food

By Matt Richtel

Reported from ice-cream shops and frozen-food aisles in Boulder, Colo.

Feb. 15, 2024

Banana pudding, chocolate fudge brownie, salted caramel, Cherry Garcia, Dr Pepper Float and dozens of other flavors packed the ice-cream freezer at a local Safeway. Robin Sawyer, one recent Sunday afternoon, hunted for her personal favorite, black raspberry chocolate chunk.

Her husband, Mark, 68, has long been a fan of chocolate chip, but he doesn't see it around much anymore.

"Here it is!" Ms. Sawyer, 66, said to him, kneeling in front of the Haagen-Dazs section. "In the small container." Then she corrected herself: "Oh, that's chocolate chocolate chip."

Vanilla chocolate chip ice cream, once a staple of the ice cream world and one of the top sellers of all time, has fallen out of favor. The flavor can still be found (a closer inspection of the Safeway aisle in this university mountain town revealed pints of Baskin Robbins's chocolate chip), but it has been losing ground to flavors with more stuff, like cookies and cream and chocolate chip cookie dough.

Those two flavors are among the nation's top five best sellers, according to the International Dairy Foods Association, while chocolate chip no longer makes the top 10. It is now sold only in selected markets or at certain times of the year, according to major manufacturers.

"Chocolate chip used to be a flavor we produced constantly," said Christine Crowley, communications specialist for Babcock Dairy Plant, which has 75 years of ice-cream making under its belt, in Madison, Wis. Chocolate chip hasn't been a staple for a decade, she said: "Now it's seasonal."

Meaning, made for summer only. Even then, chocolate chip is not such a hot seller. Last summer, Babcock took four and a half months to sell through the 110 gallons of chocolate chip it had made, compared to three months for the same amount of chocolate chip cookie dough. "It's kind of not fair," Ms. Crowley said of the comparison. "We stock chocolate chip cookie dough all year," giving it such an edge that it's "creeping up on vanilla" in popularity.

The reasons for chocolate chip's slide aren't exactly clear. Ice cream tastes change, as they always have, and there are more choices than ever, in every category. Blue Bell Creameries, based in Texas, took a few days to get back to a Times reporter's question about the changing fortunes of chocolate chip ice cream. But there was a good reason. "We released a new flavor, Cinnamon Twist ice cream, to consumers this week, so it has been a crazy past few days for our team," read a vanilla email from the Blue Bell public relations team.

The company had chocolate chip as a staple until the early 2000s, Blue Bell said in its email, but with growing demand for flavors like cookies and cream, chocolate chip has become "a market-specific flavor based on consumer preferences." The company's email added, "While Chocolate Chip may not be a standard flavor in our ice cream lineup, there are still many fans in our markets that can't get enough of it."

Joe Mruk, 39, can — get enough of it. He came to the Safeway aisle in search of a different Blue Bell flavor, Cookie Two Step, which he described as having "chocolate-chip cookie dough filling but based on cookie dough ice cream." It became "an instant hit" when introduced in 2016, according to Blue Bell. Mr. Mruk used to like regular old chocolate chip ice cream, he said, "but it's not here." Even if the flavor were available, he wouldn't gravitate to it. "Cookie Two Step is my jam."

To some ice cream experts, chocolate chip feels plain.

"It's not the worst, but it's not that good," said Ani Ward, 8, standing in the frozen-food aisle. To be fair, she could not remember the last time she'd had chocolate chip ice cream. Her father, Sean Ward, reminded her that the flavor involves vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips.

"It's similar to cookies and cream," she said.

"But no cookies in it," he said.

Mr. Ward said that when he was growing up in Ohio in the 1980s and early '90s, there were not as many ice cream choices. "There's a whole aisle now," he said. "Every time I go over there I'm, like, What am I buying now?"

Tillamook, a major ice-cream maker based in Oregon, noted that vanilla's fortunes have slid, too. According to industry data, sales of vanilla ice cream dipped 6.4 percent in volume from 2018 to 2022, compared with a 22 percent decline for chocolate chip, while volume sales of cookies and cream rose 72.6 percent. Austin Blythe, a publicist for Tillamook, noted that the company had deepened its flavor bench recently, adding Brownie Batter, Chocolate Hazelnut, German Chocolate Cake "and, yes, a Dark Chocolate Cookies & Cream."

Mr. Sawyer, in the Safeway aisle with his wife, has largely forsaken chocolate chip ice cream for other flavors.

"I now eat vanilla," he said. "It goes well with rum."

He did offer a close approximation: stracciatella, which is vanilla with chocolate flakes.

"But it's gelato," Mr. Sawyer said. He seemed to feel sorry for the Times reporter, who had come to the grocery store, and visited various ice-cream shops, in search of his beloved chocolate chip flavor and owned up to his investigation into why he couldn't find any.

Mr. Sawyer again pressed the gelato option, while noting it wasn't a simple solution: "You have to go to Italy."