Blue Bell Makes A Bold Claim About Inventing A Classic Ice Cream Flavor

It wouldn't be a movie night without a bucket of popcorn and a tub of your favorite ice cream. Whether you prefer classic vanilla ice cream (which doesn't have to be boring) or appease your sweet tooth with a container of chocolate chip ice cream (a flavor few people are eating at the moment), the levels of enjoyment are all the same. While just about all ice cream flavors are enjoyable, there are a few that have fiercely contested origin stories. Cookies 'n cream — made with a chilly vanilla base and minced Oreo pieces — wasn't even invented until around the 1980, but several companies claim to have invented this flavor, including Blue Bell Creameries. Despite it not being one of the most popular ice cream flavors in America, these companies continue to scrap over who invented cookies 'n cream. 

"We were first to create this innovative flavor," is one of the first things you'll see when you visit the webpage dedicated to Blue Bell's cookies 'n cream ice cream. This bold claim is backed up by a story. Apparently, Blue Bell introduced its cookies 'n cream flavor to the public after an employee tasted a similar ice cream at a small ice cream parlor in Houston. In 1981, Blue Bell Creameries filed a trademark application for its cookies 'n cream flavor, but the trademark was denied. As you can imagine, this was a bitter pill for the company to swallow.

The next most plausible story about cookie 'n cream's invention comes from South Dakota State University. The story goes that, in 1979, Davis Dairy Plant manager Shirley Seas urged his two employees Joe Leedom and Joe Van Treeck — who were SDSU students at the time — to buy every box of Oreos they could find. Seas had been dying to mix Nabisco Oreos with the plant's vanilla ice cream ever since he tried a bowl of ice cream that was topped with cookie crumbs at a small restaurant years before. After selling a few tester gallons on the SDSU campus, the new flavor became a raging success. In an article published by Collegian Media, Leedom is recorded as stating, "I firmly believe that South Dakota State University through the efforts of professor Shirley Seas, Joe Van Treeck and myself truly did make the first batch of Cookies n' Cream ice cream."

To further complicate matters, several commercial ice cream brands, such as Edy's and Herrell's Ice Cream also claim to have invented the iconic ice cream flavor. These claims seem to be slightly unconvincing when compared to the claims made by Blue Bell Creameries and SDSU, however, they further muddy the ice cream's already opaque history. While all these claims are interesting, we're just glad someone out there had the foresight to create this irresistible ice cream flavor.