No birthday celebration is complete without cake and ice cream, and ahead of its 150th birthday, BYU has the ice cream covered.
BYU was founded on Oct. 16, 1875 as Brigham Young Academy, and will officially turn 150 on Thursday. To celebrate its sesquicentennial, BYU created a new ice cream flavor: 150 Swirl.
The thorough process to create the new flavor, which features white chocolate brownie and blue mint ice creams, started at the end of 2024.
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“We take it seriously coming up with flavors. We really do,” BYU executive chef John McDonald told the Deseret News.
A survey of flavors and ideas was sent to “a couple hundred” BYU students, faculty and staff, according to McDonald.
Over the course of two to three months, BYU’s Culinary Support staff took the most popular ideas from the survey and turned them into roughly 12 flavors of ice cream. As part of the process, they had to find the right sources for the ingredients — the right chocolate, the right banana, etc.
The ice creams were then tested by the students that work at the Culinary Support Center. Following the testing, some of the flavors were “revamped,” McDonald said.
“Sometimes they’re a bust though,” McDonald said of creating flavors. “Sometimes it translates from a small batch, and when you blow it up, it doesn’t work the way you expect. The flavors aren’t quite the same. Inclusions don’t mix up the same, so we have to kind of go back to the drawing board.”
After the testing and revamping, the flavors were presented to a committee of 20 students and department chairs, who had to rank the flavors.
Once narrowed down to five flavors, the committee met again, and though there were strong contenders, the committee wasn’t sold yet. They wanted “something that kind of screams BYU,” according to McDonald.
While driving home one day, McDonald wracked his brain for what the flavor could be. Then, he had the idea to make a swirl ice cream, something BYU had never done.
“Obviously, our mint brownie is huge, so I decided that we would do a play on that with white chocolate ice cream and a blue mint was the idea,” McDonald said. “And then, obviously, cookies are huge. We use brownie pieces and caramel pieces as well and tie that all together.”
The committee loved it. They had finally found the right flavor.
Some of the strong contenders from the committee’s ranking could make their way to the creamery in the future, McDonald said, including Huckleberry Chocolate Truffle and Cougar Tail ice creams.
Inside BYU’s ice cream production
Once 150 Swirl was finalized, it came time for production, which takes place in the BYU Culinary Support Center, where all of BYU Creamery’s ice cream is produced.
With two barrels where the ice cream freezes, the Culinary Support Center could run 150 gallons of mix and produce 300 gallons of ice cream per hour.
“We don’t usually run it that fast. The inclusions can’t keep up with it, and we want lots of candy in it,” Benjamin Boone, the dairy manager, said.
In a day, the Culinary Support Center runs 600 to 800 gallons of mix which becomes about 1,500 gallons of ice cream.
They do that four times a week, producing a weekly total between 4,500 and 7,000 gallons.
Graham Canyon is the No. 1 flavor “by a huge amount,” according to Boone. Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough round out the top three.
“They started Graham Canyon in 2011, and every year (it’s) just a little more popular,” Boone said.
Batches of most flavors are produced every three to four weeks at the Culinary Support Center, but because of their popularity, Graham Canyon, Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough are made more often.
Graham Canyon is made three or four times in a month, and Cookies and Cream and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough are made two to three times in a month.
“When we started Graham Canyon, it was maybe in the top 10, but it wasn’t one of our top flavors,” McDonald said.
The executive chef added that “over time, people kind of gravitate to certain flavors based on popularity,” which is what they’ve seen with Graham Canyon.
“But I think you never know until you run them a long period of time. But we do get a lot of flavors that people request when they go away and then they bring them back and they get maybe a little more popular,” McDonald said.
Once the ice cream is produced and packaged, it leaves the Culinary Support Center and is made available to consumers at any Creamery location.
Reactions to BYU’s 150 Swirl
Tanner Shupe, a pre-business student at BYU, stopped by the Creamery on Ninth with friends on Wednesday and tried the new 150 Swirl for the first time.
“I thought it was really good,” Shupe said. “I like the mint and the cookie dough and the brownie. Those are all flavors I really like, and so it’s just a good combination of all of them.”
Shupe enjoyed it enough that he would order it again.
The flavor is only available now through next year. While Shupe appreciates the novelty of the flavor, he thinks it could be a good option to bring back in the future.
“I mean, it is BYU Blue, so it has that aspect of it that they could totally use for something else if they did bring it back. But I do like the novelty of it. It adds just kind of like an exclusivity aspect to it,” he said.
Shupe added, “I do think it’s a good representation of BYU showing the blue and the white, and, I mean, it tastes good just like BYU’s good.”
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