7 Halo Top Ice Cream Flavors, Ranked

Halo Top has been a leader in the ice cream market for low-calorie dairy treats for a number of years now. Easily spotted in the freezer aisle by their golden lids, Halo Top pints advertise full flavor for only 280 to 380 calories per pint. Low in sugar and especially high in protein, these light ice creams are a healthy alternative to eating a full pint of whatever your favorite indulgent brand is. Halo Top has since expanded to making dairy-free ice creams as well as fruit-based sorbets and pops. In recent years the brand has even spread itself to the baking aisle.

Today, we will be going back to basics and trying seven of its most popular dairy ice cream flavors in order to determine which ones are the best, and which are the best to leave behind at the grocery store. The flavors we tried were as follows; Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Cookies & Cream, Peanut Butter Cup, Sea Salt Caramel, and Chocolate Caramel Brownie. We've ranked all seven of them from our least to most favorite.

Read more: The Ultimate Ice Cream Brands, Ranked

Cookies And Cream

Of all the Halo Top Light ice cream flavors, this one does the biggest disservice to its namesake. A top-notch cookies and cream ice cream will have a decadent, chunky sweet ice cream with bits of cookie in every bite. Halo Top's cookies and cream fails to deliver on every level, landing it at the bottom of our ranking.

For starters, the texture is admittedly a drawback of all Halo Top dairy products. You don't get that light, low-calorie product without removing some of what makes ice cream so rich and delicious. In the case of this flavor, it was very noticeable.

The biggest flaw, though, is that the cookies here are nearly absent entirely. At first glance, it looks like the normal cookies and cream ice cream you know and love but one bite will erase that feeling. The ice cream itself is a more artificially sweet version of Halo Top's vanilla that doesn't really work on its own. As a result, neither the cookies nor the cream really come through here. You can really feel the corners cut in order to get this into a pint down to just 310 calories.

Peanut Butter Cup

The most mystifying of the Halo Top flavors we tried, this Peanut Butter Cup ice cream is not what anyone would normally expect from the flavor. Forgone are the mini peanut butter cups, you find in Ben and Jerry's or at your nearest boutique ice cream parlor. No, this ice cream contains zero mix-ins and is instead a chocolate and peanut butter-flavored ice cream. As a big fan of this classic sweet and salty combination, we have to admit this option let us down a bit.

The ice cream itself admittedly tastes like a chocolate peanut butter cup, albeit a fairly stuffed one. Which is to say, it is mostly peanut butter with barely enough chocolate flavor to be noticeable. It doesn't taste bad, but the flavor wasn't our favorite either.

Most disappointing of all was the undelivered ribbons of real peanut butter churned throughout the pint. We dug in and couldn't find any. Whether we simply got a bad pint is unclear, but either way, the result was a massive letdown. Even for 330 calories a pint, this isn't worth it.

Chocolate

We hate to be contrarian just for the sake of it and know Halo Top's Chocolate ice cream is often spoken highly of among the brand's devotees. Yet, when it comes down to the taste and satisfaction factors of this pint of ice cream we couldn't help but find it unimpressive. Of all the ice creams we tried, the Chocolate tasted the most light.

Upon first tasting, the chocolate ice cream isn't bad and you certainly get a strong chocolate flavor. It is not as rich, nor as naturally sweet, as some others but it's far from the worst chocolate flavor we've ever tasted. However, there is a bit of an unnatural aftertaste that follows which makes it hard for us to crave more. We suspect this strange hint of flavor at the end is a result of the sweeteners that Halo Top uses to cut down on sugar and calorie counts in its products.

Vanilla Bean

For less than 300 calories, this pint of vanilla ice cream is actually quite good. The texture isn't all there, but the strong vanilla bean flavor shines through. But for many people who are going to the store and grabbing a pint of ice cream to snack on by itself, vanilla might not be their first choice. Its light Vanilla Bean flavor, however, does make a great, healthier option to pile on top of other desserts.

Nothing goes better with hot apple pie than a nice cold scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream. A scoop of vanilla just makes everything better. As an accompaniment, it's more than likely Halo Top's luscious vanilla ice cream is going to get the job done at your next dinner party. Or, better yet, this light ice cream might just be the perfect way to make that next brownie sundae a little less indulgent.

Sea Salt Caramel

The Sea Salt Caramel flavor pleasantly caught us by surprise. After trying the Peanut Butter Cup flavor, we were worried this would be a bland and pale imitation of an in-vogue ice cream flavor. We've had our share of good salted caramel ice creams and know that a light version would be easy to mess up. Instead, what we found was delightful swirls of yummy caramel inside a buttery sweet ice cream.

The end result, after our analysis, is interestingly closer to a classic Butter Pecan without the crunchy nuts than the dark, rich, and luscious caramel you might expect from a traditionally made salted caramel ice cream. However, you certainly won't catch us complaining about it too much, despite the unexpected twist. Mainly because this turned out to be one of the Halo Top flavors that we were more positive about overall, ranking it high on our list.

Strawberry

If the goal of our taste test was to find the flavor that easily passes for regular ice cream, Halo Top's Strawberry flavor would be our winner. To put it another way, the appeal of strawberry ice cream was not lessened by the light, fluffier texture of Halo Top's dairy ice cream. Instead, we found it only highlighted the brightness of the strawberry flavor, without losing too much of the creaminess of an ice cream. If you wanted fruit without cream, you'd eat a sorbet. The strawberry flavor ice cream fills a specific craving, one that this Halo Top flavor fulfills.

In being lighter than your typical strawberry ice cream, the Halo Top tasted a bit more like a strawberry milkshake. Of all the flavors we tried, this one felt like it was best accentuated by the texture of Halo Top's light ice cream. The result is a sweet, lightly fruity ice cream that hits the spot when you're dying for a fast-food milkshake.

Chocolate Caramel Brownie

Halo Top's Chocolate Caramel Brownie delivers on the flavors and textures it promises and, among the bunch we sampled, was the one we would be most likely to eat again. The brownie chunks in this pint are not massive or numerous, nor are they especially gooey or chewy. Still, they taste like brownies, chocolatey and rich, which is more than we can say for many of the flavors we sampled.

It is the caramel swirls that taste almost too good to be true for a 360-calorie pint. These swirls are what we would actually call generous in terms of portions, and there's a hint of sea salt to each one that is honestly pretty spectacular. If you get a bite of everything, that salted caramel will be the perfect companion to the rich chocolate ice cream and brownie swirl. The result is harmonious and crave-able, making it the best Halo Top ice cream flavor that we have tried to date.

Read the original article on Daily Meal.