I tasted 13 vanilla ice creams – this budget supermarket tub beats the posh offerings

I did a double take when I looked at my tasting notes for this article. In front of me were 13 bowls of vanilla ice cream – no labels or brands visible, just a lineup of anonymous products (marked A to M) for me to taste and judge. Now, it was time for me to wipe my sticky face and fingers, open my laptop and reveal the labels on the tubs.
One ice cream had stood out as too sweet and too strongly flavoured with an oddly woody vanilla taste that reminded me of an over-oaked chardonnay. I gave it a middling star rating accordingly, but when I checked which brand it was, I was surprised to discover it was a Häagen-Dazs tub – the very ice cream which had come top in my last tasting of posh vanilla ice cream two years ago.
How could this be? Was the sugar buzz from tasting 13 ice creams addling my brain, or had its recipe changed? Happily, I still have my spreadsheet of data from 2023 (in which I record the prices, volumes, sugar content and more for each product – just some of the number crunching I do for all of my taste tests). I checked this year's Häagen-Dazs label against my notes, and sure enough, the ingredients had changed.
While the price of the 400g tub has risen less than five per cent (roughly in line with inflation, but below the higher rate of food inflation) savings have been made elsewhere, it seems. The sugar content has gone up from 18.8g to 19.9g per 100g – enough to tip it from 'on the sweet side' (as I judged it to be in 2023) to cloying. Perhaps it's there to make up for the new ingredient – water – now listed alongside cream and condensed skimmed milk, sugar and egg yolk.
More significantly, the vanilla extract used in the 2023 ice cream has been replaced with 'natural vanilla flavouring'. By law this must be made from 95 per cent vanilla, with the additional 5 per cent coming from natural sources (although these may be so highly refined they are unrecognisable from the original). The purpose of these extras (according to Neroliane, a French company that creates flavourings for the food industry), is to 'convey fresher, spicy, biscuity, buttery or even milky notes to the original vanilla.' Or, in the case of my Häagen-Dazs spoonful, woody notes. It's not a successful addition, and it's hard not to conclude that it's been made to cover up a switch to a lower quality vanilla.
Talking of money saving, a favourite method of some manufacturers is to whip as much air into their ice cream as possible, so they need less of the mixture to fill a tub. This is called 'overrun' in the trade, and in this area Häagen-Dazs (which was approached for a comment) actually comes out shining, with the lowest overrun I've come across. Those who add the most air usually have to add emulsifiers – generally mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids – to stop the mixture splitting. This puts the ice cream in the ultra-processed food (UPF) category, and also makes for an unpleasantly foamy consistency as it melts.
In order to estimate how much of your tub is air, I've calculated the difference between the weight of the ice cream and the volume as a percentage (a high percentage signals more air in the mixture). This isn't a perfect equation but it's a decent approximation, and it allows you to understand where you're spending money on real ingredients – and where it's just all hot (or cold) air.
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How we tasted
All the ice cream was given time to soften slightly in the fridge. A scoop was taken from each tub and placed in a glass bowl identified with a letter A to M. I tasted all the ice creams 'blind'. In order to work out the weight of the product and its overrun (the amount of air added to the ice cream), I placed any that did not declare a weight on accurate professional digital scales, subtracting the weight of the tub (these products I have marked with an 'approx' figure).
The taste test

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