that the new flavor would be ready to deliver to Cape Cod beach plum growers to sample and evaluate later in the day. Larger image Small batch processing allows easy experimentation with new flavors as well as different sized packaging. Larger image Before the first containers were wisked off to the wind tunnel freezer for ripening, each received the first Beach Plum Comfort® label. The fancy ones will come later. Larger image Speaking of dessert, Angelica Hammer, administrator in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell, enjoys a simple and tasty beach plum sorbet she created for a recent department function.