Professor's ice cream yearns for attention

Professor Arun Kilara's most famous food creation, Mattus' Ice Cream, has gotten the attention of Time magazine, ice cream manufacturers and now the British Broadcasting Company for its low-fat content and high quality. But one group it can't seem to reach is the public.

After three years of development, Kilara's ice cream was released in 1993, by ice cream entrepreneurs, the Mattus family. Time magazine promptly listed it as one of its products of the year, and it inspired Haagen-Dazs to create its own low-fat ice cream. And yesterday, a BBC documentary team visited the laboratory where Kilara, professor of food science, created it, for a lighthearted story on the product.

The documentary will focus on the Mattus family's difficulties getting the product distributed. As the owners of Mattus' Ice Cream, and former owners of Haagen-Dazs, have learned throughout their career, getting a new ice cream product distributed can be a sticky business.

The Mattus family and Kilara's ice cream will be the subject of a 40-minute BBC documentary that illustrates the ironies of the American ice cream business.

Mattus' Ice Cream is a prime example of this. After the Mattus' first ice cream brand, Haagen-Dazs, was a success, the family sold the business to Pillsbury, which was criticized by Ben & Jerry's for trying to block distribution of their ice cream, said Simon Dickson, producer and director for the program.

Now, the tables have turned, and ice cream giants such as Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs are making it difficult for the Mattus family's latest product to succeed. Despite its appeal, Mattus' Ice Cream cannot reach a wide audience because many ice cream distributors have exclusive contracts with larger companies.

"It's about the toughness of making it in the ice cream business," Dickson said.

Kilara said he is disappointed his creation hasn't reached a large market, but it is now out of his control. He created a revolutionary product -- a type of ice cream that tastes as rich as normal ice cream, but has less than half the fat. With a milk concentrate which has much less fat than normal milk, each serving of his ice cream contains just three grams of fat rather than the typical eight, and 150 calories rather than 250, Kilara said.

In the documentary, a group of seven volunteer students tasted Kilara's ice cream, comparing it to other ice cream brands, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. The most common response: "It was delicious."

For the rest of the documentary, Dickson and his partner, Carol Mynott, will travel to New Jersey and New York and interview members of the Mattus family.

Meanwhile, Kilara will go back to designing new products. Besides Mattus' Ice Cream, he has also designed a frozen soup and a high-protein beverage with the help of graduate students.