Former King Edward VI Five Ways pupil Matthew Macdonald (2004-11), pictured here in one of Unilver's industrial freezers at their Research and Development Centre, has recently been involved in the creation of two new flavours on Magnum ice cream, coming to a supermarket near you sometime soon.
Matt writes: "I am on a Research and Development leadership scheme with Unilever (producer of brands such as Persil, Hellmann’s, Dove and Lynx) which involves working in rotations in a variety of different departments across the business.
"During the past 3 years, I have developed a variety of consumer goods from toothpastes and fabric conditioners to moisturisers and shampoos. One of the product lines which I designed has just been launched: two new flavours of Magnum Ice Cream (pictured below).
"We have created two products: Magnum Double Sunlover and Magnum Double Starchaser with the theme of flavours for summer. Magnum Double Sunlover contains coconut ice cream in a white chocolate shell, swirled through with mango and passionfruit sauce whilst Magnum Double Starchaser contains popcorn flavour ice cream, milk chocolate and toffee sauce.
Both products have just been launched in all major retailers across Europe and Australia.
I started the development process at Unilever’s global ice cream R&D centre in Bedfordshire, conducting laboratory testing on new flavours of ice cream and sauces and making hand-made prototypes. My next few months were spent refining the recipe and scaling up the production process, which culminated in a successful factory trial in Hungary, which I also oversaw. My months of labour were rewarded with a double thumbs-up from our plant manager as the freshly made Magnums whizzed down the line.
There is a phenomenal amount of cutting-edge science and engineering which goes into these products, as well as a lot of work to make sure ingredients like the cocoa in the chocolate are responsibly sourced, and that the product meets targets which limit sugar and calorie content. This complex network of tasks all sat within the remit of R&D so to get to a point where there are now products on supermarket shelves which can be enjoyed by (literally) millions of people, has been a proud moment for me".
