Ben & Jerry's | Junk Food Betty

Summertime is in full swing, and we all know what that means: abnormal heat waves and confronting the mounting horrors of climate change!

But also, ice cream. Ice cream is fun!

Growing up, I didn’t like chocolate much, which narrowed my ice cream choices. This was actually a problem when I was growing up in the late 1800s: your choices were basically vanilla, chocolate, or syphilis. Anyone who says the past was better is lying.

Freaks like me chose an alternate path: the fruity one. And back in the days when indoor plumbing was scarce, that meant three flavors: lime, orange, or raspberry, aka The Sherbets Rainbow.

In these capitalist times, there’s a true rainbow of sherbets. No longer are you groaning as you face down the stripe of orange, having already consumed the far superior lime and raspberry portions. Have it your way with all the sherbet flavors available. They probably even contain actual fruit now.

“A raspberry sorbet with an extra tart lemonade swirl and sour sugar bits,” the carton of Limited Batch Pucker Upper proclaims. “…a completely new ingredient, custom-designed for this Ben & Jerry’s flavor,” the press release continues, trying to convince you that the company reinvented Nerds.

The rest of the press release is pretty milquetoast, but here’s one paragraph I enjoyed:

“After 13 years with the company, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flavor quite like this,” said Laura Essaid, Ben & Jerry’s Associate Brand Manager who helped with the new flavor creation process. “It’s a perfect flavor for summer with a balance of sweet and sour, while light, fruity, and refreshing… plus, there’s no grill required.”

That’s a rough joke at the end there, Laura, but I understand. You’re just the Associate Brand Manager. It’s not like you need to put words together good for that position.

I gotta say though, I feel like I have seen a flavor quite like this before..

Yes, I know Laura is referring to the not-Nerds, which certainly are a new ingredient to Ben & Jerry’s. I just love the feverish hype press releases attempt to stir with these proclamations.

L-lemon? You there?

The main body of raspberry sorbet is delicious but ordinary. Tart, sweet, refreshing. The lemon swirl was indeed “extra tart” as advertised, but suffered some bitterness as a side effect. I’ve seen this happen to lemon sorbets before – the more tart you go on a lemon flavor, the more you’re upping the chance for that bitter aftertaste.

This is wisely countered by the addition of the sour sugar bits. They work nicely to counteract that small bitterness by giving tiny, crunchy bursts of sugar. If you snag a bit of lemon swirl with your raspberry, you’re guaranteed to get at least a few of them – there’s no shortage. They don’t taste sour at all, due to already being ensconced in lemon, but they add a welcome sweetness and a bit of crunch to an otherwise uniformly-textured pint.

According to the press release, Ben & Jerry’s used a dairy coating around them to prevent melting. It definitely works when you’re eating out of the carton, but it works less well when you’re spitting them out of your mouth to take a picture. Ghetto? Sure, but definitely faster and more delicious than waiting for a scoop to melt so I can filter out the milk-Nerds.

While the use of a dairy coating to keep the sugar bits from melting is ingenious, it does take Ben & Jerry’s Pucker Upper off the table as a vegan dessert treat. A bummer, but it doesn’t stop Pucker Upper from being a hit in my mind.

Berry and lemon sorbets go great together. It’s a slam-dunk summer treat, no doubt. But the addition of the sugar bits does turn this into something special. Maybe it’s not the most refined flavor palette, but summer is the time to indulge your inner child, especially as we all cook to death. That’s right, I brought us back around!

Ben & Jerry’s seems like a slam-dunk of a company from a leftist perspective. They even pay their employees a living wage!

That’s absolutely good to hear, until you see that employees on glassdoor.com are reporting wages of below $10/hour at Scoop Shops. And there are news stories of migrant workers at their dairy farms making unlivable wages, as recently as 2017. This has since improved, but the migrants had to fight for it.

I’m not saying Ben & Jerry’s is the worst, but when you bring politics into your ice cream game, as they have, you better make sure your house is in order!

Limited Batch Ben & Jerry’s Pucker Upper

Score: 4.5 out of 5 BRING BACK ADORABLE CARTOON FRUITS!
Price: $3.84
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Walmart
Nutritional Quirk: Raspberry puree is the second ingredient. Take that, Rainbow Sherbet!

Ben & Jerry's Save Our Swirled Ice Cream Carton Ben & Jerry’s loves them some punny names, and Save Our Swirled is no exception. “Oh, cute, it’s like Save Our World!” You might think when you first see the name of the ice cream.

“Oh, cute, is says SOS on the carton lip!” You continue. “Oh cute, there’s the little Ben & Jerry’s cow, wearing a sweater, standing…on a disappearing glacier in the middle of the ocean…”

At this point you read the sign the cow is holding up, which says, “If it’s melted it’s ruined!” and then you start bawling your eyes out in the frozen treats section of Target, thinking of all the polar bears and penguins and how our nation’s coastline will be underwater probably in your lifetime.

While all this is happening, other Target patrons are staring at you, probably thinking that you’re holding a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and sobbing because you’re thinking about how your boyfriend just broke up with you and you’re about to spend another night alone with the only two reliable men in your life and a Netflix queue of romantic comedies. Those people are totally sexist. Ignore them. They just don’t get it.

Drying your eyes and adding the ice cream to your cart, because depressing or not, it is a new Ben & Jerry’s flavor, you console yourself with the fact that a portion of the profits must be going towards something working to combat climate change, right?

Well…no. Not exactly. The carton urges you to go to this site to sign a petition in regards to working towards clean energy. And, to be fair, there’s a lot of information about climate change and how Ben & Jerry’s works towards being a green company.

But I feel like all those tears in the frozen food aisle would have felt more justified if I thought I was actively doing something by purchasing this flavor.

Much like the current state of our planet’s climate, Save Our Swirled sounds like a bit of a mess. The carton describes the flavor as “Raspberry Ice Cream with Marshmallow & Raspberry Swirls & Dark & White Fudge Ice Cream Cones”. Holy ampersands, Batman! I’m pretty sure my elementary school English teacher would ding me for a run-on sentence on that one. And the fact that it’s not a sentence.

Semantics aside, there are so many flavors going on here that my brain is confused, which makes me think my taste buds are going to be, also. I’m also not entirely sure what “dark & white fudge ice cream cones” means. Pieces of cone dipped in chocolate? I guess I’m going to have to dive in to find out.

Ben & Jerry's Save Our Swirled Ice Cream Open

It looks so innocent on the surface, but there is much hiding underneath. I’m going to have to break this down into parts.

Ben & Jerry's Save Our Swirled Ice Cream Fudge Cones

To my surprise, the “cone” part of this didn’t involve ice cream cones at all, but instead referred to the shape of these little candies that are half dark fudge and half white. I’m sure you can understand my confusion, because we are talking about ice cream, so my brain went to waffle cones. Regardless, the little candies were tasty, and the sweetness of the white fudge nicely complimented the slight bitterness of the dark fudge.

Ben & Jerry's Save Our Swirled Ice Cream

The marshmallow swirl is all of the white stuff that you can see in the picture. I found it to be weak in both flavor and texture – all it added was a little sweetness, and it was surprisingly thin to the point of being runny, which is not at all what I would expect from something billed as “marshmallow”.

The raspberry swirl was a tasty…goo-like substance that worked well with the dark chocolate. It was rich and easily distinguishable as raspberry. I really liked the swirl, but on top of already-raspberry ice cream, it started to taste like raspberry overload.

The marshmallow swirl would have done well to step in here and break things up, but apparently it was too busy over there not tasting or acting like marshmallow at all, so it was of no help.

While I enjoyed most of Save Our Swirled’s ingredients on their own, the whole did not add up to the sum of its parts. The raspberry-on-raspberry action was too much and the marshmallow swirl was entirely underwhelming. On the plus side, the dark/white fudge “cones” added a nice change of texture and worked well with the sweetness of the other ingredients.

On the whole, I’d call Save Our Swirled a rare misstep by Ben & Jerry’s. They usually manage to take a mishmash of ingredients and make them work together, but there were some things that just didn’t work here. SOS isn’t so bad that I won’t finish the pint, but I won’t be purchasing it again, especially with all the other B&J’s more delicious options out there. Sorry, world.

Ben & Jerry’s Save Our Swirled Ice Cream

Score: 2 out of 5 sob-inducing drowning cows
Price: $3.00 (on sale; regular price $3.99)
Size: 1 pint
Purchased at: Target
Nutritional Quirk: Nothing remotely marshmallow-sounding in the ingredients, so I’m going to blame “liquid sugar” as the marshmallow culprit.

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