EGN NEWS DESK
Reported from ice-cream retailers and frozen-food aisles in Boulder, Colo.
Banana pudding, chocolate fudge brownie, salted caramel, Cherry Garcia, Dr Pepper Float and dozens of different flavors packed the ice-cream freezer at a neighborhood Safeway. Robin Sawyer, one latest Sunday afternoon, hunted for her private favourite, black raspberry chocolate chunk.
Her husband, Mark, 68, has lengthy been a fan of chocolate chip, however he doesn’t see it round a lot anymore.
“Here it’s!” Ms. Sawyer, 66, mentioned to him, kneeling in entrance of the Haagen-Dazs part. “In the small container.” Then she corrected herself: “Oh, that’s chocolate chocolate chip.”
Vanilla chocolate chip ice cream, as soon as a staple of the ice cream world and one of many prime sellers of all time, has fallen out of favor. The taste can nonetheless be discovered (a more in-depth inspection of the Safeway aisle on this college mountain city revealed pints of Baskin Robbins’s chocolate chip), however it has been dropping floor to flavors with extra stuff, like cookies and cream and chocolate chip cookie dough.
Those two flavors are among the many nation’s prime 5 finest sellers, in response to the International Dairy Foods Association, whereas chocolate chip not makes the highest 10. It is now offered solely in chosen markets or at sure occasions of the 12 months, in response to main producers.
“Chocolate chip was a taste we produced consistently,” mentioned Christine Crowley, communications specialist for Babcock Dairy Plant, which has 75 years of ice-cream making underneath its belt, in Madison, Wis. Chocolate chip hasn’t been a staple for a decade, she mentioned: “Now it’s seasonal.”
Meaning, made for summer season solely. Even then, chocolate chip just isn’t such a sizzling vendor. Last summer season, Babcock took 4 and a half months to promote by means of the 110 gallons of chocolate chip it had made, in comparison with three months for a similar quantity of chocolate chip cookie dough. “It’s form of not truthful,” Ms. Crowley mentioned of the comparability. “We inventory chocolate chip cookie dough all 12 months,” giving it such an edge that it’s “creeping up on vanilla” in recognition.
