This Is The One Brand Of Cookies And Cream Ice Cream We Won't Ever Buy Again

The only duo better than milk and cookies is ice cream and cookies, which makes cookies and cream ice cream a fan favorite. Consequently, it's as common a flavor as vanilla and chocolate both at ice cream shops and in pints to stock your freezer. We tasted and ranked 11 store-bought cookies and cream ice cream brands to find the best pints to pick up at the grocery store. We found winners, but the one brand that we won't ever buy again is Halo Top.

We ranked cookies and cream ice cream brands according to taste and texture, but also according to a balanced contrast between the vanilla and chocolate cookies and the creamy foundation and chewy, almost crunchy bits of Oreos. Unfortunately, Halo Top failed in every criterion and left us exceedingly dissatisfied. While we appreciate Halo Top's mission to offer low-calorie ice cream to satisfy your sweet tooth even if you're trying to cut back, eliminating calories resulted in a lack of flavor, texture, and ingredients. The only flavor we picked up on with the ice cream itself was the fake sweeteners that completely overwhelmed any dairy richness. Furthermore, there were no chunks of cookies, but instead tiny specs of chocolate crumbs. The ice cream base was also hardly creamy; it appears that whipping air into the ice cream must've been another way to reduce calories that didn't pay off.

Halo Top's cookies and cream ice cream wasn't just a letdown for our taste test, but it also garnered multiple negative reviews from customers across various grocery and review websites. One Influenster review put it bluntly by saying, "I know that this wasn't going to taste like typical ice cream, but lord it's missing anything that typically makes cookies and cream ice cream yummy. The cream part, the cookie chunks...it's like they took one oreo cookie, crumbled it up super fine in a food processor and that's all that's in this little guy." The flavor was also described as chemical, diet-tasting, and artificial, while the texture was described as watery and off-putting.

Many reviewers said they were especially disappointed in the cookies and cream flavor because they had enjoyed other Halo Top flavors before giving cookies and cream a try. To that effect, we offer a ranking of Halo Top flavors where we crowned chocolate chip cookie dough as number one. If cookies and cream is your favorite flavor, Häagen-Dazs was our top pick and well worth those extra calories. Häagen-Dazs is one of our favorite vanilla ice cream brands, so adding chocolate cookies to it was a winning combination. Surprisingly, our second favorite cookies and cream ice cream brand is the dairy-free So Delicious brand; chocoholics will love the fact that So Delicious' cookies and cream has a creamy "milky" chocolate ice cream foundation to contrast dark chocolate cookies.