Our Least Favorite Fast Food Ice Cream Comes From A Chain Known For Its Sweets

Perhaps you haven't had ice cream from a fast food chain in a while. Those of us who regularly go to, say, McDonald's or Burger King usually do so for their burgers and fries. But if you're lucky enough to go when the ice cream machine is working, something about the sweet, creamy soft serve you get from those franchises hits different. That's why The Takeout wanted to know which of the four major chains to offer vanilla soft serve is the best — and, just as importantly, which is the worst. The answer, shockingly, is Dairy Queen.

When we tried and ranked the best fast food ice cream – sampling vanilla soft serve from McDonald's, Burger King, Sonic, and Dairy Queen — the casual observer might think that it wouldn't be a fair fight. While Dairy Queen serves a wide array of hot foods, including tacos in Texas, the fast food restaurant may be even more well-known for frozen desserts. Why wouldn't the home of the Blizzard lap the competition? 

Simply put, we found it bland. It lacked the necessary creaminess and flavor, simply being soft and inoffensive. The Takeout's Lauren Harkawik said this: "It was like a cloud that wasn't quite cold enough. Furthermore, it [didn't] have the creaminess or the strong vanilla flavor I had hoped." Boring and basic, "Dairy Queen was not the winner by a long shot," Harkawik said. 

In fairness, Dairy Queen is more famous for its mix-in loaded Blizzards than for the plain vanilla soft serve. We concede in our ranking that it would likely make a solid base for a sundae. But we're ranking the best fast food ice creams, not the most passable sundae bases, and taken on its own we found Dairy Queen's soft serve lacking.

It should be noted that Dairy Queen's soft serve can't legally be called ice cream due to failing to meet requirements set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, you ought not hold that against Dairy Queen. It has to do with the minimum butterfat percentage set by the FDA, which is 10%. Dairy Queen soft serve doesn't meet that definition, but that doesn't mean it's some sinister substance cooked up in a lab to poison you. The combination of milk, sugar, whey, corn syrup, and various stabilizers is pretty similar to the offerings from Burger King and McDonald's, which also don't meet the legal definition. Ultimately, it was the lack of flavor and too-soft texture that did Dairy Queen in, not the fact that it's technically not ice cream.