21 Vegan Ice Cream Brands, Ranked Worst To Best

The increased demand for vegan and dairy-free food options has prompted many companies to innovate and offer ice creams. Up until only a few years ago, you wouldn't have been able to find a single dairy-free ice cream at your local scoop shop or in the frozen dessert aisle of your grocery store. Now, almost every fruity, confectionary, and chocolate ice cream comes with a vegan option. Brands use numerous bases to make vegan ice cream, including oat milk, almond milk, coconut milk, and more niche ingredients like avocados or sunflower butter. This broadens the opportunity for folks with dairy sensitivities or dietary restrictions and other allergies to enjoy a sweet frozen treat.

We've brought together some of grocery stores' most popular vegan ice cream brands. Our standards for rating these products are based on the flavor and ingredient availability, as well as the overall product taste and texture.

Vegans can now hoard the tiny plastic Talenti jars in their cabinets! Besides its mango and raspberry sorbet, Talenti offers several dairy-free gelato flavors and layered desserts. But before you get too close, check the ingredient list. Because although its gelato and layered gelato desserts are made without dairy, they do contain egg. Cue the sighs of disappointment.

The only dairy-free and vegan options Talenti has are the Alphonso mango and Roman raspberry sorbetto in pops and pints. Several users have complained that the Roman raspberry pops taste borderline fermented, while others complain that both flavors are sickeningly sweet, even for a dessert. While we're glad to have at least a few options from Talenti, we're disappointed that there aren't any creamy gelatos for us to enjoy.

If you purchase ice cream from Wonderlab, you can be sure there is a commitment to sustainable and ethical business practices. The brand chose to use hemp and oat for its ice cream base because of its drought tolerance, carbon capture rates, and its potential to make velvety, creamy ice cream.

The offerings for this brand are scant and only include four flavors: smooth coffee, chocolate mint chip, banana cinnamon date swirl, and chocolate raspberry swirl. However, we give this brand props for offering more than just the dull chocolate and vanilla combo. Sourcing this ice cream is difficult because it is only available in some specialty grocers rather than major grocery stores, meaning fewer folks enjoy its unctuous texture and fun flavors.

Brave Robot is one brand that has been experimenting with adding animal-free whey to its products. The company uses precise fermentation to create milk proteins from microflora, like yeast and plants, to make this whey. No animal is involved in the process, and the resulting ice cream has the same soft, buttery texture as dairy-based ice cream. However, the drawback to this innovative technology is that individuals with milk allergies cannot eat this ice cream.

The brand offers eleven ice cream pints in flavors like buttery pecan, white raspberry truffle, and chocolate cherry brownie. In addition, a collaboration with COOLHAUS brought mint chocolate chip and chocolate chip cookie dough sandwiches to the brand's lineup. We found some of the brand's pints relatively easy to find but could not locate any of the "sammies" at our local grocery store.

Earth Grown is Aldi's in-house natural foods brand. For being such a small retailer, Aldi offers a competitive range of frozen dessert products in almond and oat milk pint varieties and bars. For example, you can purchase almond milk-based mocha fudge, vanilla, and chocolate. Its oat milk ice cream covers more niche flavors, including strawberry, vanilla cookie chip, and cold brew. The bars for this brand are massive for the price and come in flavors like peanut butter, caramel, and forest fruit — all covered in a delicious layer of crunchy chocolate.

The Earth Grown peanut butter bars and vegan mocha fudge pints are some of the best vegan foods at Aldi. The ice cream is creamy, decadent, and much more reasonably priced compared to other name brands at a conventional grocery store. However, our major complaint with Aldi is that its products are only sometimes consistent, meaning you can fall in love with its vegan ice cream only not to have it in stores for several months.

Wicked Kitchen offers numerous plant-based foods, with ice cream being one of the brand's novelties. Its pints are available at many Kroger grocery stores across the United States, but it's difficult to find the brand if you live in certain parts of the country otherwise. Unlike other brands, Wicked Kitchen uses the lupin bean to make its ice cream, giving it a creamier texture than some non-dairy varieties.

The brand's offerings are much more limited than the others we reviewed. The four flavors of ice cream include the standard vanilla, chocolate, cookie dough, and mint chocolate chip. You can also purchase chocolate almond or berry white ice cream sticks and chocolate and berry novelty cones. The novelty treats are fun, exciting, and filled with chunks of flavorful ice cream. The chunky ice cream pints are stand-outs from the brand, while the plain vanilla and chocolate are lackluster in flavor.

Who in their right mind would pay $12 for a pint of ice cream? If you're a Van Leeuwen ice cream lover, you might be one of the first people to fork over the cash. The brand currently offers seven vegan ice cream flavors, including chocolate chip cookie dough, (our favorite) peanut butter brownie honeycomb, churros and fudge, cookie crumble strawberry jam, and oat milk brown sugar chunk.

You're paying a high price for an innovative ice cream brand that flawlessly matches flavors and textures. This ice cream is smooth, flavorful, and packed with all of the components it claims to have. There is a delicate balance of textures and elements in Van Leeuwen's ice cream, which makes it one of our favorites. But the whole $12-a-pint thing? We're not about it.

Favorite Day is Target's in-house brand of vegan and non-vegan food. The brand currently offers both non-dairy pints and ice cream bars. Favorite Day offers more chunky flavors rather than just the boring vanilla, chocolate, and mint flavors. We love the almond-milk-based vanilla cake and cookie dough swirl ice cream, as well as the decadent caramel brownie.

We think that Favorite Day ice creams are reminiscent of Ben & Jerry's, just at a slightly lower price point and with more limited flavor and product availability. One pint of Favorite Day ice cream costs just under $5, which is comparable to other non-dairy brands like SoDelicious and Planet Oat. The ice cream has a beautiful blend of "stuff" with a creamy almond milk base.

There are many vegan foods at Trader Joe's — including a delicious array of non-dairy ice creams. Our personal favorite is Trader Joe's cold brew boba ice cream. The coconut milk ice cream is rich, coffee-y, and filled with tiny chewy tapioca pearls.  Other popular dairy-free Trader Joe's ice cream flavors include oat-milk-based strawberry with flecks of crunchy praline and the soy-based creamy cherry chocolate chip — which is a vegan twist on the Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia. If you feel like eating novelty ice cream, Trader Joe's has you covered with its vegan frozen dessert cones, "Hold the Dairy," and non-dairy Mint & Chip Bon Bons.

Trader Joe's non-dairy ice cream deserves much more respect than it's gotten in recent years. The flavors are innovative and reflective of customer demand — meaning that if Trader Joe's enthusiasts don't like it, it won't stay around long.

Breyer's has fixed one major issue with vegan ice cream — that most brands only offer pints. Luckily, Breyer's comes in numerous dairy-free flavors, including nostalgic cookies & creme, vanilla peanut butter, mint chocolate chip, vanilla, and chocolate-chocolate chip. While these flavors are in the "safe zone," Breyer's still has spent time developing its flavors and formulas to achieve the same taste and texture as its comprehensive dairy-based lineup. As a result, its dairy-free ice cream isn't icy and doesn't taste watery. Instead, it's just a pleasant, delicious, and bite-of-everything in each spoonful kind of ice cream.

Currently, vanilla is the only oat milk ice cream Breyer's sells; the rest of the flavors are made with almond milk. After the success of its dairy-free product line, we hope the brand will add more tubs for us to enjoy with a good movie and company.

SoDelicious takes the cake — or ice cream cone — for the sheer availability of ice cream bases. You can purchase SoDelicious products made with cashew milk, oat milk, almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk, or "wondermilk"— a medley of dairy-free milk. Across the board of bases, you'll find plenty of innovative flavors, including oat milk coffee chip, cashew milk peanut butter brownie, and even no-sugar-added coconut milk flavors. The brand also offers novelties like ice cream sandwiches, dipped bars, and sundae cones.

SoDelicious products are a testament to what happens when a brand specializes in dairy-free ingredients and makes it its mission to offer quality textures and flavors. The texture of its options is creamy, smooth, and suited to a wide variety of allergens. Unfortunately, the primary reason why SoDelicious didn't take our top spot was that it lacked the same richness and mouthfeel of our top-performing dairy-free ice cream brand.