Vegan Ice Cream

(aka, Non-Dairy ice cream)

by Michael Bluejay

Here's a huge list of every single brand and flavor of vegan ice cream I could find in North America, including the number of calories and the amount of fat. It includes styles that are similar to ice cream (i.e., sorbets and gelatos), but it doesn't include other frozen treats like popsicles and ice cream bars. Note that the term "ice cream" is regulated in most places and a producer can't call something ice cream if it doesn't have milk. Look carefully on the product labels and you'll see things like "frozen dessert", but never "ice cream". But I'm a writer, not a food producer, so I can call these things nondairy ice cream if I feel like it (and I do).

Because of the cost of shipping frozen foods and keeping them frozen, most of these brands aren't available nationwide. Most producers concentrate on a very limited geographic area. Notable exceptions are Rice Dream, Soy Delicious, and Tofutti, where are available widely.

I started this page because I'll soon be writing about weight loss and I wanted to find the lowest-calorie treats to recommend. And as you can see, there's a huge range in the number of calories and amount of fat from brand to brand, and sometimes even flavor to flavor.

Make your own!

If these products aren't available in your area, you can easily make your own vegan ice cream. There are scores of free recipes all over the Internet, and there are at least three books out specifically about how to make nondairy ice cream yourself:

Ice Dream Cookbook

The Vegan Scoop

Vice Cream

Let me get you started with the easiest recipe you'll ever see: Put an equal amount of frozen bananas and frozen strawberries in a blender or food processor and blend until creamy. That's it! Just two ingredients!

If the blades just spin around through the fruit without mixing it together, wait a few minutes for the fruit to thaw a little. You can also try adding a tiny amount of water, but not too much, otherwise the mixture will come out watery rather than thick.

This mixture won't freeze well, so you'll need to eat it all at once. If you freeze it, it'll turn to ice.

If this recipe is too simple for you, look for some other recipes on the net, or buy one of the books above.

"Best and Worst" Awards

All figures are for one pint.

Least Calories per pint Brand Flavor Calories Blackwell's Organic Sorbetto Pineapple 440 Strawberry 440 Soy Delicious (Fruit Sweetened) Black Leopard 440 Green Tea 440 Tiger Chai 440 Mango Raspberry 440 Vanilla 440 Awesome Chocolate 460 Carob Peppermint 460 Espresso 460 Raspberry 460	Most Calories per pint Brand Flavor Calories Coconut Bliss Chocolate Peanut Butter 1000 Naked Almond Fudge 960 Purely Decadent (Turtle Mountain) Coconut Craze 960 Tofutti Vanilla Almond Bark 960 Coconut Bliss Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge 948 Purely Decadent (Turtle Mountain) Peanut Butter Zig Zag 920 Swinging Anna Banana 920 Cookie Dough 920 Temptation Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough 920 Peach Cobbler 920
Least fat Brand Flavor Fat Blackwell's Organic Sorbetto Pineapple 0g Strawberry 0g Lemon 0g Mango 0g Raspberry 0g Orange 0g Ciao Bella Sorbetto Kalamansi 0g Peach Martini 0g Blackwell's Organic Soy Gelato Vanilla 4g  (7%) Coffee 4g  (7%) WholeSoy Frozen Yogurt Black Cherry 4g  (8%) Créme Caramel 4g  (8%) Vanilla Bean 4g  (8%) Soy Delicious (Fruit Sweetened) Black Leopard 6g  (14%) Green Tea 6g  (14%) Tiger Chai 6g  (14%) Mango Raspberry 6g  (14%) Vanilla 6g  (14%) Awesome Chocolate 6g  (13%) Carob Peppermint 6g  (13%) Espresso 6g  (13%) Raspberry 6g  (13%) Vanilla Fudge 6g  (13%)	Most fat Brand Flavor Fat Coconut Bliss Chocolate Peanut Butter 72g  (60%) Naked Almond Fudge 64g  (63%) Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge 64g  (57%) Mint Galactica 60g  (63%) Naked Coconut 60g  (55%) Cherry Amaretto 56g  (63%) Vanilla Island 56g  (62%) Cappuccino 56g  (62%) Dark Chocolate 56g  (59%) Strawberry Lemon Love 52g  (61%) Tofutti Vanilla Almond Bark 60g  (56%) Temptation Fair Trade Coffee 56g  (56%) Fair Trade Chocolate 56g  (62%) Mint Chocolate Chip 56g  (59%) Peach Cobbler 56g  (52%) Tofutti Better Pecan 52g  (56%) Vanilla 52g  (56%) Organic Nectars Gelato Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl 52g  (57%) Purely Decadent (Turtle Mountain) Peanut Butter Zig Zag 52g  (52%) Swinging Anna Banana 52g  (52%)
Purest / Simplest ingredients Brand Sample Flavor Ingredients Blackwell's Organic Sorbetto Pineapple Organic Pineapple, Filtered Water, Evaporated Cane Juice, Organic Lemon Juice, Sea Salt Blackwell's Organic Soy Gelato Mango Organic Mango, Filtered Water, Evaporated Cane Juice, Organic Lemon Juice, Sea Salt Ciao Bella Sorbetto Kalamansi Water, Kalamansi puree, Organic Evaporated Cane Juice, Lime Juice, Pectin.	Most Questionable Ingredients Brand Sample Flavor Ingredients Tofutti Vanilla Almond Bark Water, Sugar, Corn oil, Corn syrup solids, Almonds, Soy protein, Tofu, Cocoa processed with alkalai, Coconut oil, vanilla and other natural flavors, Almond extract, Guar, Locust bean and cellulose gums, Carrageenan, Salt, Veg. Mono and Diglyrecides, Annatto color.
Best Website Freezees Simple and fast. All products are listed on a single page, along with ingredients and nutrition info on the same page. Many other sites have only a single product on a page, and most sites force you to painstakingly click a nutrition label link for each product separately -- which then usually spans a popup window. Freezes does what almost no other site does, but what should be obvious: put all the info on one page so you don't have to waste your time clicking all over the universe to find what you need. However, we should point out that Freezees uses a smaller, non-standard serving size on its nutrition labels in order to make its product appear to have fewer calories and less fat. And Freezees is alone in doing so -- every single other manufacturer uses the standard serving size of 1/4-carton. So shame on Freezees for that one. Organic Nectars Requires a little more clicking around than Freezees, but they still have the ingredients and nutrition labels for all products on a single page, saving their visitors a lot of time compared to other sites. Well done.	Worst Websites Brand Sample Flavor Rice Divine (Good Karma Foods) This site is the whole reason I decided to make a Best/Worst Sites section in the first place. I had such a frustrating time here I actually swore never to buy this company's products again. For starters, it's based on ridiculous multimedia that's slow, noisy, and frustrating, but the worst part is the music they forced on me -- which I couldn't turn off. (Clicking the "Sound" link had no effect.) Since I was already playing music through iTunes I then had this horrible combo of both the Rice Divine site and iTunes playing at once. I had to turn the sound on my computer completely off until I finished with their site. Oh, and I hope you like popup windows! Tofutti Their Products menu has not just one but three submenus! Have fun if you accidentally miss the item in the third menu, and then all the menus disappear -- you get to start all over again from scratch. Plus they use lots of Flash animations to make sure the site is nice and slow. Ciao Bella They don't bother to list ingredients for most of their products -- let alone nutrition labels. Even worse, you don't know whether ingredient or nutrition data is available for a particular product or not unless you click through on it specifically -- and given that they have several dozen products, it's gonna take you a while to go through all of them. Finally, their nutrition labels are wrong. (They claim there are 42 servings per container, which would mean a single carton is over 9 pounds.) Ben & Jerry's Slow, Flash-based website, and they don't publish nutrition/ingredient info.

 

Nutrition notes

These tables illustrate a certain point beautifully:

The more fat in a product, the more calories it has.

You can see that fat and calories track exceptionally closely. The products with the least fat have the fewest calories. And those with the most fat have the most calories. This is important because carbs have become the bogeyman recently, but the real problem is fat. Most of these products are loaded with sugar, but when the balance is tipped from sugar to fat, the calorie content surges.

I calculated the percentage of fat using the number of fat calories on the label, as that's generally a little more accurate than the standard method of multiplying the number of fat grams by nine.

All the numbers below should be taken with a grain of salt. Nutrition labels on products are notoriously inaccurate. Sometimes that's due to rounding issues, or faulty analysis, or someone transcribing the numbers from the lab onto the label incorrectly, or even a company fudging its numbers in order to make its product appear better. For example, sometimes in the table you'll see two flavors which have the same number of calories, though one has more fat. That's almost certainly wrong. If a product has more fat, it should almost certainly have more calories. So probably either the calorie counts are wrong, or the fat counts are wrong. Still, the data we have is better than nothing, and certainly we can trust that the products on the lower end of the calorie scale (~500 calories) are really a lot lower than the ones on the higher end of the scale (~1000 calories).

Fruit-based vegan ice cream

Blackwell's Organic Sorbetto Flavor Calories Fat Pineapple 440 0g  (0%) Strawberry 440 0g  (0%) Lemon 520 0g  (0%) Mango 520 0g  (0%) Raspberry 520 0g  (0%) Orange 560 0g  (0%) CT, KY, OH, NJ, NY, MD, PA, VA, DC, and by mail (shipped with dry ice)

Ciao Bella Sorbetto Flavor Calories Fat Kalamansi 520 0g  (0%) Peach Martini 520 0g  (0%) Note: All other Ciao Bella flavors, both sorbetto and gelato, are loaded with milk (except possibly two flavors that have the word "soy" in the title, but they didn't bother to list the ingredients for those products on their website).

Sambazon Flavor Calories Fat Açai 520 16g  (23%)

Soy-based vegan ice cream

Soy Delicious - Fruit Sweetened Flavor Calories Fat Black Leopard 440 6g  (14%) Green Tea 440 6g  (14%) Tiger Chai 440 6g  (14%) Mango Raspberry 440 6g  (14%) Vanilla 440 6g  (14%) Awesome Chocolate 460 6g  (13%) Carob Peppermint 460 6g  (13%) Espresso 460 6g  (13%) Raspberry 460 6g  (13%) Vanilla Fudge 480 6g  (13%) Pistachio Almond 520 18g  (31%) Chocolate Peanut Butter 540 14g  (22%) Almond Pecan 560 18g  (29%) Chocolate Almond 560 18g  (29%)	WholeSoy Frozen Yogurt Flavor Calories Fat Black Cherry 480 4g  (8%) Créme Caramel 480 4g  (8%) Vanilla Bean 480 4g  (8%) Chocolate Hazelnut 480 10g  (17%) Mocha Fudge 480 10g  (17%) Swiss Dark Chocolate 480 10g  (17%)	So Delicious (Turtle Mountain) Flavor Calories Fat Twisted Vanilla Orange 480 8g  (17%) Strawberry 480 12g  (21%) Neopolitan 480 14g  (25%) Creamy Vanilla 520 12g  (19%) Mocha Fudge 520 12g  (19%) Chocolate Velvet 520 14g  (23%) Dulce de Leche 560 12g  (18%) Mint Marble Fudge 560 12g  (21%) Cookies 'N Cream 600 16g  (23%) Peanut Butter 600 24g  (33%) Chocolate Peanut Butter 640 18g  (29%) Butter Pecan 640 28g  (50%)
Soy Dream (Hain Celestial) Flavor Calories Fat Chocolate 480 24g  (42%) Chocolate Fudge Brownie 520 28g  (46%) Mocha Fudge 560 28g  (43%) Strawberry Swirl 560 28g  (43%) Vanilla Fudge 560 28g  (43%) French Vanilla 560 32g  (50%) Green Tea 560 32g  (50%) Vanilla 560 32g  (50%) Butter Pecan 600 36g  (53%)	Blackwell's Organic Soy Gelato Flavor Calories Fat Vanilla 560 4g  (7%) Coffee 600 4g  (7%) Chocolate 600 8g  (13%) Peanut Butter 760 24g  (26%) Peanut Butter Chocolate Swirl 760 28g  (32%)	Purely Decadent (Turtle Mountain) Flavor Calories Fat Purely Vanilla 640 32g  (41%) So Very Strawberry 680 18g  (24%) Dulce de Leche 680 24g  (29%) Blueberry Cheesecake 720 24g  (25%) Belgian Chocolate 720 28g  (28%) Snickerdoodle 760 24g  (26%) Key Lime Pie 760 28g  (24%) Mint Chocolate Chip 760 32g  (37%) Rocky Road 760 32g  (42%) Cherry Nirvana 760 36g  (42%) Raspberry À La Mode 800 28g  (30%) Chunky Mint Madness 800 32g  (35%) Pomegranate Chip 800 32g  (35%) Turtle Trails 800 32g  (35%) Cookie Avalanche 800 36g  (40%) Mocha Almond Fudge 800 36g  (40%) Vanilla Swiss Almond 800 36g  (40%) Chocolate Obsession 840 36g  (38%) Chocolate Brownie Almond 840 40g  (43%) Praline Pecan 840 40g  (43%) Cookie Dough 920 32g  (30%) Peanut Butter Zig Zag 920 52g  (52%) Swinging Anna Banana 920 52g  (52%) Coconut Craze 960 48g  (38%)
Tofutti Flavor Calories Fat Chocolate Supreme 720 44g  (55%) Vanilla Fudge 760 36g  (43%) Wild Berry Supreme 760 36g  (43%) Strawberry Cheescake Supreme 800 48g  (59%) Chocolate Cookie Crunch 840 44g  (56%) Better Pecan 840 52g  (56%) Vanilla 840 52g  (56%) Vanilla Almond Bark 960 60g  (56%)	Temptation by Chicago Soydairy Flavor Calories Fat Fair Trade Green Tea 800 52g  (60%) French Vanilla 800 52g  (60%) Strawberry 800 52g  (60%) Fair Trade Coffee 800 56g  (55%) Fair Trade Chocolate 840 56g  (62%) Mint Chocolate Chip 840 56g  (59%) Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough 920 52g  (48%) Peach Cobbler 920 56g  (52%) Available in FL • IL • IN • MD • MI • MN • NJ • NY • PA • TX • VA • WA • WI

Nut-based vegan ice cream

Rice-based vegan ice cream

Rice Dream Supreme (Hain Celestial) Flavor Calories Fat Sweet Peach Pie 600 24g  (33%) Vanilla Gingersnap 600 24g  (33%) Chocolate Caramel Chai 600 28g  (47%) Vanilla Hazelnut Fudge 600 28g  (47%)

Rice Dream (Hain Celestial) Flavor Calories Fat Neapolitan 640 24g  (31%) Cocoa Marble Fudge 640 28g  (38%) Orange Vanilla Swirl 640 32g  (44%) Strawberry 640 32g  (44%) Vanilla 640 32g  (44%) Cookies n Dream 680 32g  (41%) Mint Carob Chip 680 36g  (47%) Vanilla Swiss Almond 720 36g  (44%) Carob Almond 720 40g  (50%)

Rice Divine (Good Karma Foods) Flavor Calories Fat Banana Fudge 600 24g  (33%) Coconut Mango 600 24g  (33%) Mint Chocolate Swirl 600 24g  (40%) Very Vanilla 600 28g  (40%) Carrot Cake 640 28g  (38%) Mudd Pie 680 32g  (41%) Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge 800 40g  (45%)

Hemp-based vegan ice cream

 

Tempt (Living Harvest) Flavor Calories Fat Vanilla Bean 560 28g  (43%) Coffee Biscotti 560 28g  (43%) Coconut Lime 600 28g  (40%) Mint Chip 680 36g  (47%) Chocolate Fudge 800 44g  (50%) U.S. & Canada

Cool Hemp Flavor Calories Fat Maple 612 26g  (49%) Chocolate 620 26g  (38%) Natural 620 26g  (38%) Available in Canada Comes in 0.5L cartons, which is slightly larger than the 1-pint (0.475L) size of U.S products. The figures above are for the actual 0.5L carton.

Brands which don't publish their nutrition info

Here are the brands which I didn't include above, because they don't provide nutritional / ingredient info about their products on their website, or if they do it's incomplete.

• Temptation
• Bishop's Vegan Gelato
• Natura Glacé
• Double Rainbow (primarily makes regular dairy ice cream)
• Ben & Jerry's (slow, annoying Flash-based website)

U.K. vegan ice cream

Here are some brands of vegan ice cream I found in the U.K.:

• Oat Supreme
• Tofutti (I think this is the only brand available both in the U.S. and the U.K.)
• Swedish Glace
• MotherHemp Organic Hemp Ice (warning: ridiculously slow/cumbersome Flash-based website)

Last update: November 2009