We consult culinary professionals around the world

We stick to one specialty: helping you make the best product possible.

Our most in-demand expertise is developing ice cream formulas for artisanal shops and pastry kitchens.

We solve problems, improve quality, adapt formulas for specific challenges, and offer customized versions of ideas from our blog.

There are many consultants who will advise you on business plans, equipment maintenance, financing, hiring. If you’re looking for these services, we can help point you to someone. If you’re trying to make world-class ice cream, you’re in the right place.

See how we’re different:

This chocolate ice cream recipe is published by a prominent consultancy.

This is ours.

The Underbelly formula is custom-made around the chocolate; it doesn’t use a one-size-fits-all base.
It’s egg-free, as chocolate formulas should be.
It uses blends of sugars, dairy and stabilizers specifically designed for the textural challenges of cocoa butter.
It’s calculated precisely to maximize both texture and vibrant flavor release.
It pushes the limits of reasonable chocolate concentration in ice cream.
We perfected this formula during 15 trials, using the best single-origin chocolates and cocoas available.

This formula represents our vision of perfection. We share it freely. What we offer as consultants is a scientific process to bring YOUR vision to perfection.

If you’re thinking that not every market can support this level of ice cream (or this level of anything), you’re absolutely right. Our approach is designed primarily for chefs at the kinds of restaurant where the wine list pays the bills. Nevertheless, our clients have often been ice cream shops who insist on making their product by hand, constructing recipes on a per-flavor basis for customers seeking something special.

We’re available for big and small projects, and would love to hear from you.

Our clients include

A dairy farm in Killarney, Ireland, that needed to formulate farm stand ice cream from its own milk and cream
An artisanal scoop shop in Kuwait City that needed to improve its ice cream quality
A pastry chef in Kansas who needed help with an artisanal soft-serve base
An ice cream manufacturer in Hawaii that wanted to launch a non-dairy line
A national manufacturer that wanted to introduce an innovative new line of non-dairy and all-natural frozen desserts
A liquid nitrogen-based ice cream shop in New York that needed high-quality recipes created from scratch
An artisanal scoop shop in Tblisi, Georgia, that needed help with its all-natural base formula
A high-end restaurant in Brașov, Romania that needed help with its frozen dessert quality
An artisanal scoop shop in San Francisco, that needed to reformulate its base recipe when its favorite stabilizer was discontinued

I highly recommend Underbelly’s consulting services! Before I’ve opened my ice cream shop I finished courses in Italy and the US. The courses were great and they gave me a lot of theoretical knowledge but when I was back I’ve realized that theory is not enough to make ice cream. I tried my best for weeks but something went wrong. That was when I came across with Underbelly’s blog and contacted them. Tons of helpful information, advice on recipe balancing, igredients and flavors, new ideas and what’s more important – huge support. I can hardly express how grateful I am and what a big role this support and consulting played in my business! Thank you so much and all the best.

—Nata Shchinska
The Cone Culture, Tbilisi, Georgia

How do we do it?

After exhausting all the widely available ice cream knowledge, we worked with top pastry chefs to learn their insights. We then moved on to the professional literature, and then to the peer-reviewed food science literature. To solve some of the remaining mysteries, we talked to the world’s top ice cream science luminaries, including Dr. Cesar Vega, Dr. Douglas Goff, and Dr. Michael Mullan. When questions remained, we did our own experiments.

There can be a long path between theory and practice, especially in such a technically complex product. We made it navigable by encoding our knowledge (including pages of mind-numbing equations) into custom software. There’s plenty of commercially available software for calculating ice cream recipes, but none of it encoded all the knowledge we’d been uncovering. So we put on our math and coding hats and went to work.

One of our custom ice cream mix calculators. It allows us to interactively design a recipe with precise flavor and texture qualities, with a wide range of ingredients. This version uses advanced math for estimating hardness at any serving temperature, including a 4th-order polynomial regression analysis. We have also devised a method for estimating the hardening potential of ingredients like cocoa butter and nut oils. We developed these unique tools in consultation with dairy scientists in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland. They don’t teach this in culinary school!

In the time it used to take us to calculate a single formula by hand, we can now work through dozens of iterations. We can can quickly build a unique recipe with the exact qualities you want.

We’ve had request like, “We want a dense texture like Ben & Jerry’s, but with a smoother, longer melt, and a less oily mouth feel. We have gum arabic and guar, but no locust bean gum or carrageenan. Also, we can only get goat milk.” We’re happy to work with this! We probably won’t get it perfect with the first draft, but we will get very close. And we know how to use your feedback to get closer.