You’ve probably never had this ice cream flavor — and here’s why

When it comes to ice cream flavors, the weirder the better — especially in the artisanal world. Wasabi pea dust, caviar, or corn on the cob, anyone? Cup or cone?

These have all been popular flavors at more enterprising creameries. But you know one flavor we’ve never seen?

Grape.

The humble, plain jane grape is often maligned for being too boring, or reminding us too much of cough medicine (Dimetapp, anyone?)

Though it’s been spotted at small scale ice cream shops, you’ll probably never see it packaged for large scale commercial sale. Why?

Wil Fulton points out in his Thrillist article that grapes have too high a water content to actually be easily churned in big batches at commercial facilities. But he also acknowledges that cherries have a similarly high water content as grapes do, and cherry ice cream is a hugely popular flavor. So what gives?

Basically, no one really wants to eat the grape ice cream. For some reason, despite the proliferation of other grape sweet snacks – Gushers, Airheads, Jolly Ranchers, even sorbets– grape ice cream just isn’t being developed because people don’t really have an appetite for it. Ben & Jerry’s has tested similar flavors, and they weren’t that bad – they just weren’t great.

We did find a couple of examples of grape ice cream though – they’re just not the lurid purple of your childhood fantasies.

Behold: Wild grape ice cream. Mmm.

And then there’s this ice cream pop – we can’t tell if it’s legit cream-based or more of a sorbet deal. Not that we’d care if you put it in front of us – we’d eat it.

There’s also grape soft serve (in pink, swirled with a peanut butter flavor). Apparently “yum” is spelled “g-r-a-p-e s-o-f-t s-e-r-v-e?” Who knew.

And then there’s this industrious soul who actually made fresh grape ice cream herself. What this picture lacks in lighting, we’re guessing the ice cream makes up in taste. We also kind of love that it’s white and doesn’t have any artificial coloring.

Basically, the main takeaway from this article is: There’s a wide open grape-shaped niche in the ice cream market. And you, future confectioners of the world, should totally fill it. Just be sure to FedEx us samples when you’re done.

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