Halo Top's New Recipe Is Designed To Fix A Major Ice Cream Flaw

If you love ice cream but you're trying to keep your calorie count down, chances are you've dug a spoon into a pint — or six — of Halo Top. The light ice cream brand has taken the industry by storm since 2016, when a long-form article published in GQ described the writer's 10-day, Halo Top-only ice cream diet — at the end of which he had lost weight. After the piece ran, according to AdAge, the brand's sales jumped a whopping 2500 percent.

By 2017, Halo Top shouldered aside full fat ice creams, including Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's, to become the top-selling ice cream brand in the United States, according to Business Wire. But since then, sales have been flagging. According to Food Dive, last year, sales of nearly $211 million represented a 43 percent decline from 2017. So it comes as no surprise that the brand has been reworking its recipe over the past two and a half years, according to Food Dive, to come up with a more customer-pleasing formulation. And that new formulation, which is currently heading to supermarket shelves, seeks not just to hook dessert lovers' palates but also to solve an ice cream flaw that has plagued many of us.

Have you ever grabbed some ice cream from the freezer and readied your spoon — only to find that the dessert was frozen solid? Many of us pop ice cream into the microwave for a few seconds to dig in immediately, but according to CNN Business, Halo Top's new recipe is soft straight from the freezer. While pints of the brand's previous formulation were marked with the instructions to "give me a couple of minutes on the counter before you dig in," the new one, made with ultra-filtered milk, shouldn't require thawing.

CNN Business notes that ultra-filtered milk contains less sugar and more protein than regular milk, rendering it creamier than the previous iteration, which was criticized for not being smooth (via Food Dive). The new version will enable diners to enjoy the dessert more easily, and will hopefully hook them with better flavor, too. According to Food Dive, the new recipe was developed to turn around the sinking ship of Halo Top's sales. "You've got a lot of competitors out there that kind of tried to take our formula and make it their own and it's a more competitive market," senior brand manager Ryan Roznowski told the outlet. "We thought that improved texture might really move the needle."

Halo Top's new formulation debuts with a Chocolate Cake Batter flavor, to be joined by others nationwide later this spring (via Food Dive).