AMES, Iowa -- For months, Iowa State's Dairy Science Club has been working on a limited-edition ice cream flavor for the university's 150th birthday kickoff on Saturday. They concocted "Cyclone Celebration," a cake-batter flavored ice cream with cardinal and gold sprinkles, and prepared thousands of servings in time for Veishea Saturday.
Unfortunately, the Dairy Science Club has had to make a substitution. They will instead serve vanilla ice cream with cardinal and gold sprinkles in their tent southeast of Beardshear Hall, and the usual lineup of flavors (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, Oreo and Snickers) in Kildee Hall.
The change came about on Friday after City of Ames Sanitarian Kevin Anderson alerted ISU officials to a 2005 bulletin from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA bulletin indicates that, in the summer of 2005, ice cream containing cake mix sickened people in eight states. That ice cream was prepared in food service establishments.
Maynard Hogberg, professor and chair of animal science and an advisor to the Dairy Science Club, said he feels confident about the safety of ISU's cake-batter ice cream -- so confident that he'd had some just today. But to be absolutely safe, the students won't serve that flavor.
"This is simply a case of taking every precautionary measure we can," Hogberg said. "We decided it was in everyone's best interests not to make that flavor available."
Dairy Science Club members have been successfully making and selling ice cream for years at Iowa State. It's produced in a federally inspected lab, and students carefully adhere to all food safety guidelines. The cake batter ice cream they had planned to serve contained no eggs. The ice cream is pasteurized. It was tested in ISU's food safety lab and no problems were found.
The issue, Hogberg says, is that cake mix is not a ready-to-eat product. Incorporating that into a ready-to-eat product, such as ice cream, is something the FDA considers a food safety risk.
"It's one of those very honest mistakes," Hogberg said. "The students thought they were doing everything right. But as a public institution with a very strong food safety program, I think we are doing the right thing by not making cake batter ice cream available. It will be disposed of."
Students like Lorilee Schultz, one of the lead ice cream makers, hopes that Veishea goers won't be too disappointed by the substitution of vanilla with cardinal and gold sprinkles. She and her fellow students plan to spend all of Friday night making 2,000 servings of the vanilla version. And the 2,500 servings of chocolate, plain vanilla, strawberry, Oreo and Snickers are all ready to go.
"There's a giant birthday cake in Beardshear -- we want to make sure people still know there's plenty of ice cream to go with it. All that's changed is one flavor. Please come out and see us," Schultz said.
Ice cream is $2 a cup; proceeds go toward scholarships.