I Taste-Tested And Ranked 8 Of The Most Popular Ice Cream Brands — One, Quite Frankly, Blew Me Away
I hate to break it to ya, but there’s a 99% chance you’re buying the wrong brand of ice cream.
Whether it’s a gruelingly hot summer afternoon or a frigid, wintery day, I’m a firm believer that there’s no best season to enjoy a cup or cone (or entire pint) of ice cream. Every season is ice cream season, folks.🍦
We all have our preferences, but when it really comes down to it, I’ve never met an ice cream that didn’t bring me joy. That said, I’m also entirely guilty of tending just to buy whatever ice cream is on sale. So I decided to do myself (and all of you) a favor: I taste-tested the most popular ice cream brands to determine the best of the best, and though my stomach is still pretty mad at me, the results were absolutely worth it.
While pondering ice cream flavors to test, I struggled more than I usually do. Other products I’ve taste-tested, like marinara sauce and boxed mac ‘n’ cheese, are pretty limited in their flavor offerings…but ice cream flavors? The limit does not exist. Vanilla? Too boring. Chocolate? Way too polarizing. And when we start to enter the world of ice cream flavors with mix-ins, things can get pretty wild.
All roads and schools of thought led me back to one flavor in particular, which just so happens to be my personal favorite: cookies ‘n’ cream. Why cookies ‘n’ cream? I’ve got two reasons in particular:
• The vast majority of ice cream brands out there use a simple vanilla base for their cookies ‘n’ creams, so I figured that this flavor would be a solid indicator of the overall quality of the vanilla ice cream itself — how smooth and creamy it is, its general sweetness level, and if it delivers in the flavor department.
• The Oreo-adjacent chocolate cookies are also a relatively straightforward mix-in — no swirls of anything and nothing complicated. To that end, I concluded that the individual flavors of the various elements would be easy to distinguish from one another, and I also realized that cookies ‘n’ cream would likely be a great barometer for how much each brand gives you when it comes to the mix-ins. Let’s be real: If they’re generous with their chocolate cookies, they’re probably not going to rip you off on their cookie dough or cake batter or chocolate chips.
So, with cookies ‘n’ cream in mind, I did my research and landed on eight of the most popular brands I could find, making sure to gather varieties in three distinct categories. First up, the widely available standards:
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