Choco Taco – The Waffle Shell Wonder That Broke Hearts
The Choco Taco was invented in Philadelphia in 1983 and quickly found a foothold in mobile food vendors. By the mid-1990s, it was available for purchase in various grocery store chains and eventually introduced to markets in Italy and Sweden, evolved to include a cookies and cream version, and was even available to buy in some Taco Bell locations. Unfortunately, Klondike announced in July of 2022 that the Choco Taco would be discontinued so that the company could focus its attention on consumer interests in other areas. This wasn’t just ice cream, it was a whole experience. The sweet take on a popular Mexican dish featured vanilla ice cream and fudge wedged between a waffle cone taco shell and topped with peanuts and chocolate. People didn’t just eat Choco Tacos, they celebrated them at pool parties and bought them from ice cream trucks with the same excitement as winning the lottery. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian even offered to buy the rights to the product, to “keep it from melting away from future generations’ childhoods”, but to no avail. Since then, there has been talk about it making a comeback, but so far, no large scale Choco Taco resurrection has happened.
Tutti Frutti – The Rainbow Mix That Time Forgot
One of the most dramatic disappearing acts is tutti frutti, which went from being ubiquitous to being all but untraceable. Its name means “all fruits” in Italian, and although that’s a pretty tough claim to live up to, it did boast a distinctive fruity flavor that couldn’t be narrowed down to a single one. Known for its bits of candied fruit and often having a bright pink hue, it was a wildly popular ice cream flavor at one point, one you could find just about anywhere ice cream was sold. Tutti frutti ice cream has a long history, becoming particularly popular in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Recipes for tutti frutti ice cream were found in cookbooks of the late 19th century. The flavor got its distinctive pink color from the mix of candied fruits, creating something that looked like a party in a bowl. Unfortunately, its main component is sneakily similar to the main component of fruit cake, which boasts an impressively bad reputation. Sadly, despite the rich creaminess of the ice cream and delicious burst of fruit flavor, like many other ice creams that came and went, tutti frutti is mostly a memory. Today, you can still find it at Leopold’s Ice Cream in Savannah, Georgia, but that’s about it.
Teaberry – The Pink Minty Surprise from Pennsylvania
Made, appropriately enough, with teaberries, this bright pink ice cream was all the rage in the 1960s but is now hard to find outside of Pennsylvania. Despite the color of the ice cream and the word “berry,” the flavor is closer to mint than strawberry or raspberry. Teaberry ice cream is made with teaberries that come from the teaberry plant, sometimes also called checkerberry plants or wintergreen plants. Teaberries were historically used to flavor chewing gum, sometimes called wintergreen gum. The ice cream has a minty flavor and a pink hue and, due to both, has been likened to Pepto Bismol. If you were an adventurous eater in the 1960s, you may’ve come across teaberry treats as this flavor reached its peak popularity back then. However, now if you want some teaberry ice cream, you’ll have to travel for it, to the state where it’s still popular: Pennsylvania. There, you’ll find it still sold by regional brands like Yuengling’s Ice Cream.
Black Walnut – The Earthy Flavor That Went Extinct
Black walnut ice cream seems to have been a little more prevalent, with several major brands carrying black walnut varieties at some point in time, including Haagen-Dazs, Blue Bell, and Baskin Robbins. However, while you can find advertisements for the flavor dating to the 1950s, today, this ice cream flavor is a little more difficult to find, as the multiple Reddit threads asking for assistance can attest. Most helpful respondents report that the brands that were known for having it, discontinued it or only sell it intermittently. Haagen-Dazs discontinued its black walnut flavor more recently, due to lack of demand; before its disappearance, fans described the flavor as “unusual” and “earthy.” The rich, almost woodsy taste was definitely an acquired preference, but those who loved it really loved it. If you’re desperate to try it, you may have luck at Harris Teeter where they sell the Mayfield Dairy Farms brand, per some Reddit users’ reports – that is, if you live in one of the eight states that are home to the 250-plus Harris Teeter grocery store locations.
Tin Roof – The Southern Sundae in Scoop Form
When Tin Roof first made its appearance under the Blue Bell brand in 1980, before being discontinued in 2019, the flavor featured a vanilla base, with chocolate sauce swirled in, alongside chocolate-dipped peanuts. However, the ice cream flavor dates back much further than the 1980s. The story goes, it finds its roots in the tin roof sundae, created in Nebraska in the 1930s. You’d never guess what was in this traditional flavor just by hearing the name. The combination of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and those chocolate-covered peanuts created something magical that perfectly captured the essence of an old-fashioned sundae. While you can still find a tin roof sundae in Nebraska, getting a quart or gallon of tin roof sundae-flavored ice cream is a little more difficult. Blue Bell and Turkey Hill both sell tin roof ice cream, the former only does so on a limited basis, bringing the discontinued flavor out of retirement randomly, and the latter seems to distribute this flavor on a limited basis.
Peach Melba – The Opera Singer’s Sweet Legacy
Operatic fandom was responsible for two well-known creations by French chef Auguste Escoffier that have since outlived a stint as a popular ice cream flavor. Before the turn of the century, Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba was a regular at the Savoy Hotel in London. At the time, Escoffier, a fan of the singer and chef at the hotel, created a dessert named in her honor that featured peaches and raspberry sauce served over vanilla ice cream. That combination later went on to be featured by the same name as one of the offerings from Sealtest Dairy, whose parent company Kraft General Foods was acquired by Unilever in 1993 and eventually discontinued all Sealtest products. While raspberry and peach make appearances independently in ice creams, or as part of other flavor combinations, the peach Melba, featured in Escoffier’s “A Guide To Modern Cookery” along with his hazelnut soufflé, has become a rarity. This sophisticated flavor combination deserved better than the corporate shuffle that killed it off.
Rum Raisin – The Adults-Only Flavor That Lost Its Cool
Unlike tutti frutti and plum ice cream, you can still find rum raisin at some stores, but its stint as one of the most ubiquitous ice cream flavors is long gone. You might remember it as a big deal in the 1970s and ’80s, but its history is much more extensive, dating all the way back to Sicily in the early 20th century. Back then, it was made with marsala-soaked Málaga raisins and gelato, but when it made it to the U.S., regular ice cream and rum-soaked raisins became the norm. Its first wave of popularity in America can be attributed to the end of Prohibition. No longer banned from drinking alcohol, Americans added it just about everything, including desserts. It came back into style in the ’70s and ’80s, so much so that many people today still associate it with that period instead of the ’30s. However, these days, it’s far from guaranteed that you’ll find it at a specialty ice cream parlor, let alone a mainstream one. The boozy sophistication that once made rum raisin a grown-up treat now seems dated in our craft cocktail culture.
Beatle Nut – When Beatlemania Hit the Freezer
In the 1960s, The Beatles were at the peak of their fame, and “Beatlemania” was rife. This fan culture wasn’t just limited to the famous British rock band’s shows and performances, but it also made its way to the ice cream world. Beatle Nut was a pistachio-walnut ice cream flavor with chocolate ribbon that Baskin-Robbins created in five days during 1964 to capitalize on the Beatles’ first U.S. tour, marking one of the first celebrity-inspired food products in American commercial history. The speed with which they developed this flavor shows just how massive Beatlemania really was. Just like the famous four, Beatle Nut was a hit before it was retired to Baskin-Robbins’ “Deep Freeze.” It was nearly resurrected in 2011, when Baskin-Robbins announced a new competition to bring back one of its vintage flavors. Beatle-Nut was one of 30 flavors in the running for a revival, but in the end, Pistachio Almond Fudge won the vote.
Heavenly Hash – The Flavor That Evolved Too Much
The name might not give much away, but heavenly hash has a surprisingly lengthy history and twisty evolution. Its first known printed use came in 1887, when it referred to a mixture of oranges, bananas, lemons, apples, raisins, and pineapples that were mashed and fitted into a hollowed-out orange. Over time, it evolved to include nuts and marshmallows, then excluded all the fruit entirely and added chocolate. In 1923, Elmer Candy Corporation released its Heavenly Hash candy, which was comprised of marshmallows and almonds coated in chocolate. By the 1970s, it was enjoying its heyday as an ice cream flavor, usually in the form of chocolate ice cream studded with marshmallows and nuts. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Rocky Road ice cream, which is also comprised of chocolate, marshmallows, and nuts. If the two were ever in direct market competition, it’s clear that Rocky Road won the day, possibly because its name is more illustrative of its contents. Sometimes having a better marketing name makes all the difference in frozen dessert survival.
Plum Nuts – The Punny Flavor That Couldn’t Stick
It’s hard to name more than a handful of fruits that aren’t popular ice cream flavors. Strawberry, cherry, even peach are commonly found at ice cream parlors and on store shelves, but one that is strangely elusive is plum. At one point in the mid-20th century, however, the flavor was available from multiple major ice cream brands, and both of them used the same pun. Baskin-Robbins had the idea to make a plum flavor when a young customer visited one of the stores for the first time and marveled, “My god, I’ve never seen so many flavors. The people who think of these flavors must be plumb nuts.” Plum Nuts, a vanilla ice cream containing plums and walnuts, was then born. Another brand to capitalize on the wordplay was Sealtest, which had its own Plum Nuts flavor that featured striations of plum color. The fact that two different companies independently came up with the same punny name shows just how obvious the connection was. But apparently, being obvious wasn’t enough to keep plum around in the ice cream world. The combination of sweet plums and crunchy walnuts in creamy vanilla should have been a winner, but sometimes even the best ideas don’t survive changing consumer preferences.
