The Dollar Tree Ice Cream You Should Leave In The Freezer Aisle

Vanilla ice cream may be a simple sweet treat, but there's a big difference between a scoop that's creamy and full of real vanilla flavor and one that leaves you wishing you'd bought a different brand. At just $1.50 for a 14-ounce container, Dollar Tree's Founders Street Vanilla Bean Ice Cream is a budget-friendly find, especially compared to many of the other options in the ice cream aisle at traditional grocery stores. But while there are other frozen foods worth buying at Dollar Tree, this ice cream may be one to leave in the freezer. 

Founder's Street Vanilla Bean Ice Cream starts with skim milk and cream, followed by corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and whey. Since ingredients are listed from greatest to least by weight, the placement of those three sweeteners shows that each one makes up more of the ice cream than the ingredients listed after it. For such a simple flavor, there's a lot of sweetness — and not any vanilla — showing up early on the label. 

This ice cream's ingredients also include several gums, calcium sulfate, artificial vanilla, and vanilla bean specks. These are included at 2% or less — yes, even the vanilla flavoring — and compared to other high quality ice creams, the label might give you a good reason to keep browsing the freezer aisle. 

Ice cream is already a sweet treat, and this Founders Street tub certainly fits in the sweet category. Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and sugar come before whey, while dextrose – another added sugar — appears later in the list. The gums and emulsifiers may sound less familiar, but they're used to keep frozen desserts thick and smooth and to help control ice crystallization. 

In an ice cream labeled "Vanilla Bean", you might expect real vanilla bean to give the ice cream its flavor. Founders Street does contain ground vanilla bean specks, but it also relies on artificial vanilla flavor. This doesn't default it to needing to stay on the freezer shelf, but shoppers looking for true vanilla bean may be expecting more of that simple flavor to come from actual vanilla. 

Luckily, you don't have to leave Dollar Tree without a frozen treat. The chain also sells FatBoy Premium Vanilla Ice Cream Sandwiches, with individual sandwiches listed for $1.25. FatBoy's vanilla ice cream is made with vanilla extract rather than artificial vanilla flavor, and one Dollar Tree customer called it, "a tasty treat with a lot of vanilla in the middle." The nostalgic sandwich still contains multiple sweeteners and stabilizers, but if you're looking for real vanilla flavor at a bargain price, the FatBoy sandwich might be the sweeter pick.