My List of Ice Cream Flavors

You can’t have a successful ice cream franchise unless you’ve got the flavors people want. Plenty of ice cream shop franchises experiment and come up with their own unique flavors, but it’s hard to improve on the classics. If you’re wondering how to start an ice cream shop business, start with this list of tried-and-true favorites.

Vanilla

There is simply no flavor as classic or timeless as vanilla. Flavored from the vanilla bean, vanilla ice cream is often used as the base for floats, sundaes and various toppings. While some consider vanilla to be “plain” ice cream, don’t let its simplicity fool you — vanilla is a tough flavor to beat!

Chocolate

There are plenty of chocolate lovers (affectionately known as “chocoholics”) who occasionally crave an ice cream treat. It only makes sense to have chocolate ice cream to help them satisfy their cravings, right? Though many feel that chocolate ice cream doesn’t really taste like chocolate, it’s still a hugely popular flavor.

Strawberry

Completing the “Neopolitan Trinity” is strawberry ice cream, a sweet pink concoction that often contains small bits or chunks of actual strawberries to enhance the taste. A variation on strawberry is strawberry ripple, which despite its name, is actually vanilla ice cream that has a streak of strawberry jam or flavoring.

Chocolate Chip

One way ice cream makers came up with to jazz up vanilla was to add small bits or chunks of dark or semisweet chocolate and rechristen in chocolate chip. Though these days chocolate chip serves as a basis for many other concoctions, purists prefer the sweet simplicity of the original style chocolate chip.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Of the many things that ice cream makers discovered they could add to chocolate chip to make it even sweeter, none have proven more popular than blobs of cookie dough. It has all of the advantages of a sweet ice cream cookie built into one tasty flavor that’s hard for someone with a sweet tooth to pass up.

Cookies and Cream

Ice cream makers noticed that crumbled up cookies — specifically the wafer parts of Oreo cookies — were a very popular topping for vanilla ice cream, so they decided to add the cookies to the ice cream itself, and the cookies and cream flavor came into reality and proved itself quite popular.

Pistachio

Easily recognizable by its bright green color — although it has been available in white for some time now — pistachio ice cream has a very distinct flavor that is enhanced by the chopped pistachio nuts that are added to the base and, in most if not all cases, additional pistachio flavoring.

Rocky Road

Rocky road is an ice cream flavor that can trace its name all the way back to the Great Depression. Originally made with a base of chocolate ice cream, today’s variant uses a base of vanilla and adds chocolate chips, marshmallows and almonds to the mix for a sweet, tasty flavor.

Butter Pecan

Using vanilla ice cream as a base, butter pecan adds flavoring that gives it a slightly buttery taste and adds pecans to the mix, hence the flavor’s name. Butter pecan is a hugely popular flavor among ice cream fans, and has its own variant, butter almond, which replaces the pecans with almonds.

Mint Chocolate Chip

Mint chocolate chip uses a base of mint ice cream and then adds chips or chunks of dark or semisweet chocolate. The mint taste or flavor is sometimes achieved by adding the liqueur crème de menthe, but is more commonly the result of adding spearmint or peppermint to the base.