National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day Date in the current year: July 1, 2024

People have enjoyed ice cream and ice cream-like frozen desserts for centuries. Traditional ice cream flavors include vanilla, which is the most popular ice cream flavor in the world, chocolate, and various fruit flavors.

However, as ice cream became affordable and popular throughout the world thanks to the development of refrigeration technologies, manufacturers begin to invent new ice cream flavors to stand out from the crowd and draw customers on the basis of variety. For example, Baskin-Robbins built its entire marketing strategy on its 31 ice cream flavors (a different flavor for each day of the month).

Although traditional ice cream flavors remain the most popular ones, creative and unusual flavors have their fair share of fans. It should also be noted that what counts as an unusual ice cream flavor in one part of the world might not be considered unusual in another part of the world. For example, matcha (green tea) ice cream is very common in Japan but it used to be considered exotic in Western countries. Today, however, it is becoming more and more common even in the West.

So, what are some of the most creative ice cream flavors one might come across? In some Japanese ice cream stores, one can find fish and seafood ice cream flavored with crab, eel, octopus, and shrimp. Other unusual Japanese ice cream flavors include chicken wing, wasabi, miso, soy sauce, sweet potato, soba (buckwheat noodles), seaweed, bitter melon, red beans (anko), and squid ink.

Heladería Lares, an ice cream shop in the town of Lares, Puerto Rico, offers several dozen ice cream flavors daily, many of which are very unusual. They include, for example, rice & beans, garlic, cod fish, carrot, pumpkin, sweet potato, avocado, corn, and many others.

An artisan ice cream shop in the Scottish town of Falkirk used to sell mayonnaise ice cream that broke the Internet in 2018, and it wasn’t the only unusual ice cream flavor they came up with, although definitely the craziest one. And of course you can buy fish and chips flavored ice cream in England.

Other weird ice cream flavors that can be found across the world include curry, smoked salmon, lobster, bacon, stout, foie gras, mint & cucumber, cheese, brown bread, mushroom, tomato & basil, gin & tonic, black licorice, olive oil, ramen, chili, mustard, cactus, black peppercorn, bourbon, tequila, and even pizza. Some people might find them disgusting, but others love them. As they say, every man to his taste!

Celebrate National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day by visiting your local ice cream shop and tasting some of the most unusual flavors it offers or by buying unusual ice cream at a grocery store. And if you’re feeling really adventurous, try making your own ice cream with any flavor you want.