Due to ongoing construction in the Dairy Bar’s ice cream production facility and problems with some machinery, the beloved UConn landmark is only able to produce 60-70 percent of its usual ice cream output.
However, the Dairy Bar and Facilities are working as fast as they can to get production back to normal.
Professor Daniel Fletcher, head of the Department of Animal Science – which is responsible for the Dairy Bar – says that the construction is related to new equipment being installed that will allow the Dairy Bar to increase its output, so that more UConn ice cream will be available at locations throughout campus. Unfortunately, the construction has meant that the Dairy Bar sometimes has to stop production for a few days at a time to allow the crews to do their work.
“This has created something of an ice cream bottleneck,” Fletcher says. “We had the option of closing the Dairy Bar while construction was going on, but that would have meant no ice cream at all during a time of peak demand. So we decided to work through it as best we could.”
Compounding these problems, unrelated equipment failures have resulted in the disruption of the Dairy Bar’s ability to produce ice cream cakes. Workers are moving as fast as they can to fix this equipment.
Consumers haven’t been pleased.
“People love the ice cream and are very, very unhappy when what they want isn’t available,” says Fletcher. “But it isn’t the staff’s fault; they’re making ice cream as fast as they can, given the constraints they have.”
Fletcher doesn’t yet know when the Dairy Bar will be back to its normal output.
“The Dairy Bar is iconic for the University and for people in the community,” he said. “We want to be operating at 100 percent as badly as they do.”