Move over, Muscadine Ripple—to make room on the freezer shelf for two new Mississippi State-borne ice cream flavors.
Blueberry and sweet potato plan to join MSU’s 11 other palette-pleasing ice cream flavors in 2026 at the MAFES Sales Store, also the home of famous MSU cheese.
Shecoya White, associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Nutrition and Health Promotion, and her students have been busy “cooking up” the new formulations to turn the state’s official fruit and vegetable into churnable ice cream. Their efforts have resulted in the development and testing of 15 to 20 variations of each flavor in her lab.
“This was an incredible opportunity to work on value-added products to meet stakeholders’ needs,” White said. “It also gave my students hands-on experience to apply their classroom knowledge to a real-world research project.”
White, also a scientist with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, or MAFES, worked alongside graduate students Jhennys Paola Becerra Ossa and Kenisha Gordon and students from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, Krystell Charles, Cerissa Cooley and Morgan Mosby.
(Video by Mary Kathryn Kight)
While the sweet potato-flavored ice cream may be unconventional, White and her team put the product in front of a stakeholder sensory panel in the north Mississippi town of Vardaman, known as “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World.” Judging was based on qualities like visual appeal, aroma, flavor, creaminess and texture.
Panel member and third-generation sweet potato farmer Caleb Englert said he’s enthusiastic about a new opportunity for the storage root.
“It’s great for producers and consumers when a new sweet potato product is introduced to the market,” Englert said, also president of the Mississippi Sweet Potato Council. “They are versatile, so it’s exciting to have this new addition to MSU ice cream.”
White then held an on-campus event with 120 participants and another sensory panel of producers and MSU employees at Sandy Run Farm in Purvis, owned by blueberry producer Tim Goggans.
As the sweet potato’s statewide production value currently stands at $82 million annually, the botanical blueberry—a summer fruit favorite—contributes $115 million in production value and is a staple of the state’s horticulture industry.
“Blueberries are a delicious, healthy fruit full of antioxidants,” said Goggans, also a third-generation farmer. “We farmers have our product and Mississippi State has the scientists and the technology, so there are opportunities to work together, test new ideas and get high-quality, locally made products into the hands of consumers.”
This summer, White’s team is working in the university’s processing plant to produce dairy-based and plant-based formulas. To White’s surprise, participants in all testing events overwhelmingly preferred the plant-based samples of both sweet potato and blueberry—although testers were not aware it was dairy-free. The new flavors, along with a new dairy-free Muscadine Ripple, will be sold on campus once the formulations are finalized and ready for production.
“Formulating a batch of ice cream is an exact science that requires precise preparation, timing and procedure, and you have to maintain quality control,” White said. “But consumer feedback is equally valuable to the work we do in the lab. If they don’t like it, we must go back to the drawing board.”