What Happened to Talenti?

We eat our way to insightMaybe the vanilla gelato that our taste-testers had panned had been an anomaly. Maybe it was just a bad recipe in a lineup of otherwise perfectly crafted flavors. I pulled together my own panel of four Wirecutter experts to taste a whole lot of Talenti, including two people from our kitchen team who were originally on the vanilla ice cream taste-test panel. We chose nine flavors of Talenti gelato, including the vanilla, and tasted each one, with no knowledge of which brand was which, against a close-matching flavor from a purveyor that we recommend in our guide: Aldi, Häagen-Dazs, or Van Leeuwen. Our testing team scooped samples into coded mugs so that tasters wouldn’t know which brand’s offering was which. Wendy Li/NYT WirecutterMy disappointment with Talenti began right away. I couldn’t finish a single bite of the vanilla. It was strangely sour. One of our taste-testers picked up notes of banana. Another said it seemed as if the vanilla pods were dried out, stale. Ciara told me that since vanilla is such a pure, straightforward flavor, recipe developers have to work extra hard to make it good, because they can’t hide behind chunks, chips, swirls, or other flavors.But several of those other Talenti flavors also didn’t fare well. As the tasting progressed, the word that came up multiple times around Talenti’s offerings was “foamy.” “Gelato should be creamy, luscious, like an ultra-thick frozen pudding,” said kitchen writer Maki Yazawa. “It shouldn’t be foamy and frothy.” The tasting notes were revealing. NYT Wirecutter, source photos by TalentiRemember the Mediterranean Mint I’d championed with my friends years ago? The contents of the jar I tried in June ended up in the trash. The texture was odd. The flavor was off. I have never in my life thrown away ice cream — it’s criminal behavior. And yet. Still, there were a few Talenti flavors we didn’t hate.NYT Wirecutter, source photos by TalentiWhat changed?How did the Talenti of the 2010s that I so admired become this inconsistent and often-disappointing mishmash in the 2020s?It helps to understand how gelato is made. Gelato gets its rich, creamy texture and full-bodied flavor from a long cook and a slow churn. It’s also often lower in fat than ice cream, because it’s primarily made with milk, unlike custard-based ice creams, which are made with cream and eggs. As a result, technically it’s not premium ice cream. In fact, the United States Department of Agriculture has no definition of gelato, and products that have less than 10% milkfat are considered “frozen dairy dessert.”Talenti, therefore, exists in a netherworld.“You can write ‘gelato’ on the container, and you can put any formulation you want inside,” said Dana Cree, author of Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: The Art and Science of the Scoop, in a video interview. “For something marked ‘gelato,’ you can definitely cheap out on the ingredients if you want.”Since the screw-top jars are made of plastic with the ingredients printed right on it, and since plastic never dies, I invited myself over to the homes of a few Talenti obsessives who had been keeping the jars for years. I then cross-referenced the ingredients lists and the best-by dates on the bottoms of the jars. NYT Wirecutter, source photo by Adobe StockOf the seven flavors whose jars I examined, with a range of best-by dates from 2015 to 2027, every single one had at least one change on the ingredients list, and they all added more gums. (The gelato was likely made 12 to 18 months prior to its best-by date, according to Hochschuler.)Traditionally, gelato is eaten shortly after it’s made, more similar to soft serve. The idea of packing gelato in pints and blast-freezing it for transport is anathema to gelato purists, and in fact, when Hochschuler decided to pivot to packed pints, his Argentine business partner balked. Adding gums and stabilizers to the recipe for a grocery-store pint allows it to better handle a freeze-thaw cycle and retain the soft scoopability that sometimes gets lost in the industrial processing. Talenti is not alone in including such things as ingredients. A spokesperson for Unilever told The New York Times back in 2013 that Breyers, a brand known for its “all natural” simple ingredients, had released a line of frozen dairy desserts that included additional gums and corn syrup due to customer feedback on texture.One food scientist I spoke to was perplexed by the additional gums’ appearance in Talenti gelato over the years. The earlier flavors I examined contained carob gum; Talenti later added tara gum and guar gum, and in the case of the vanilla, all three.Pandemic-era supply-chain issues could have been at play. Or maybe the company switched to a new supplier that offered a blend of gums. But still, using multiple gums is unusual, as carob, tara, and guar gums are all in the same family, and premium brands tend to want to have shorter, more recognizable ingredients lists. By contrast, Häagen-Dazs, which was founded in 1960, uses cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, ground vanilla beans, and vanilla extract in its Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. I discovered other Talenti recipe changes, too. The company has had at least three iterations of vanilla-bean gelato. Hochschuler, during his tenure, went to great lengths to procure rare Tahitian vanilla beans. At some point, the company switched to non-varietal beans, likely around 2016 or 2017, judging from angry online reviews (unfortunately, the best-by date on the jar I examined had rubbed away). By 2018, Unilever was using more-common Madagascan beans. The ingredients list also changed from whole vanilla pods to vanilla extract and vanilla seeds. And the most recent recipe uses “vanilla specks,” which are the ground-up husks of vanilla pods, rather than the interior seeds. Our tasting team found the specks off-putting. “They were gritty and bland,” said kitchen writer Maki. “The dried-out husks lack the warm, complex flavor of fresh vanilla beans.”In addition, the Brazilian and Colombian coffee that Talenti uses in its Coffee Chocolate Chip was no longer listed on the jar as fair-trade sometime between the 2023 and 2025 best-by dates. And the company switched from fresh mint to mint “extractives” in the Mediterranean Mint sometime between the 2015 and 2020 best-by dates.While a Unilever spokesperson did not comment on any ingredient changes except to say, “We continue to evaluate and source our ingredients so we deliver the premium product our consumers have come to expect from Talenti,” manufacturing is not static. Ingredient availability, quality, cost, changes to the production equipment, and even a conflict involving the Strait of Hormuz — essential for petroleum-based plastic products — can all impact how something is made and what its retail price will be.And then there’s the impossible-to-open jarsIt’s not just the quality of the gelato that people complain about these days. It’s also the signature plastic jars. Devotees have had to hack, saw, or use heavy force to get the goods inside. Much has been written about this phenomenon, so much so that Talenti itself has acknowledged it as a problem. In May 2025, Talenti, tongue in cheek, gave away a gripper called the Talenti Twist and said it had a full team working on a permanent solution to the issue. Hochschuler told me it’s been a challenge since at least 2007 or 2008. His team would occasionally have to throw away product because the lids were too tight. When Unilever acquired Talenti in 2014, Hochschuler’s team tried to explain the problem to the new parent company. “They were like, ‘Oh, we know. We understand screw-on lids really, really well. We’re experts in this. We own Hellmann’s, and we deal with this all the time. Don’t you worry,’” Hochschuler said. “I’m like, ‘This is different. You gotta understand what happened.’” I was dying to know what happened. The filled jar goes through a blast freezer to help the texture of the gelato retain its creamy mouthfeel and long shelf life. “The product inside is actually expanding outward because it’s freezing, so it caused the lid to slowly turn and tighten,” said Hochschuler. “And it just keeps tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening until it is so tight, it could almost break it.” The plastic itself is also part of the problem. The jar and the lid are made of two different types of polymers. That means they’ll react differently to various temperature conditions and will shrink or expand at different rates, causing the two pieces to work against each other, rather than with each other, said Patricia Santos, a professor in the Rutgers packaging engineering program, who previously worked at Mars and Kraft. I was curious about what was happening between the lid and the thread, so I asked our friends at the industrial CT-scanning company Lumafield (who had helped us dig into the mystery of why Ralph Nader’s pens were drying out). They put several jars of Talenti gelato into their machine, both new and already opened, and compared those pints against other screw-style jars in the grocery store. “The shape of the thread seemed very unusual,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield, who wrote an article on the scan results. It’s sharp — even sharper than threads of other plastic containers you might find. Those pointy threads could be clawing into the lids, further contributing to the issue, which is why Hao said the internet hack of running a butter knife between the jar and the lid should make it easier to open.The folks at Lumafield put a closed Talenti jar and a closed mayonnaise jar through an industrial CT scanner to compare how the lids interacted with their respective bases. The Talenti jar is “a very unusual, definitely very custom design,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield. LumafieldWhen Unilever bought Talenti, it had to invest millions in specialty equipment, including machines to fill the