PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island Hospital employees noticed something new in their cafeteria when they arrived at work on Friday: a MooBella Inc. Ice Creamery.
The machine at the hospital is the first one Taunton-based MooBella has installed in Rhode Island, David Peters, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, told Providence Business News on Friday. “It’s really exciting,” he said.
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The Ice Creamery is a refrigerator-size machine that makes a scoop of instant ice cream – traditional hard ice cream, not soft-serve – in about 40 seconds. MooBella began rolling out the machines, which have been in development for nearly two decades, late last year.
It works like this: Customers type their orders on an LCD touch-screen in the front of the Ice Creamery, choosing regular or low-fat ice cream; one of 12 flavors; and one of three mix-ins, like chocolate chips. Then they open a small door in the machine and stick in an empty cup, which a robotic arm lifts into the machine.
Inside, an aseptic bag of room-temperature milk is punctured and the contents are mixed with the designated flavor. That liquid mixture gets blasted with air and flash-frozen, and within 40 seconds, voilà – the robotic arm lowers a 4.5-ounce cup of fresh ice cream.
Employees, patients and visitors at Rhode Island Hospital, which is owned by Lifespan Corp., should be able to start buying ice cream from the machine by early next week, once employees are trained on how to maintain it, Peters said.
MooBella has been installing one or two Ice Creameries a week, with about nine up and running in Massachusetts so far, Peters said. The company is on track to have 100 machines installed by the end of June, he added.
MooBella plans to install more machines in Rhode Island, according to Peters, though he could not say where they will be located. Connecticut and New York will get their first machines sometime in the next few weeks.
Additional information is available at moobella.com.
