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5. Store Brand… If In A Literal Penny Pinch
Wakefern Food Corp is the private label manufacturer for five regional supermarkets on the Eastern seaboard. Though Shop Rite’s brand Bowl & Basket is still regionally specific, it’s worth putting this brand’s ice cream to the test. Many grocery stores have sales on store-brand items, so it’s good to know if pinching pennies is worth it or not.
Taste: The vanilla flavor is present, but it comes on strong and goes very quickly. Looking at the milk fat content it’s easy to see why this would happen, fats stick to the tongue and allow the vanilla flavor to settle into the taste receptors of the tongue. Without enough cream or fat to keep the flavor lingering, the flavor quickly disappears.
Texture: Straight out of the freezer, it was sort of brittle, but as it softened up, it got easier to handle and had a smooth texture. However, the softened state did not compensate for the overall crystalized, grainy texture.
Richness: This was the lightest of the ice creams, however, it didn’t have any hefty denseness.
Price: The price was the lowest of them all, pricing at $2.50 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
4. Breyers… If You Don’t Like It Creamy
The green leaf of the Breyer logo hung over many 20th-century ice cream stores and was a ubiquitous sign of creamy fresh Philadelphia-made ice cream. Now the ice cream has gone through some PR problems, like being sued for not actually having vanilla beans in their vanilla bean ice cream, but they’ve pivoted and tried to go back to simpler ingredients, just like in the beginning.
Taste: It has a consistent vanilla flavor, however, it is not the most complex vanilla flavor, and doesn’t have those signature floral notes of vanilla. Similar to Friendly’s ice cream, you only taste the vanilla after the cream.
Texture: The texture of this ice cream was the oddest of the brands. Initially, the texture was pliable and super easy to scoop out, but as it softened it got a weird, glue-like gloopy thickness. As we ate it more, the creaminess turned more into wateriness. There was only a small window of time when the texture tasted right.
Richness: This ice cream was neither very creamy nor very light. It was one of the lighter tasting ice creams, which made it very easy to eat a lot of it without much thought but when you tasted it, it tasted more like ice milk than ice cream. If you want to make an ice cream cake or an ice cream pie, it’s a good ice cream to use.
Price: Moderate. Depending on the store it ranged from $4.99 to $5.19 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
3. Friendly’s… Most Affordable Creamy Ice Cream
Two brothers in Massachusetts saw an opportunity during America’s toughest downturn and opened a restaurant in 1935 selling double scoops of ice cream for an affordable 5 cents. Friendly’s has gone and is still going through many bankruptcies, but this company’s ice cream has been, and remained, in stores since 1989.
Flavor: The first thing you taste is milk followed by a fast flash of vanilla. Though the base has a yolky yellow hue, it doesn’t have a custard flavor. With each spoonful, you got the same sequence of flavors: milk, vanilla, sweet.
Texture: This ice had a creamy middle-of-the-road texture. It always felt a little stiff to lick and to get a spoonful of the ice cream, you had to dig into it!
Richness: It’s easy, almost too easy to eat a lot of this ice cream. Where it doesn’t succeed in vanilla flavor, it passes with easy eat-ability. It’s neither light nor heavy, so this ice cream is addictive to eat!
Price: Similar to Breyers, it was moderately priced, if not a little cheaper ranging anywhere from $3.20 to $5 for 1.5 quarts (48 ounces).
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