Factory Has Scoop on Old-Fashioned Ice Cream : Food: The Hershey Creamery--one of the last independent ice-cream manufacturers--continues to produce timeless dairy treats.

It’s a kid’s fantasy: finding yourself inside an ice-cream factory where every breath is like a swirling icicle and every taste lingers like the longest day of summer.

In a world rapidly being taken over by fancy-schmancy ice creams with foreign names and butterfat contents in the stratosphere, it’s nice to know that a more traditional, comforting place exists. A place where there are 10-cent orange Popsicles, ice-cream sundaes with drizzles of chocolate--a place where every Nutty finds its Buddy.

This is the Hershey Creamery, an ice-cream factory (not related to the Hershey Foods Co.) near the banks of the Susquehanna.

The Hershey Creamery--one of the last remaining independent ice-cream manufacturers in the nation--has been in operation since 1894 and is still selling mostly to mom-and-pop groceries in the Northeast. It has been run by the Holder family since the 1960s and is now run by the Holder brothers, Walter and George Jr.

They were the lucky kids who got to spend the hottest summer days inside the cool factory. Those were the preautomated days, before the gleaming white mixing tanks would swoosh all the basics--milk, sugar and corn syrup--at the touch of a button.

Perhaps you want to stop reading now, especially if you don’t want to know a thing about ice cream, except the next time you’re going to eat some, but consider this: As a nation, we collectively eat almost 1 billion gallons a year. The biggest ice-cream consumers are in the Northeast, followed by Californians.

People are always trying to figure out why we love it so much, why it remains our No. 1 favorite dessert. Self magazine even tried to explain the psychological hook of ice cream, and as you probably guessed, it’s all related to childhood. “When you’re good as a child, the reward is often an ice-cream cone,” said Dean Krahn, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at the University of Michigan.

Some explanations are simpler. Many of us remain little kids; some of us are remembering the sound of bells, first distant and then closer, signaling the arrival--”Hurry up, Mom”--of the ice-cream truck on our corner. Some remember the old-fashioned drugstores and parlors we went to, the kind where they used to give out free ice-cream sundaes on your birthday.

So, if you don’t want to spend a day at the ice-cream factory, if you don’t want your pleasures demystified, then don’t read any further.

But maybe you’d like to come along for the tour at the Hershey’s Creamery, a large modern factory, where the temperatures can dip to 40 degrees below zero.

In a 24-hour, peak summer cycle, the equivalent of 50,000 gallons a day will be produced in the form of 3-gallon containers, half gallons, pints, quarts and two dozen ice-cream novelties, including the most popular--Nutty Buddy cones and chocolate-wafer-covered ice-cream sandwiches.

Inside the factory, almost everywhere you turn, it’s white and the floors are a little wet, a byproduct of the machines churning and spewing.

About 225 people work here during the summer, most of them on the assembly lines, where they watch ice-cream bars come parading by the dozens, toss out the drippy ones, and package everything. Ice cream comes oozing out of Flex-Fill cylinders merging in a perfect balletic turn with cones, nuts, syrup and paper. The smell can be sticky-sweet, like overripe strawberries that have been in an airless room too long. The constant clackety-clack is not unlike 100 manual typewriters going at full speed.

Two women sit opposite each other, between them a short conveyor belt. Orange Squeezeup tubes, wrapped in blue-and-orange silvery paper, come four at a time. Each woman takes her turn. In less than a minute, she will have put a dozen tubes into a box.

Two dozen wooden Popsicle sticks appear on the horizon on the Vita-Line machine. Next, they are covered with orange ice. Then they disappear for a moment. The next time you see them they are covered in paper. They come off the machine like little toy soldiers, then down the conveyor belt they go, where another woman will catch them and stuff them into boxes.

In its simplest form, without giving away any trade secrets, here’s how the process works every day during the peak season: At 3 p.m. each day, the raw ingredients are brought by trucks and poured into multistory silos. For the day’s production, the factory will need 100,000 pounds of cream, 100,000 pounds of skim condensed milk, 50,000 pounds of liquid cane sugar and 50,000 pounds of liquid corn sugar.

Tubes from the silos lead into the mixing areas where, at 7 p.m., the ingredients--including 500,000 gallons of water--are blended, pasteurized and homogenized, stabilized and emulsified in 500-gallon batches, containing varying percentages of the products. They are then transferred to 20 holding containers. It’s all timed by computer and operated with the touch of a button. This process can handle 4,000 gallons of ice cream an hour. (A product can only be classified as ice cream, according to federal regulations, if it includes at least 10% solid milk products. Most ice cream contains from 10% to 16%, which is considered premium ice cream. Low-fat and frozen dessert products are also made at this plant.)

At 4 a.m. (and later in the process as well), samples from the mixtures pass through the quality control lab, which looks like a well-stocked college lab room. In this lab, four technicians test the mixtures in petri dishes for 24 hours for safety and the products in finished form for flavor and texture. Leftovers are stored in the lab freezer for employees.

At 5 a.m., the mixtures are pumped into the 20 flavor vats. There are more than 100 flavors including butterscotch ripple and peanut butter cup. (Vanilla still corners 25% of the market with chocolate just under 10% and strawberry at 6%.) These flavor vats are swirls of cream and goo. The chocolate syrup for flavoring and dipping is made in another part of the creamery.

After 5 a.m., the production of novelty ice-cream products as well as the packaging of flavors begins. Every day, specific consumer demands are met, from Popsicles to brownie sundaes.

Yes, they’re trying to appeal to sophisticated tastes, said George Holder, the vice president in charge of production. “We just try to keep up with the times. It’s a very competitive business we’re in here.”

Here’s what the factory produces in a 24-hour period:

At the two stick novelty machines in 18-hour shifts: 25,000 dozen orange Popsicles and 25,000 dozen Strawberry Scooter bars.

5,000 orange Squeezeups in an eight-hour shift.

8,000 three-gallon ice-cream cartons.

10,000 dozen Nutty-Buddy cones in an 18-hour shift.

10,000 dozen ice-cream sundae cups.

30,000 half gallons of ice cream in a 10-hour shift.

50,000 pints of ice cream.

After the ice cream is packaged, it is then sent for two hours through the hardening tunnel--a long passageway--that is kept at 40 degrees below zero. After that, the ice cream is stored in an enormous hardening room kept at 20 degrees below zero.

Soon the trucks will come and take the finished product away. And somewhere, some kid is clutching a few quarters and is ready to take a walk to the corner.