By NAOHIRO TAKIGAWA/ Staff Writer
July 14, 2022 at 08:00 JST
A dessert pizza topped with ZuT ice cream (Provided by Nakasho Co.)
FUKUCHIYAMA, Kyoto Prefecture--A general food trading house here developed a melt-resistant ice cream for people with dysphagia, a swallowing disorder that slows down their eating process.
The ice cream, named ZuT, will maintain its form for up to an hour in a room at 35 degrees.
Yuka Fujii, a certified nutritionist at Nakasho Co., came up with the idea after hearing about dysphagia from client hospitals and nursing-care homes.
“Dysphagia patients can take in calories by consuming ice cream that melts in the mouth, but ice cream will melt while they are eating their meals,” a health care worker told Fujii.
Patients with dysphagia need more time to eat their meals. So ordinary ice cream is usually reduced to liquid form before they can finish the dessert.
Fujii suggested her company create a frozen sweet that does not melt quickly.
In June, Nakasho started offering ZuT in three flavors of milk, chocolate and strawberry through the Rakuten online shopping mall.
“Healthy people will also find our product tasty, and I hope they will learn about and enjoy the difficult-to-melt ice cream,” Fujii said.
A set of six 90-milliliter cups carries a price tag of 5,000 yen ($36), including tax but excluding delivery fee.
The price is rather high partly because the product contains Jersey milk produced at Tango Jersey Farm’s Dairy Kitchen Sora in Kyotango, Kyoto Prefecture, along with other local ingredients, the company said.
Ice cream becomes soft when higher temperatures separate the milk fat, water and air bubbles. ZuT slows down the separation and melting process by using strawberry-derived polyphenol and a special ingredient from seaweed.
The heightened viscosity of seaweed-mixed milk made it tougher to blend the ingredients together. Nakasho said it overcame the challenge through trial-and-error efforts on mixing the ingredients with the milk’s temperature kept high.
“We will establish a mass-production system to lower the price so that more dysphagia patients can try it,” Fujii said.
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