Kathryn Coldren

Ezra's Morning Cup team describes its marketing plan Nov. 27.

Here's the scoop: Paying tribute to the new Cornell NYC Tech campus, two groups of Cornell students won a class ice cream contest for their flavors -- Big Red Apple and Ezra's Morning Cup.

The traditional end-of-the-year ice cream development-contest is the final project in the introductory food science class. Instructor Alicia Orta-Ramirez divided the class into five teams and asked that this semester's flavors be worthy of the Cornell NYC Tech campus.

For the first time, two flavors tied for first place. Big Red Apple ice cream screams vanilla-base with apple flavoring, touches of cinnamon sprinkles, caramel swirl and crunchy bits of graham cracker.

In honor of the city that never sleeps, Ezra's Morning Cup is a coffee-flavored ice cream named for the university's namesake, Ezra Cornell. This flavors awakens a vanilla base with espresso-tint and a white chocolate swirl. The group's target audience, their report said, was "already over-caffeinated college students. And really, who doesn't love coffee?"

The other teams' flavors were Big Red Beary Pi, Red Apple Pi and C++ (with tropical flavors).

Each team performed market research and decided which flavors likely would be popular. The class learned technical aspects of commercial ice-cream processing, such as how much milk-fat content would be acceptable to the discerning palate, how much overrun (air content) to put into it, and how many crunchy tidbits to use -- both to keep manufacturing costs low enough to realize a profit and to keep the ice cream from clogging the machines at the still-under-renovation Cornell food science plant.

The purpose of the class is experiential learning, according to Orta-Ramirez. But one of the covert purposes is to teach students how to work together in diverse groups through the complex process of formulating a likeable ice cream.

Later this spring, Big Red Apple and Ezra's Morning Cup ice creams will be sold in Ithaca at the newly constructed Cornell Dairy Bar on campus.