When Bill Sciturro retired from a 17-year career in healthcare, he found himself wanting to return to his first love: ice cream. As a teenager in the 1980s, a young Sciturro worked for a mom-and-pop ice cream shop called Dear Hearts in Warwick, RI. For eight years he scooped, restocked and sold ice cream.
“I loved that job. I fell in love with ice cream because it makes people happy. Who is unhappy when they are getting ice cream? No one,” Sciturro says while talking to a UConn Journalism class.
After retiring in 2007, Sciturro applied for a part time job at the University of Connecticut Creamery. His job: making ice-cream for the UConn Dairy Bar. However, after working at the Creamery for only a short time, the 2008 recession hit. The manager quit and the Creamery could not fire Sciturro, so he kept working, making it his mission to learn everything there was to know about ice-cream.
He taught himself the entire system and became an expert in how each machine in the Creamery worked. When the recession ended and the position for manager opened back up, Sciturro applied for the job.
Sciturro is the Creamery manager to this day, and as he stands in front of a glass window looking into the Creamery explaining its mechanics to the class, his knowledge and passion for ice cream is still evident.
He talked about how each ice cream flavor is created and made, what his responsibilities are as manager and what the mechanics are of making enough ice cream during different times of the year.
“When creating a new ice cream flavor, we start with what’s popular and see what we want to make based on that,” he said. “We make five small batches of the flavor and let people try them. Based on people’s reactions, we decide if we want to make it a flavor.”
He explained that the Dairy Bar only serves 24 flavors at a time, and to add new ones they have to remove others.
“Sometimes when we add specialty limited flavors, they become so popular that we make them permanent flavors,” he said. “Salted Caramel Crunch was originally made just as a limited flavor, but it became so popular that it is now a permanent flavor on the menu.”
As he talks, Sciturro wears a grey shirt, blue pants, brown rubber boots and a hair net and stands in front of a glass window that looks into the Creamery. Through the window, a dozen grey machines manned by student workers can be seen churning away ice cream.
The flavor being made on this day? Mango Italian Ice.As the students watch employees guide the mango ice into large tubs, Sciturro explains that his duties as manager have become more business oriented over the years, but in turn, he has become focused on preventing food waste.
Food waste has been a major problem according to the U.S Department of Agriculture, with food waste making up 30-40 percent of the food supply. According to Sciturro, the UConn Creamery acknowledges and is working to prevent this in the ice cream production. They are doing this by working with a food scientist at UConn to “review products individually to determine whether the product has a real food spoilage risk or whether the best-by or exp. date is purely a business decision that has no impact on food safety,” according to Sciturro.
The creamery also tries to reduce food waste by working to “use up ingredients before they get close to any best buy dates or expiration dates to avoid having to evaluate anything.”
After a long day of making ice cream, Creamery workers find another way to stop waste. Once the ice cream batch is done for the day, the workers get to eat whatever is left in the tubes.
Sciturro tells the journalism class this, just as the workers behind the class begin to close down operations for the day.
They clean equipment and clear the excess ice cream in the tubes into a pale. Then each worker gathers around with a cup and a spoon and gathers to share the leftover ice cream.
“We don’t get to take ice-cream home for free, but we do get to do that at the end of every shift and everybody looks forward to it,” Sciturro said.