We Taste-Tested 10 Supermarket Chocolate Ice Creams—Here Are Our Favorites

I completely respect that you’d click into a story about ranking chocolate ice creams and expect to read about the merits of chocolate ice cream. That said, we are all aligned here, yeah? You love chocolate ice cream? You also feel that it is good? That it’s important? That it can make everything better? And, therefore, you would like to read some serious nonsense on which easily accessible brand of it is the best? Great! I have nothing more to say to introduce the subject and you’ve come to exactly the right place. 

Recently, the Serious Eats team pulled together 10 brands of chocolate ice cream you're likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it!

Editor’s Note: We wanted to try Blue Bell, Ben & Jerry’s, Edy’s, Trader Joe’s, and Van Leeuwen’s chocolate options, but were unable to procure them the day of this particular taste test. But please! We plan to retest with these options included and will update this article after doing so.

The Criteria

A good chocolate ice cream is—wait for it—chocolatey. I write this knowing full well you’re laughing! I also write this knowing you’ve likely not sampled 10 chocolate ice creams in rapid succession, evaluating each one diligently for its level of chocolate flavor. Not all supermarket chocolate ice creams even taste like chocolate, you monsters! And when they do, they often don’t taste like chocolate enough, or, in rare instances, they taste like chocolate too much, to the point of eating like chalky cocoa powder or protein powder dredges. 

The chocolate flavor should be rounded out with a significant punch of creaminess—you want to know you're eating a full-fat dairy product. We also prefer a chocolate ice cream that's been properly aerated (had air incorporated) so that it's dense yet soft, scoopable, and creamy, but not so much air (also called “overrun”) that it's foamy or reads as "light." 

Another factor that contributed heavily to this taste test was each ice cream’s chew factor. Clockable bounce, body, and chew all correlated with the less aerated options, and this staff enjoyed almost every instance of that. It’s objectively better to feel like you chewed your ice cream while you ate it than it is to feel like it could’ve been sipped. Like, on a scale from "poorly made diner milkshake" to Tootsie Roll, a proper chocolate ice cream should go down like luxurious saltwater taffy someone left out on a perfect 70°F day for many, many hours. 

Of note: I was yanking a gigantic freezer door open and slamming it shut repeatedly over the course of a humid test kitchen day. Most of the ice creams in this test were delivered to the kitchen; a few were transported from home. Who knows how often they were frozen and unfrozen and re-frozen in transit even before then? All this to say, there was a variable mostly beyond our control that affected the iciness and meltiness of each sample. In a few cases, we ended up re-scooping and re-sampling where it felt like samples had been tarnished by the elements during their tumultuous time between their original containers and their sample bowls, and taste testers were able to ask for re-scoops as they felt necessary. I built that consideration into the sampling templates, asking people to separate temperature side effects out of their rankings as much as possible. As always, this is a very serious operation, and we operate seriously accordingly.

Overall Winner

Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Ice Cream

The Serious Eats staff’s affinity for Häagen-Dazs ice cream has been well documented on this website over the course of a couple of previous taste tests, including our strawberry ice cream taste test and our vanilla ice cream taste test. It’s not our fault they’ve managed to identify the exact-correct flavor: gumminess: aeration ratio across mass-produced-and-distributed pints! Our director of product, Alison, wrote: “This is a classic ice cream texture and it has a classic ice cream smell.” Our senior social media editor, Kelli compared the experience to drinking a smooth glass of syrupy chocolate milk. And our editorial director, Daniel, who nearly immediately asked “Häagen-Dazs?” after taking a bite, much preferred this texture to aaaany of the other samples that came his way that day.

Runners-Up

• Breyer's Chocolate Ice Cream
• Wegman's Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream

Though our editors didn't enjoy these chocolate ice creams as much as our winner, they thought the two brands above were more than satisfactory and would be happy to have a scoop or two on a hot summer day. Each tester noted a sweet and middle-of-the-road chocolate flavor in Breyer's Chocolate Ice Cream and thought it was nicely creamy. Every editor had positive things to say about the texture of Wegman's Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream: Daniel thought it was "denser than most others in a pretty good way," and Alison called the ice cream "silky-stretchy," noting it tasted like "the chocolate layer in a Carvel ice cream cake."

In yet another completely spot-on reference I am so upset I didn’t make, Kelli’s notes from this tasting read: “This reminds me of the chocolate ice cream that they used to give us in grade school from those little round cardboard containers and a little wooden tongue depressor instead of a spoon.” Ugh!!!! It’s too true!!! That’s exactly what it smelled and tasted and felt like!!! It was consistently smooth, decently foamy, and tasted very gentle.

The only chocolate ice cream of the bunch to elicit the word “maltiness” in tasting notes! “At this serving temp, it's like eating semifreddo chocolate mousse…which isn't the worst,” Daniel said. The others noted the sweetness rather than chocolatey-ness of this offering, and craved more heft and chew in each bite.

The Contenders

• Blue Bunny Soft Chocolate Frozen Dessert*
• Breyer’s Chocolate Ice Cream
• Friendly’s Rich & Creamy Classic Chocolate 
• Häagen Dazs Chocolate Ice Cream
• Halo Top Chocolate Light Ice Cream**
• Jeni’s Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream
• Stop & Shop Chocolate Ice Cream, Churn Style
• Tillamook Chocolate Ice Cream
• Turkey Hill Dutch Chocolate, Premium Ice Cream
• Wegman’s Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream

*This is technically a “frozen dairy dessert” rather than an “ice cream” (which is how all of these other contenders are classified). Per the FDA definition, ice cream, along with a lot of other qualifiers, “contains not less than 10 percent milkfat,” whereas frozen dairy desserts don’t hit that threshold.

**...We ultimately decided to cut this and the Blue Bunny from the rankings after reconsideration of the fact that they're not full fat ice creams and, as different products, didn't belong in the mix.

Key Takeaways and Conclusion

Most of the ice creams we tasted are made with milk, cream, sugar, and cocoa processed with alkali, though some also contain stabilizers, such as vegetable glycerine, gels, gums, mono and diglycerides, and carrageenen, which are often used to improve the texture of ice cream by making it harder for ice crystals to form, which can turn ice cream unpleasantly crunchy and frosty. Others include sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and tapioca syrup. 

Our winner, Häagen-Dazs, contains just five ingredients: cream, skim milk, sugar, cocoa processed with alkali, and egg yolks. Eggs and/or egg yolks are often used to prepare French-style ice creams, which typically use crème anglaise—a custard that can double as a sauce—as their base, resulting in a richer, denser ice cream than eggless ice creams. One of our runners-up, Wegman's Chocolate Premium French Ice Cream, is made with a custard base containing yolks. Unlike our winner, its base contains liquid sugar, buttermilk, and corn syrup, as well as natural flavor. While Breyers does not contain yolks, our testers still loved how creamy it was, likely because it has whey, which helps thicken ice cream, and tara gum, which helps preserve an ice cream's silky smooth texture.

Our Testing Methodology

All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria that vary from sample to sample. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.