We pitted Ben & Jerry's new 'light' ice cream against the trendy company that is trying to compete with it - here's the verdict

Jessica Tyler,Jessica Tyler

Aug 11, 2018, 01:25 IST

We pitted Ben & Jerry's new 'light' ice cream against the trendy company that is trying to compete with it - here's the verdict

Business Insider/Jessica Tyler

Ben & Jerry's low-calorie ice cream is much richer than Halo Top's.

Ben & Jerry's released a low-calorie ice cream line in early 2018.
The low-calorie Ben & Jerry's ice cream competes directly with Halo Top, a trendy ice cream company that sells low-calorie flavors and was the top-selling ice cream brand in American grocery stores last year.
We tried a pint of low-calorie ice cream from each brand and found that one was clearly better than the other.

Halo Top offering low-calorie ice cream was one of the trendy brand's biggest assets in competing against more established ice cream companies like Ben & Jerry's.

But Ben & Jerry's is responding to the growing popularity of Halo Top, which launched in 2012, with a low-calorie ice cream of its own.

As Halo Top's "light" ice creams have become more and more popular, Ben & Jerry's released a low-calorie ice cream of its own in February. Ben & Jerry's version comes in three flavors: P.B. Dough, Caramel Cookie Fix, and Chocolate Milk & Cookies. The pints each have under 160 calories per serving and are low in fat, with no artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols.

Though Ben & Jerry's may have more name recognition, Halo Top surpassed it to be America's top-selling ice cream brand in grocery stores last year. Unlike Ben & Jerry's, all of Halo Top's ice cream flavors are low-calorie, with many flavors having under 350 calories per pint - half of what the low-calorie Ben & Jerry's flavors have per pint.

We put both low-calorie ice creams to the test. Here's the verdict:

Ben & Jerry's only makes three flavors of low-calorie ice cream. We tried the P.B. Dough flavor and compared it to Halo Top's non-dairy Peanut Butter Cup, its most similar flavor.

The premise of both ice creams is similar: all the flavor of ice cream, with half as many calories.

We tried Ben & Jerry's P.B. Dough first.

It had 160 calories per serving, or 640 for the whole pint. It had 5 grams of fat, 16 grams of sugar, and four grams of protein.

The flavor was really rich, so it was hard to eat a lot of it. The mix-ins, in this case peanut butter cookie dough bites, were delicious.

The flavor and texture were almost identical to the regular chocolate Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It was hard to taste the difference.

Next up was Halo Top. We tried the non-dairy peanut butter cup flavor, which is the most similar one we could find to P.B. Dough.

Halo Top's ice cream only had 80 calories per serving, and 320 for the whole pint — about half as many calories as the Ben & Jerry's flavor. It had four grams of fat, four grams of sugar, and four grams of protein.

The flavor was very almond-y, even though it was a peanut butter flavor made with coconut milk, not almond milk. It was very nutty, but the peanut butter flavor didn't come through as much.

It was much lighter and more refreshing than the Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It wasn't as rich or filling, and it definitely would have been easier to eat the whole pint because of that.

Both ice creams had a similar taste and texture to regular ice cream.

But Ben & Jerry's had a much richer, better flavor and more mix-ins. It was the better low-calorie ice cream by far.

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