Bryers Ice Cream... Not

Becky got some free Breyers Ice Cream from Dash's Market recently that was part of  their rewards program. We were sitting at the kitchen table enjoying our ice cream after dinner. The flavor was Heath with a big splashy logo sign that exclaimed "made with 100% real Heath Toffee pieces". 

Well, as I was this really delicious ice cream I started reading the fine print and the list of ingredients on the box. I was surprised to see that nowhere on the packaging were the words "ice cream". The largest lettering describing what we were eating said "Frozen Dairy Dessert".  So we weren't eating ice cream like we thought and we decided to look up Breyers online which revealed some interesting stories about their ice cream.

Apparently some of Breyers flavors fail to meet a basic criteria for being ice cream set by the US Dept. of Agriculture and cannot by law use the phrase "ice cream" on those products. They are therefore called "frozen dairy dessert" which actually means not ice cream. According to the Food and Drug Administration ice cream has at least 10% dairy fat and a frozen diary dessert does not.

Breyers began in Philadelphia in 1866 and was later bought out by Kraft Foods. More recently the company was absorbed into the Unilever multinational conglomerate. 

Becky and I also talked about having "ice milk" as kids. Later in the early 1990's the government regulators allowed food companies to call that particular product "low fat ice cream" rather than ice milk. So any low fat ice cream on the shelves today is what we called ice milk back in the day.