we've been cheated at the ice cream parlours

Recognise the scoop above? It's an ice cream scoop used mainly at ice-cream parlours. The Zeroll Ice Cream Scoop was designed by Sherman Kelly in 1953 and is still very much in use today. Through the years, many different designs by other manufactureres have become available but their design have hardly deviated from the original by Kelly.

I am a ice-cream junkie myself and after hearing what my design lecturer told us today, ooh......i feel so cheated. The humble plastic or household ice-cream scoop with the lever, readily available and sold at NTUC fairprice, which help to remove the ice-cream ball after it has been scooped from the ice-cream tub actually gives us more ice cream per scoop. As we scoop the ice-cream from the tub, the ice cream is compacted within the scoop into a ball. The ice-cream scoop at the parlours functions in almost the same way except......

Ever wondered how is it the waiteress/waiter at these parlours have it so easy to scoop out the ice-cream from the tub into a nice round ice-cream ball while we struggle at home to even get it ball shape? The Z-scoop is usually placed within a warm bucket of water when not in use and it is designed to retain the heat so as to enable the scoop to slice through the ice-cream smoothly. While this allows us to achieve a very nice ice-cream ball, what is little known is that, on average the ice cream ball scooped by the Z-scoop although creates the same size ice-cream ball as your normal scoop, in actual fact, it contains 20% less ice-cream. This is because scooping ice-cream is made so easy that the ice-cream is not as tightly compacted into a ball thus leaving an air-hole in the center.

Oooh......these ice-cream parlours charge us so much for a single scoop of ice-cream and give us less. Hrumph!