Once Popular Ice Cream Flavors You Hardly Ever See Anymore

There are some ice cream flavors that are reliably popular and that you can find in just about any grocery store with a freezer aisle — or at any ice cream shop you might walk into. Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry are always summertime staples and it's not just public perception — according to the International Dairy Foods Association, in 2024, survey respondents named these three flavors as their top favorite flavors overall.

However, there are some ice cream flavors that have fallen to the wayside in years and decades past. No, we're not talking about novelty flavors like Hidden Valley ranch ice cream or mayonnaise ice cream. We're talking ice cream flavors that were once legitimately widely popular and just as common on store shelves or on the dessert table as chocolate or strawberry (or at least as close as they could get). Still, despite their once wide popularity, ingredient trends have shifted, leaving these flavors in the dust. These are some of the once popular ice cream flavors you hardly ever see anymore.

You may know it as a song. You may be familiar with the Jelly Belly flavor of the same name (albeit a slightly different spelling). You may know it in connection with the original Italian, translating to "all fruits." Whatever the phrase "tutti frutti" conjures up in your mind, if we're talking ice cream, tutti frutti is a pink confection spotted with bits of tropical fruit (recipes call for banana, pineapple, and cherries).

While tutti frutti ice cream enjoyed a long run, appearing on New York Public Library-compiled restaurant menus from 1890 to 1981, this isn't an ice cream that you can find just anywhere anymore. One of the most famous places to still serve and sell it is Leopold's Ice Cream in Savannah, Georgia, but this isn't a flavor option you can typically buy at your neighborhood Walmart. Perhaps it's because modern consumers simply don't like it? 

If you were an adventurous eater in the 1960s, you may've come across teaberry treats (such as ice cream) 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.

So what exactly is it? Teaberry ice cream is made with teaberries. Teaberries 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. Now, it's fallen out of favor with the younger crowds, but still has a niche, small fanbase. If you like mint or mint chocolate chip ice cream (which the International Dairy Foods Association survey found has retained popularity, making it into the top 10 of ice cream flavors nationwide), you might as well give teaberry a try — if you're lucky enough to come across it.

Don't confuse this ice cream flavor with butter pecan, which is still fairly popular and easy to find. Like teaberry ice cream, butter brickle ice cream is historic and very closely tied to geography.

Butter brickle started out as a candy, a butterscotch-y toffee surrounded by chocolate and likened to a Heath bar. The candy first hit store shelves in the 1920s, and the ice cream followed shortly thereafter. While the first person to mix the candy with ice cream is up for debate, it quickly became a Midwest favorite, most often associated with the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Fenn's brand. When the company shuttered, the butter brickle recipe was sold to the same folks who made Heath Bars, and, in the 1990s, the recipe was passed along to Hershey. Now, it's a bit hard to find the butter brickle candy, but you can still occasionally find the ice cream, such as at the Braum's chain that stretches throughout Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas.

Black walnut ice cream seems to have been a little more prevalence, 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."

If you need to get your black walnut ice cream fix, 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.

You'd have a difficult time guessing what's in this traditional ice cream flavor just based on the name alone. 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. Much like the ice cream flavor, the sundae featured vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and roasted Spanish peanuts, but also came with the addition of marshmallow sauce and chocolate ice cream.

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.

Cheese ice cream made headlines a few years ago, when Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, known for its inventive flavors, released a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ice cream. However, while it may seem a bit like a modern novelty, cheese and ice cream are a historic match. In fact, George Washington enjoyed it, in the form of parmesan ice cream, according to Boothbay Register coverage of a Daughters of the American Revolution presentation from 2018. The reason why parmesan was an ice cream flavor of choice in the 1700s? Parmesan was one of the few favorite European ingredients that could withstand the long, arduous journey across the Atlantic and make it to the American colonies in relatively good condition.

While you'll be hard pressed to find any parmesan ice cream at the grocery store, you can easily make it yourself at home. The 1789 cookbook "The Complete Confectioner" by Frederick Nutt offers a parmesan ice cream recipe and its easily replicable at home, with just eggs, simple syrup, heavy cream, and the requisite parmesan.

Of all the ice cream flavors that you might suspect to have fallen out of favor with the masses, it's probably not this one. After all, chocolate chips are seemingly beloved no matter their form or function. Chocolate chip cookies? Amazing. Chocolate chip pancakes? Perfection. Chocolate chips in your brownies, granola bars, or banana bread? No complaints. However, it does seem that chocolate chip is beginning to wane in popularity among American consumers.

Not only has chocolate chip ice cream been declining in popularity for years, but now it's not even within the top 10 most preferred ice cream flavors in the United States. If you need your chocolate chip ice cream fix, you can likely find it faster via the many chocolate chip cookie dough ice creams still available. While not specifying chocolate chip cookie dough, data from the International Dairy Foods Association, shows that cookie dough ice cream in general still remains a favorite, and it's easy enough to find chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream on offer from top brands such as Turkey Hill, Breyers, Friendly's, Haagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry's, and more.