We have been through so many taste tests together now. We’ve braved pounds of cream cheese. Mountains of butter. Puddles of peanut butter. And yet, no one on our team has been more excited for a taste test than they were about our mint chocolate chip ice cream showdown. It’s pretty! It’s polarizing! It’s popular! It should, in theory, make a whole bunch of you very happy and/or very, very mad. And the internet needs more of that kind of fodder, don’t you think?
And so, the Serious Eats team recently pulled together 14 (!) brands of mint chocolate ice cream you’re likely to find in your local supermarket and methodically, empirically, scientifically! tasted its way through them all in a quest to identify the very best. And we loved every minute of doing it! Also, many of us felt very, very unwell after the fact.
Ed. note: Van Leeuwen and Target’s Favorite Day were, among others on our sample lists, but we were unable to procure them the day of the test despite our best efforts. I can’t wait to hear about how much you love them, though, as well as all the other brands our nonexistent West Coast correspondent should have contributed to the test. Xo!
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Contenders
- Adirondack Creamery Whiteface Mint Chip
- Baskin Robbins Mint Chocolate Chip
- Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie Peppermint
- Best Yet Mint Chocolate Chip
- Breyers Mint Chocolate Chip
- Edy’s Mint Chocolate Chip
- Friendly’s Mint Chocolate Chip
- Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip
- Häagen-Dazs Mint Chip
- Jeni’s Green Mint Chip
- McConnell’s Mint Chip
- Tillamook Mint Chocolate Chip
- Turkey Hill Mint Chocolate Chip
- Wegman’s Mint Chocolate Chip
The Criteria
A good mint chocolate chip ice cream is, and I want you to take a deep breath here, not too minty. Don’t get me wrong—it’s definitely minty! But if any part of you takes a bite and clenches because a tiny dentist is yelling at you in your head, you are not eating a nice mint chocolate chip ice cream. As with all our other ice cream taste tests, creaminess is important—wateriness is incorrect. Also important (perhaps equally so!) is that the chocolate present throughout is high-quality, evenly dispersed, and substantially chunky. In a lot of these samples, we encountered smaller shards drowning in ice cream, little squares that kinda clumped, and/or meteorites of chalky junk floating in the corner, waiting to take your tooth #16 out, sending you right back to the dentist as a fun, full-circle bit.
Two things that surprised me: In a few instances, the team picked up on distinct minty-ness from the chips themselves, rather than the surrounding ice cream. Those instances did not correlate to high rankings! The ice cream should be nudgingly but distinctly minty, and the nice, uniform chocolate should be distinctly chocolatey. Secondly, we…don’t really care about color!? I went into the day intending to blindfold my coworkers to ensure they couldn’t let the color of the sample impede their opinions. It turns out there is no comfortable or appropriate way to blindfold your coworkers and force-feed them ice cream, so…they saw everything going into their mouths. And their top choices ran the gamut from stark white to gentle gray to greeeeeeen! What fun.
Of note: Similarly to our chocolate ice cream taste test, we conducted this round on a sweltering and disgustingly humid NYC day. These ice creams were transported from all over the city and sat in a freezer I yanked open near-constantly over the course of the day. There was no way to preserve their textural integrity as we would’ve liked to, but…we did our best! And, as with the chocolate ice cream taste test, I built the uncontrollable variability of iciness/meltiness into the sampling templates, asking people to separate temperature side effects out of their rankings as much as possible.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Rankings
Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie Peppermint, 3.87/5
This Ben & Jerry’s pint—which is a pleasant muddled greenish-gray—ate the way good skincare feels. It was viscous upon contact (in a luxurious way), it smelled good (in a nice afterthought–type way), and eating it felt like you were doing something nice for yourself (in a really uplifting way). I’m not suggesting every other mid-millennial out there reading this should begin slugging with Ben & Jerry’s mint chip, but I’m not not saying we all shouldn’t cleanse with this while we eat it. More relevant to this particular article, perhaps, is the fact that this sample felt very low on stabilizers but held its own nicely, particularly in contrast to the luxe and substantial chocolate-y cookie crumbles.
Baskin Robbins Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.43/5
Behold: the fourth consecutive Serious Eats taste test in which these predictable little monsters gave a deeply nostalgic offering the silver medal. Fascinating! It’s difficult to extrapolate the facts here: Is Baskin Robbins mint chip (a spearmint gum-green ice cream which was “very chocolate-y, and I do love that,” per our visuals director Amanda with a “fantastic chip-to-cream ratio,” per our product lead Alison) actually the second-best ice cream here or do my coworkers all need bi-weekly therapy? Hard to say!
Häagen-Dazs Mint Chip, 3.33/5
Another SE ice cream taste test top three staple: Häagen-Dazs! This particular flavor was creamy and sweet, and though it was one of only three without the word “chocolate” in its name, it featured luscious, chunky chunks that everyone took note of. These chunks even outshone the actual ice cream, to some. Amanda put it best: “These chips command a lot of attention.” TL:DR; if you’re looking for a mint-heavy, chocolate-light mint chocolate chip, this isn’t quite the one for you, but if you are a chocolate lover who likes a subtle mintiness, you’re probably going to love this one. Oh! And it’s snooow-white.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Wegman’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.35/5
Enough of a mixed bag of feedback here that this one squiggled its way toward the top. Of note: This isn’t the first time a Wegman’s product has done that! It had a significant hit of mint at the front—some, like our social media editor, Kelli, adored this, while others, such as Amanda, likened it to toothpaste—and not in a good way. Either way, it stretched nicely, had nice chip distribution, and wasn’t overly sweet. Color-wise, it was like…man-handled white chalk. But in a fun way!
Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.25/5
My pre-tasting notes read: “Seems fancy.” It was milky-white, firm enough to form a scoop shop-ish scoop, and it smelled nice. Genevieve noticed its « milkiness », but noted it tasted watery in addition to creamy. Kelli and Amanda clocked a gumminess that wasn’t entirely pleasant or unpleasant. All this to say, this was a satisfying option, if not exactly a fulfilling one?
Friendly’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 3.125/5
It was so wild how I opened this pint and, right as I began scooping, Frankenstein’s monster said back to me: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.” Tasting notes ranged from: “Dentist!! Dentist!” to “I’ve had this before…” to “Idk what this tastes like but it doesn’t taste like mint.” After our tasting was complete and I revealed this option—the most jarring, neon-adjacent green—to be Friendly’s, Helen, our guest taster/resident SEO genius, threw her head back and laughed in an « I knew it »-type way. Again, they ranked this one above-average!
McConnell’s Mint Chip, 3.17/5
Unequivocally the mintiest of the bunch. If! You! Want! A for-real-minty mint chocolate chip ice cream! You should! Pick! This! One! Comparisons were made to Ice Breakers commercials of yore. It looked like vanilla bean ice cream from the jump. It served as a nice palate cleanser for all that came after it! It also was a very helpful sample in determining criteria for this test—mint chocolate chip should not, in fact, be three-sticks-of-spicy-gum minty.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Tillamook Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.56/5
Another option in which the chunks shone (“These are the chunkiest chunks that have ever been chunked,” wrote Kelli), but the ice cream enveloping them didn’t as much. Tasters craved an ice cream with more mint and a firmer constitution. The whole experience, though aesthetically pleasing (we’ll call the color “white-ish”) and easy to scoop, felt muted.
Adirondack Creamery Whiteface Mint Chip, 2.56/5
Here we enter icy territory. Not, like, the aforementioned Ice Breaker ice. We just ended up with a ice- and chocolate shard-heavy pint. And with shard-shaped chocolate chips kinda-sorta scattered throughout, it wasn’t the creamy, balanced experience the group was hoping for. This sample points for prettiness, heft, and what might have been a more defined mint flavor on a different, less freezer-burned day.
Best Yet Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.4/5
I used up my two permitted dentist references three or four samples ago, so I can’t sit here talking about the toothpaste-iness of this guy for too long, but I will tell you: It felt like Best Yet R&D thought “No one else has gone full-steam-ahead at the toothpaste option. Let’s fill that space.” And they absolutely understood that assignment. Dental hygiene flavor? Check. Dental hygiene color? Check. Dental hygiene texture? It was “like whipped cream and ice cream met up,” per Alison, so nah.
Jeni’s Green Mint Chip, 2.25/5
From here on out, each ice cream was a cloudier color, whether it fell under the realm of “gray,” “green,” or “mossy cement gray-green.” (Again, color did not seem to factor into these rankings, but I’m noting them in case you do fall squarely into a « green chip » or « white chip » camp.) Jeni’s looked like the latter and…listen, we all sincerely love Jeni’s in our personal lives, but this simply did not hold up to the heat for even a minute, nor did it taste great in its quickly puddled form. That said, the chips were small, yummy, and evenly dispersed enough to make people happy, and the mint flavor—A more spearmint-forward energy I’m going to chalk up to the presence of honey in its ingredients list—was different enough from the rest that everyone took note.
Edy’s Mint Chocolate Chip, 2.05/5
OK. So! This was nice but extremely sweet! How nice to have an option that woke up and said “I’m going to put every other sugary option to shame.” Sometimes, you really do just need to eat something you know is going to take you out later!! There were a lot of chocolate chips all up in this ice cream! Plus, if I had to describe the color, I’d call it “Lana Del Ray’s seafoam of choice,” so that’s cool in some circles!!!
Breyers Mint Chocolate Chip, 1.86/5
A well-intentioned ice cream with a prevailing sense of artificiality throughout. If you served this to me in an ice cream cake at a four-year-old’s birthday party on the world’s hottest day that would completely track for me!!
Turkey Hill Mint Chocolate Chip, 1.5/5
See above, but I would probably duck out of that party before dessert. That’s all!
Our Testing Methodology
All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample 1 first, while taster B will taste sample 6 first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets ranking the samples for various criteria. All data is tabulated and results are calculated with no editorial input in order to give us the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
