7 Melona Ice Cream Flavors, Ranked Worst To Best

It's hard to resist a good ice cream bar, especially if it carries a delightfully creamy and fruity flavor profile. That's where Melona comes in, an ice cream brand that first gained popularity in Korea in 1992 with its classic and iconic honeydew flavor and has since expanded to countries like Vietnam, China, Canada, and the United States. In the following decades, it rolled out several other flavors, including strawberry, mango, ube, pistachio, and banana. 

While many fruity ice cream bars tend to have an icier texture, Melona's ice cream bars lean heavily into a creamy, rich texture, with the brand describing the bars as "gelato-like." The availability of Melonas may vary depending on where you're located, but the ice cream bars have been available at Costco in the past, and there's a good chance that you'll find them year-round at local Korean grocery stores or chains like H Mart. Melona's store locator can help you pinpoint any products that might be available near you.

As someone who is well-versed in all things ice cream and has tried just about every ice cream bar out there, I purchased all the available Melona flavors to determine if the honeydew flavor really is the best or if another flavor deserves more esteemed recognition. The taste test is based on personal preference, but I also considered factors like which flavors accurately represented the fruit or nut and how potent the flavor was. 

While I love a good banana, I'm a little more weary of banana-flavored things because they don't often taste like the actual fruit. Instead, banana-flavored foods, like candy or even Trader Joe's yogurt, have a certain artificial taste that's hard to pinpoint. While I get that bananas are pretty mild in flavor, artificial banana flavoring is a little too strong, so it's about time some product out there must have found a middle ground.

Unfortunately, Melona's banana-flavored ice cream bar has not found a comfortable middle ground and instead tastes very strongly of artificial banana — if you've ever had a banana Laffy Taffy, you'll know the flavor. I'm sure there's a demographic of people out there who really enjoy that flavor, and if you fit into that group, then you will love this Melona flavor. It's not my cup of tea, hence ranking dead last on this list, but if there is one positive thing to say about this ice cream bar, it's the signature creaminess that almost distracted me from the subpar flavor.

If there's one flavor on this list that really surprised me, it would be Melona's mango-flavored ice cream bars. I love mango in fruit form and mango-flavored things, but there was something amiss with these creamy bars. At first, the flavor struck me as pretty typical, a bit sweet with lots of mango flavor shining through, but it quickly transformed into something quite strong and almost floral. 

To be more specific about the floral flavor profile, it tasted flowery in the same sense that certain perfumes smell flowery — so it was almost like I sprayed a floral perfume right in my mouth, which was not the most pleasant of flavors to pick up on. Mango flavor, like banana, doesn't always translate super well into certain foods, but I've typically found that frozen mango-flavored desserts like sorbet, ice cream, gelato, or Italian ice are safe bets. Unfortunately, Melona's mango flavor left me wanting more sweet mango and less floral, perfumey aftertaste, but I did like it slightly better than the overbearing banana flavor.

Strawberry-flavored ice cream is almost always a safe bet, with strawberries being a fruit that works particularly well in creamy contexts. Moreover, I've always found that strawberry-flavored things are pretty close to the actual flavor of strawberries, and even if it tastes a little artificial, it's a flavor that (usually) works. While all these things are true with Melona's strawberry flavor, I wanted a bit more with this one. It had Melona's usual smooth and creamy texture, but the strawberry flavor was a little weak, and it didn't seem too far-fetched to make it taste more like actual strawberries.

Unlike the mango and banana flavors, which I objectively just didn't like, the strawberry Melona isn't a terrible one, but it didn't leave a lasting enough impression to make it worth buying again. Also, since strawberry is such a readily available ice cream flavor, I needed this Melona bar to really impress me and stand out amidst a vast sea of frozen strawberry treats. It's not the worst Melona flavor but not the best — a safe middle-ground, nothing more and nothing less.

While I'm a fan of most fruit-flavored desserts, there's one flavor that I almost always reach for, and it's coconut. Naturally, I was pretty stoked to try Melona's coconut ice cream bar since I love the flavor of coconut to begin with, and I think it's a pretty hard profile to mess up. Plus, there's arguably no flavor that works better in a creamy context than coconut, so I really figured that Melona's coconut flavor would rank quite high on my list.

To be fair, the coconut flavor isn't ranking particularly low, but it's also not particularly high. In the middle-ground with strawberry (but slightly better), Melona's coconut ice cream bar was tasty, sweet, creamy, and all the things I needed it to be, but it still left me wanting a little more. The coconut flavor was very subdued, which may be a perk for those who enjoy coconut but not too much. For me, however, I kept waiting for more coconut flavor to become apparent, but it never did. This bar leaned way more on the creamy flavor profile than the coconut one, which did make for a tasty treat but one that would have been even tastier had it been stronger in the coconut department.

As someone who falls on the neutral side when it comes to pistachio-flavored things, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Melona's pistachio ice cream bar — so much so that it broke the top three on this list. Pistachio, like so many other flavors on this list, tends to lean a bit artificial in flavor when it comes to things like ice cream, so I wasn't particularly expecting much of anything from this ice cream bar, but I also wasn't expecting it to be awful.

Much to my surprise, this ice cream bar didn't taste like artificial pistachio but instead like actual pistachios, something that worked really well, in my opinion. Sweet, nutty, and just a tiny bit savory, these ice cream bars were far tastier than any pistachio ice cream I've ever tried before. While artificial pistachio flavoring almost tastes like almond extract to me, these bars really didn't taste like that at all, and their combined nutty, sweet, and creamy profile made for a delightful treat that stood out over most of the fruity flavors.

The flavor that started it all: Melona's honeydew ice cream bar truly is delicious, making it an easy choice for the second slot in this ranking. I thoroughly enjoy a good honeydew, but so often, the fruit is underripe, not super juicy, and just lackluster all around, making it a gamble to even bother with buying the melon in the first place. With Melona's honeydew ice cream bars, there's no gamble — it's just a sweet, melon-flavored bar that delivers fresh honeydew flavor.

I was impressed by how much this ice cream bar actually tasted like honeydew and just how concentrated it was. Since most types of melon are pretty mild in flavor on their own, I questioned how much ice cream could really replicate the flavor, but these bars proved it possible. Another thing I really like about this flavor is that it's unique — while you could find a whole slew of strawberry or mango-flavored treats at just about any grocery store, this honeydew flavor feels pretty distinctive to Melona specifically. While there was one flavor that edged honeydew out just a bit, this flavor is a great option for those who love juicy melon.

Taking the number one spot on this list is none other than Melona's purple yam, a.k.a. ube-flavored bar, a purple treat that was an absolute delight from start to finish. For those who aren't too familiar with ube, it's a type of purple yam that's common in Filipino cuisine and baking. It's not exactly known for having a super strong flavor profile, and in fact, most foods that spotlight ube flavor mostly end up tasting like vanilla or just generally sweet — not a bad thing, but not exactly true to all that ube has to offer.

Unlike so many ube-flavored products out there, Melona's ice cream bars really did live up to the subtle but delicious flavor that ube has to offer. Sweet, slightly nutty, a little bit earthy, and somewhat like vanilla, these ube bars captured the essence of the purple yam without being overbearing or leaning too hard on vanilla to make the magic happen. I loved how the rich creaminess of the bar contrasted so nicely with the earthy nuttiness of the ube flavor, making these purple bars an easy choice for the best Melona flavor.

When trying each Melona ice cream bar, I mostly based my ranking on how much I enjoyed the flavor that each bar had to offer. Obviously, that mostly came down to personal preference, but I did consider how well I think each flavor meshed with the creaminess of the bars, along with how strong I found each flavor to be. For example, I found the artificial banana flavor to be far too strong, whereas the coconut flavor could have been slightly stronger, and ranked them accordingly. 

Finally, I also considered uniqueness, with something like honeydew or ube being slightly harder to come by at any given grocery store than something like strawberry or coconut. The top three flavors are all ones that I considered to be the best flavor-wise, though they are also more unique to Melona specifically than they are to ice cream in general (especially the honeydew flavor). Also, while I had to ultimately rank them, I felt that the top three were all pretty interchangeable, so to truly land on number one (the ube flavor), I went with the one I'd be most likely to repurchase and keep stocked in my freezer.