Imagine having every flavor of Baskin-Robbins ice cream available to you in your home. The best part? You don’t need a massive freezer to store it all. That dream could be a reality with LG’s latest concept device, a Keurig-style machine that produces single servings of ice cream from tiny pods. The prototype personal ice cream maker is called SnowWhite, and LG showed it off at this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
To be clear, SnowWhite is just a concept and won’t be coming to a kitchen near you quite yet, but LG seems confident that the device may become a reality one day. If it does, you’ll be able to create single servings of basically any frozen dessert that you crave by simply placing a pod in the machine. LG showed off potential pod-based treats that it could produce, including ice cream, gelato, sherbet, sorbet, and frozen yogurt among others.
All of the possible treats are kept in a cup about the size of a Keurig coffee pod. Users would use one pod to determine the texture (the aforementioned choices of ice cream, gelato, etc.) and another pod would be inserted into the device to determine the flavor. Place both pods in the top of the SnowWhite machine in their appropriate slots and it will produce your desired dessert within two to five minutes. A physical dial on SnowWhite as well as a touchscreen display would allow you to tweak the settings as you see fit.
For what it’s worth, the version of SnowWhite that LG took to SXSW was not a working model, so no one has actually seen the concept machine in action — though surely its services would have been welcome in the Texas heat. However, LG likely has the wherewithal to make the concept machine into a reality. LG has already made a pod-based machine for beer rather than ice cream. The company showed off its HomeBrew countertop beer maker at CES earlier this year. Similar technology could be employed to take SnowWhite from a fantasy to a reality that you just might have in your kitchen one day.
