Would you like to eat ice cream at work? It sounds like the best job in the world. But it is not as easy as you think.

Ice cream tasters work for food companies, and many of them are food scientists too. Their job is to check every new ice cream before it goes to the shops. In the morning, the taster looks at the plan for the day. There are many samples to test. Before work, she does not drink coffee, she does not eat spicy food and she does not use chewing gum, because all these things change the taste in your mouth.

Then the tasting starts. The samples do not have names, only numbers, so the taster does not know which company or which recipe she is testing. This is important. Now she cannot have a favourite — she can only be honest. First she looks at the ice cream. Is the colour good? Does it look soft and nice? If it looks bad, the rest does not matter.

Then something strange happens: she does not taste it immediately. Ice cream from the freezer is very cold, and very cold food makes your tongue numb. So she waits a few minutes, until the ice cream is a little warmer. Now she takes a spoon — a gold spoon. Why gold? Because a plastic or wooden spoon leaves a small taste in your mouth, and that taste changes the ice cream. Gold leaves nothing.

She puts the ice cream on her tongue, moves it around her mouth and smells it. And then she spits it out. She does not swallow it, because tasters try many samples every day. One famous taster tried sixty flavours a day, and nobody can eat sixty ice creams. So they taste, and then they spit.

Taste is not the only thing. The taster also checks how the ice cream feels in the mouth. Good ice cream is soft and creamy. Sometimes there are small pieces of ice in it, and then it feels rough — that is a problem. She also checks how fast it melts. After each sample, she writes notes and gives points. Then she drinks some water and eats a plain cracker to clean her mouth for the next ice cream. She must take breaks too, because after many samples your tongue gets tired and everything tastes the same.

In the afternoon, the tasters sit together and compare their notes. Too sweet? Too hard? Not creamy enough? Then the team changes the recipe, makes a new sample and tests it again. Sometimes they do this many times before the ice cream is right. One American taster, John Harrison, did this job for thirty years. He could taste the difference between 12% and 11.5% milk fat, and his company thought his tongue was so important that they insured his taste buds for one million dollars.

So it is a sweet job, but it is still a job. You need training, patience and a lot of attention. It is not about choosing your favourite flavour. It is about making sure that every spoonful is right.