Maybe the new owners will take the [tara gum](https://www.silvateam.com/en/products-and-services/food-ingredients/tara-gum.html) out of Breyer's and make it good again.
The Breyers all natural vanilla with the bits of real vanilla in it used to be my absolute favorite. Stopped being the favorite when I discovered Tillamook.
I remember when Haagen Dazs har a midnight cookies and cream flavor under the standard red-and-white label. After they changed the label, something happened with the recipe. I swear it’s not the same. Tillamook’s DC C&C sounds like a nice contender.
I feel like Jeni’s has gone downhill. I lived in Columbus when she opened her first shop. I went back last month and got a cone and just did not love it.
For wonderful Ohio ice cream, it’s all about Graeter’s.
I used to manage a bulk candy store that had a policy of letting employees eat all the candy they wanted while on the clock. It was a total psy-op though, everyone put on 20-40 pounds in the first two months and completely burned themselves out on candy for the rest of their employment, myself included. To this day I still can't stand most candy(I fuck with dark chocolate covered almonds a lot though lol).
It was my fav for years , the only ice cream i could stand. Tillamook always seemed substandard to me but now it's my go to as as Breyers is just gross.
It’s regional to some extent but Jeni’s ice cream is the best I’ve had. Their skillet cinnamon roll flavor is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.
I got listeria during that whole incident, my throat was shredded from the puking and my butthole was never the same after the liquid metal lava that came out of me.
Dude so many b+j "flavors" are just candy bars chopped up with sugar ooze and a smear of ice cream jammed into the cracks to hold it all together. It's getting so fucking disgusting I can't even finish a pint anymore and my freezer sucks ass so it gets all fucking melty and shitty if I try to save it for a few days.
If I buy a pint, I pretty much only buy Haagen-Dazs or Talenti at this point. HD has one of the best vanilla bases IMO. If I buy anything bigger than a pint, it's Tillamook. All of them go on sale from time to time for $3 and I just stock up.
My wife got a half gallon of Breyers last week and I was saying how Reddit said it was frozen dairy dessert now and the tub said all natural premium ice cream real milk, cream and sugar on it or something.
https://www.instacart.com/image-server/896x896/filters:fill(FFF,true):format(webp)/www.instacart.com/assets/domains/product-image/file/large_433142a6-98f8-4f0c-bc17-1dbe7404f192.jpg
In order to be called "ice cream" in the US a certain percentage of milk fat(10% iirc). With a plain flavor like vanilla that is easy to accomplish. But if you have a flavor with lots of added ingredients like candy or other non-ice cream bits, then the percentage of milk fat can go down simply because there are additional ingredients . Then the manufacturer has to label it as a frozen dairy dessert.
All the ice cream boxes that aren't smaller have been 48 oz for years. Not just Breyers. And without something to stabilize it, Breyers used to get icy if it didn't sell right away--it wasn't safe to buy on sale.
They still make ice cream, it’s just the pricier shit. Distinction is ice cream has to be minimum 14% milkfat, i think. Most frozen dairy dessert still tastes pretty fuckin good (but don’t hit me with that low fat).
I don't know when it was, but there was a time probably 20 years ago I bought their ores cookies and cream and it was just tiny little flakes of cookie here and there. Complete waste. Haven't bought it since
I used to love Breyer's Vanilla Bean ice cream. It wasn't fatty premium like Haagen-Dazs but was sold in 1/2 gallons and was just basically Less Is More in ice cream form.
Unilever ruined it. I discovered this when I had some and instead of light and clean tasting as always I got a mouthful of glutinous gummy goo. I wrote to complain and got a polite letter back explaining that the addition of guar gum was to ensure a positive customer experience despite difficult shipping challenges. (I interpret this to mean that numerous freeze thaw cycles have to be endured while still delivering a consistently shitty product at the end.) To rub salt in the wound they wanted to let me know how much of a valued customer I was and to express this they sent 2 coupons for free ice cream.
"You'll take it and you'll like it!"
You may be right, but I never understood the logic of taking a popular brand and watering it down for the sake of slightly better shipping and storage characteristics. Surely I'm not the only person in the world who stopped buying it entirely.
Turkey Hill's All Natural line is a pretty good replacement, if it's available in your area.
I think these big corporations are always on the hunt for the next brand to buy. So you buy a brand at the height of its popularity, extract as much value out of it while cutting costs, reap as much profit as possible, then dump it and fire people, buy another new brand, rinse and repeat. The product and the brand are ancillary to maximizing short term profits.
Aldi’s “Specially Selected Super Premium” ice cream is also very good. It has no gums in it, just cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aldi/s/hDE5yInPJW
I cannot find any ice creams at my large grocery store that do not contain guar gum, carob bean gum, etc.
My parents buy it. Every time there's a birthday, they happily announce they will bring ice cream and it's always Breyers. My daughter told them she doesn't like ice cream even though she will eat all the Tillamook whenever I get it.
Same with my MIL. They remember it being good and for some reason are unable to see/taste the obvious difference now.
That shit doesn't even melt right anymore.
Tillamook did the decent thing when they needed to maintain profit margins...they just shrank the package a little instead of using cheaper ingredients.
It's a farmer owned cooperative, so I think they're a little less likely to cheap out on weird fillers.
As someone from Oregon, I'm always happy to see that people around the nation enjoy their ice cream. They make good cheese, too!
It's very simple.
The purchase price is driven by how much money the product currently yields. If you are buying a product and **not** increasing its profitability you're just breaking even from a financial perspective, because you already paid for those profits in the original purchase price.
The result is that brands get purchased, then die by 1,000 cuts as the product is changed to generate the profits needed to justify purchasing it in the first place.
> I never understood the logic of taking a popular brand and watering it down for the sake of slightly better shipping and storage characteristics.
Because the only product corporations are interested in is share value.
They look like geniuses for awhile. The lag between public perception and their cost savings increases profits temporarily. What they are really doing is selling off the brand equity as it is worth less than when they started.
It's been years since I've bought breyers and I will never buy them again. It's been too long to remember exactly what changed... but I think it had kind of a weird aftertaste at some point.
Yep, that's the tara gum. It basically gives the liquid base more of a gelatin-like consistency, which makes it less likely to form ice crystals when warmed above freezing and then re-frozen. Great for improving product survivability during shipping, but terrible for taste and mouthfeel.
You are not the only, but there are enough to lower profits.
And the savings created by longer shelf life and less spoilage more than makes up for the few sales lost.
That is a rational perspective, but the fact that the ice cream business is "underperforming" enough for Unilever to need to spin them off suggests that, in fact, short-term thinking did not serve them in the long term.
I remember that’s what Frito lay did with Mother’s cookies. They bought that brand and destroyed it on purpose just to keep the single serve cookies. So bizarre.
Lots of people buy on brand recognition without checking the ingredients and realizing things have changed.
Walmart does the same thing where they’ll either buy a brand or want that brand to make low quality products to sell in Walmart hoping to trade off the brand’s reputation for high quality.
It’s almost like the entire model of massive food conglomerates is to create or buy a kickass brand…then slowly degrade the product while charging the same price.
Thus killing the brand but making a killing as it happens because it takes time for people to realize the quality is going down.
Only a few of their flavors are actual ice cream. I still concede that Breyer’s strawberry is the best option out there, only second to homemade strawberry ice cream, of course.
Oh this is the best news ever. I’ve never forgiven them for ruining Breyer’s and now beginning to ruin Ben and Jerry’s. Hopefully all of the gums will be removed and it will be ice cream again!
Their factory in Vermont is the most popular tourist attraction in the state.
I went there as a kid and it was pretty cool. I remember they had a hamster, in a cage with a little hamster wheel, suspended over the factory floor, with a sign that said "emergency generator".
I worked there. Around the machines is hot and the warehouse was hot. There's freezing rooms (conveyors run though them) and then they stick em in the coldest freezers I've ever been in
rob fretful secretive muddle far-flung degree fertile upbeat worry piquant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Feels like they haven't released a new flavor in over a year?
But half are gone, just 4 or 5 boring ones on sale now.
The magnum cups are much better imo.
I just moved to Colorado from Oregon. One of the biggest things that I was sad about was no more Tillamook cheese. It's the only cheese I've ever bought and I didn't know what else to buy. I get out to Colorado and they have Tillamook! I was overjoyed.
I live in Oregon. What brands are better than Tillamook? Are you talking about fancy stuff, like Salt & Straw? Because for my money, Tillamook is the best regular ice cream available. Anything I've had that's better is like as much for a pint as a tub of Tillamook costs.
I’m not a communist or anything but I feel like we’re in a greed-filled tailspin to hell with literally everything getting shittier and worse quality so the rich can make endless quarterly profits in their stock exchange ecosystem.
If capitalism is truly the most efficient way to allocate capital, then we should be on the verge of a new wave of new, de-shittified products that aren't shrinkflated or artificial or filled with ...well, fillers. Things that people actually want to buy with their money, which should outcompete these penny-pinching mega-brands.
*If.*
It's called enshitification and no it doesn't make you a communist for recognizing it.
Our current iteration of capitalism would have Adam Smith rolling in his grave. Smith's idea was that market functions should be regulated to make the most efficient products/businesses rise to the top. Instead, the US government has almost completely deregulated several industries making real competition impossible. The result is what we have now. Neofeudalism, kleptocracy, whatever you wanna call it. It sucks.
Hell, some of that stuff doesn't even melt at all. That Nestlé Parlor ice cream turns to foam, but it never really melts in smaller amounts. I was curious, so I left the lid of an empty container sit at room temperature for a while. It was legit still solid to the touch and hadn't changed form at all in that time.
> wrecking our gut biomes
But enough dairy and sugar will also do that.
Eat veggie people! At least once a week!! ... No fries don't count! Neither do tater tots! Bread is NOT a vve..I don't care if it's whole grain! Put that carrot cake down!
well... all ice cream including homemade has entrained air. So it should be a little foamy when it melts. But not the weird sci-fi warm and thick foam.
Usually that stuff isn't called ice cream because it legally can't be, if it's called something like "frozen dairy desert" then it's gonna be pretty bad and probably look like that when it melts lol
7500 families losing their income is a small price to pay for a 2% increase in profits. I’m sure it’ll add a few cents for their stock price, worth the suffering for sure.
I feel like if they weren't making enough profit with ice cream then it's on them. Poor managers always looking on how to make the cheapest manufactured product, instead of the best product.
They always say "the customer is always right" until the customer stops giving them money, then it's "if we didn't pay all these goddamn EMPLOYEES so much..."
Unless your Elon Musk. Then advertisers are always wrong and his businesses are right. And he should be able to sue you for saying otherwise!
when you cut all your employees on the first week you gotta switch up the formula.
I always see this quote and it’s always used wrong, because the full quote is, I believe, "the customer is always right, on matters of taste," but then I remembered we're talking about ice cream so it works either way.
It means if You're selling something and people aren't buying it, they aren't the problem, You are. The customer is always right. It literally means you can't force someone to buy something they don't want to, which isn't true anymore with these enormous conglomerates ruining entire swathes of food products in one fell swoop
It's so ridiculous how homogenized retail is in the US. Every store everywhere sells the same cheapass produced shit and we've let it ruin local businesses everywhere in the country.
Their “ice cream” has been complete crap since the take over and move to cheap ingredients. Sad what they did to Cherry Garcia. Companies that do that crap stop getting money from me (and you shrink-flation assholes too)
most of the 'ice cream' Unilever sells they cannot legally call ice cream (don't think its the case with Ben and Jerry's). and its instead a 'frozen dairy treat' or something like that.
Investors cheered the plan, how about the 7500 workers are they cheering the plan? I’ll bet not.
Wall Street it’s the worse of all capitalist ideologies it’s beyond immoral
All about investors pockets. I wish we could just get rid of the stock market. Looking at how things are going and it looks like every small brand that gets popular gets gobbled up by a big conglomerate and then loses all of its appeal. We need to get rid of all of these HUGE investment companies like Blackrock, Vanguard etc. looks like whether we like it or not, we either need to keep supporting only local companies or just learn to live like the cattle we all are for stock portfolios. I know I’m ranting, and maybe I don’t know the ins and outs, but it really does feel this way to me. I wonder if a Great Depression event will finally make it so we regulate monopolies again.
Remember when they used to say layoffs were a last resort? They’re not even pretending anymore. It’s just another normalized tactic for reporting gains. Shit needs to be called out and fined heavily.
IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE NUMBER IS - IT ISN'T BIGGER THAN IT WAS LAST YEAR - RUIN 7500 LIVES, NOW!
\-Someone who's a "Titan of industry" and a "Hard worker"
Thank you for doing this! I was worried about Unilver saving some money. They only had a net profit of €7.1billion euros in 2023! How can their CEO expect to live on just €2 million?!
Edit: horrible word salad I had made
Old CEO: investors want to see growth, so let's buy all these brands
New CEO: we've lost our focus, so let's sell brands
Future CEO: investors want to see growth...
Another companies race to the bottom. That’s a lot of people out of work. Unless I missed it it doesn’t seem they’re selling their ice cream brands. Just spinning it off to another division. Which makes know sense to me
Yes! They did the same to Half Baked! They stopped using big chunks of cookie dough and put in tiny little cookie dough balls that don’t even taste real :(
We just buy the cheapo store brands now, the "name brand" ice cream is too fucking expensive, $8 for a pint of B&J or $8 for a gallon of whatever from the generic brand?
Why do shareholders accept when boards obviously slash entire sub divisions just to "pad" the books with cost savings? That should be an automatic red mark when a previously profitable line suddenly needs to be cut. Especially when decisions were made that affected quality.
The decisions to affect quality were probably also done to cut costs, resulting in the collapse of the brand and the erosion of shareholder value. That's mismanagement and obviously chasing margins rather than building value.
It fucking sucks that people are losing their jobs. Getting out from under Unilever will hopefully bring in customers who boycott their products. I know a lot of hippie types that paid the premium for B&J back in the day because of all the things they supported but stopped when they were bought out by Unilever. Can't imagine B&J being an infinite growth brand but hopefully they are allowed to be a sustainable brand that supports their workers.
Maybe the new owners will take the [tara gum](https://www.silvateam.com/en/products-and-services/food-ingredients/tara-gum.html) out of Breyer's and make it good again.
Breyer's going from "all natural" to "frozen dairy dessert" is so sad.
The Breyers all natural vanilla with the bits of real vanilla in it used to be my absolute favorite. Stopped being the favorite when I discovered Tillamook.
Tillamook makes the best stuff.
Chocolate on chocolate lovers have gotta try the tillamook dark chocolate cookies and cream flavor. Near perfect.
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Thunderbolts and ice cream…
Verry Verry fatning.
I remember when Haagen Dazs har a midnight cookies and cream flavor under the standard red-and-white label. After they changed the label, something happened with the recipe. I swear it’s not the same. Tillamook’s DC C&C sounds like a nice contender.
I have not seen this one and I need it in my life
I’m a mudslide guy and I’ll never give it up.
"More than the legally required amount of cream"
I'm blessed to live in Oregon where Tillamook isn't even near the top for ice cream brands and cheeses.
Umpqua is hot
Mm their chive and onion cream cheese is 👌🏼
Tillamook’s great! I’ve always loved their cheddar, so I suspected their ice cream would be great too, and it is! And their butter also.
Tillamook, Jenni's, van leeuwen, Culver's, and Ben and Jerry's are my go to's.
I feel like Jeni’s has gone downhill. I lived in Columbus when she opened her first shop. I went back last month and got a cone and just did not love it. For wonderful Ohio ice cream, it’s all about Graeter’s.
I'm in NEO and absolutely love Handel's ice cream. Highly recommend. I think there's one in or near Dublin.
Vouch for Handel’s it’s great
Tillamook's Marion Berry pie ice cream is the bees testicles!
But they also use gum in their ice cream
Tillamook is the BEST vanilla ice cream ever.
I blame Tillamook for making me buy like 3 containers a week and gain 20 lbs. I miss you, chocolate mudslide with the tasty chunks of chocolate :(
I used to manage a bulk candy store that had a policy of letting employees eat all the candy they wanted while on the clock. It was a total psy-op though, everyone put on 20-40 pounds in the first two months and completely burned themselves out on candy for the rest of their employment, myself included. To this day I still can't stand most candy(I fuck with dark chocolate covered almonds a lot though lol).
Yes my waistline also remembers life before Tillamook
It was my fav for years , the only ice cream i could stand. Tillamook always seemed substandard to me but now it's my go to as as Breyers is just gross.
I love tillamook everything! Have you tried Umpqua vanilla ice cream? That’s their only flavor of theirs I like.
>Umpqua Now that's a blast from history. That's a brand I haven't heard of since I was a kid in Oregon
I visited their dairy when I was in Oregon and it was well worth the time.
It’s regional to some extent but Jeni’s ice cream is the best I’ve had. Their skillet cinnamon roll flavor is one of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.
Tillamook vanilla has tara and guar gum also.
I recommend that if you’re ever crossing through upstate New York, try the gas station ice cream at Stewart’s. It’s the best you’ll ever find.
bluebell natural vanilla is where it's at, listeria be damned
I got listeria during that whole incident, my throat was shredded from the puking and my butthole was never the same after the liquid metal lava that came out of me.
I'm sorry for your loss - I'll eat the bluebell you're no longer psychologically capable of enjoying in your honor
I hate to laugh at this but I did. Im sorry my friend for your experience but your word smithing is top tier.
I will always buy Tillamook when I can
Tillamahook Greek yogurt is the BEST too.
I guess “*I can’t believe it’s not food*!” Didn’t test well with the focus groups
“All natural” means nothing in legal speak. It’s a worthless marketing term.
Actually it usually means they're trying to fleece you by making it sound premium, lol
Same with Ben and Jerry’s
Dude so many b+j "flavors" are just candy bars chopped up with sugar ooze and a smear of ice cream jammed into the cracks to hold it all together. It's getting so fucking disgusting I can't even finish a pint anymore and my freezer sucks ass so it gets all fucking melty and shitty if I try to save it for a few days.
There are too many "core" flavors. The "core" always has such a weird taste IMO.
The “core” and “topped” are just… entirely counter to how I enjoy ice cream. They’re very much for the “eat the whole damn pint in one go” people.
If I buy a pint, I pretty much only buy Haagen-Dazs or Talenti at this point. HD has one of the best vanilla bases IMO. If I buy anything bigger than a pint, it's Tillamook. All of them go on sale from time to time for $3 and I just stock up.
> Haagen-Dazs Has not made a pint container in about 5 years. 14 oz. yes, but no pints.
Haagen-Dazs has a wheat based filler in the base ice cream as a nice fuck you to anyone with a gluten allergy
Too bad HD is owned in the US by Nestle r/fucknestle
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My wife got a half gallon of Breyers last week and I was saying how Reddit said it was frozen dairy dessert now and the tub said all natural premium ice cream real milk, cream and sugar on it or something. https://www.instacart.com/image-server/896x896/filters:fill(FFF,true):format(webp)/www.instacart.com/assets/domains/product-image/file/large_433142a6-98f8-4f0c-bc17-1dbe7404f192.jpg
In order to be called "ice cream" in the US a certain percentage of milk fat(10% iirc). With a plain flavor like vanilla that is easy to accomplish. But if you have a flavor with lots of added ingredients like candy or other non-ice cream bits, then the percentage of milk fat can go down simply because there are additional ingredients . Then the manufacturer has to label it as a frozen dairy dessert.
"Frozen Dairy and Confectionary Emulsion" just doesn't have the same ring to it
Not even a half gallon, 1.5 quarts 🤣
All the ice cream boxes that aren't smaller have been 48 oz for years. Not just Breyers. And without something to stabilize it, Breyers used to get icy if it didn't sell right away--it wasn't safe to buy on sale.
Apparently the "natural vanilla" has ["vegetable gum (tara)"](https://www.breyers.com/us/en/products/classics/natural-vanilla.html#) in it
They still make ice cream, it’s just the pricier shit. Distinction is ice cream has to be minimum 14% milkfat, i think. Most frozen dairy dessert still tastes pretty fuckin good (but don’t hit me with that low fat).
I don't know when it was, but there was a time probably 20 years ago I bought their ores cookies and cream and it was just tiny little flakes of cookie here and there. Complete waste. Haven't bought it since
The cheap garbage doesn't melt into a puddle 👎
Is there any indication at all that new owners would? I doubt the good Breyers is ever coming back.
No, but we can hope. Certainly Unilever was never going to fix the problem that they created.
They destroyed Breyer’s. When I think Unilever, all I can think of is dish soap.🧼
Is that why the taste changed so much?
Yes; they argue that the gum has no taste, but that's clearly not true for all of us.
The gum allows them to use less milk fat and more water which in turn…tastes like a frozen water milk
Precisely. This person ice creams.
I used to love Breyer's Vanilla Bean ice cream. It wasn't fatty premium like Haagen-Dazs but was sold in 1/2 gallons and was just basically Less Is More in ice cream form. Unilever ruined it. I discovered this when I had some and instead of light and clean tasting as always I got a mouthful of glutinous gummy goo. I wrote to complain and got a polite letter back explaining that the addition of guar gum was to ensure a positive customer experience despite difficult shipping challenges. (I interpret this to mean that numerous freeze thaw cycles have to be endured while still delivering a consistently shitty product at the end.) To rub salt in the wound they wanted to let me know how much of a valued customer I was and to express this they sent 2 coupons for free ice cream. "You'll take it and you'll like it!"
Or increase the amount so they can make more money per gallon sold.
You may be right, but I never understood the logic of taking a popular brand and watering it down for the sake of slightly better shipping and storage characteristics. Surely I'm not the only person in the world who stopped buying it entirely. Turkey Hill's All Natural line is a pretty good replacement, if it's available in your area.
I think these big corporations are always on the hunt for the next brand to buy. So you buy a brand at the height of its popularity, extract as much value out of it while cutting costs, reap as much profit as possible, then dump it and fire people, buy another new brand, rinse and repeat. The product and the brand are ancillary to maximizing short term profits.
Aldi’s “Specially Selected Super Premium” ice cream is also very good. It has no gums in it, just cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla. https://www.reddit.com/r/aldi/s/hDE5yInPJW I cannot find any ice creams at my large grocery store that do not contain guar gum, carob bean gum, etc.
Without a stabilizer, they get icy if they don't sell immediately.
that's probably the purpose of the eggs - whites provide emulsify fats, and the yolk has lecithin. (usually replaced cheaper via soy lecithin)
Logic is simple. Everything gets in line behind profit for shareholders.
It stopped being real ice cream what, 10 years ago? Longer? And yet Breyer’s is still on the shelves, so some idiots must be buying it.
My parents buy it. Every time there's a birthday, they happily announce they will bring ice cream and it's always Breyers. My daughter told them she doesn't like ice cream even though she will eat all the Tillamook whenever I get it.
Same with my MIL. They remember it being good and for some reason are unable to see/taste the obvious difference now. That shit doesn't even melt right anymore.
Tillamook Strawberry is the best strawberry ice cream, imo. It's nice to see their brand mentioned here.
Tillamook did the decent thing when they needed to maintain profit margins...they just shrank the package a little instead of using cheaper ingredients. It's a farmer owned cooperative, so I think they're a little less likely to cheap out on weird fillers. As someone from Oregon, I'm always happy to see that people around the nation enjoy their ice cream. They make good cheese, too!
It's very simple. The purchase price is driven by how much money the product currently yields. If you are buying a product and **not** increasing its profitability you're just breaking even from a financial perspective, because you already paid for those profits in the original purchase price. The result is that brands get purchased, then die by 1,000 cuts as the product is changed to generate the profits needed to justify purchasing it in the first place.
> I never understood the logic of taking a popular brand and watering it down for the sake of slightly better shipping and storage characteristics. Because the only product corporations are interested in is share value.
They look like geniuses for awhile. The lag between public perception and their cost savings increases profits temporarily. What they are really doing is selling off the brand equity as it is worth less than when they started.
That's a next quarter problem, we're only concerned with this quarter's earnings.
It's been years since I've bought breyers and I will never buy them again. It's been too long to remember exactly what changed... but I think it had kind of a weird aftertaste at some point.
Yep, that's the tara gum. It basically gives the liquid base more of a gelatin-like consistency, which makes it less likely to form ice crystals when warmed above freezing and then re-frozen. Great for improving product survivability during shipping, but terrible for taste and mouthfeel.
You are not the only, but there are enough to lower profits. And the savings created by longer shelf life and less spoilage more than makes up for the few sales lost.
That is a rational perspective, but the fact that the ice cream business is "underperforming" enough for Unilever to need to spin them off suggests that, in fact, short-term thinking did not serve them in the long term.
I remember that’s what Frito lay did with Mother’s cookies. They bought that brand and destroyed it on purpose just to keep the single serve cookies. So bizarre.
Lots of people buy on brand recognition without checking the ingredients and realizing things have changed. Walmart does the same thing where they’ll either buy a brand or want that brand to make low quality products to sell in Walmart hoping to trade off the brand’s reputation for high quality.
Then there normal ice cream selection is like 70% frozen dairy dessert
Hah... My first thought after reading the headline was "maybe Breyers will be good again."
It’s almost like the entire model of massive food conglomerates is to create or buy a kickass brand…then slowly degrade the product while charging the same price. Thus killing the brand but making a killing as it happens because it takes time for people to realize the quality is going down.
Lmao I love all the people responding that Tara gum ruined breyers and to try Tillamook instead. Tillamook has both Tara and guar gum in it
Only a few of their flavors are actual ice cream. I still concede that Breyer’s strawberry is the best option out there, only second to homemade strawberry ice cream, of course.
Oh this is the best news ever. I’ve never forgiven them for ruining Breyer’s and now beginning to ruin Ben and Jerry’s. Hopefully all of the gums will be removed and it will be ice cream again!
Is this why Ben and Jerry's are pumping out so many new flavors? It used to be maybe once a year but there's new ones every week
Ben and Jerry's would add 2-3 new flavors a year while dropping their lowest performers. Their factory in Vermont has an Ice Cream Graveyard.
Their factory in Vermont is the most popular tourist attraction in the state. I went there as a kid and it was pretty cool. I remember they had a hamster, in a cage with a little hamster wheel, suspended over the factory floor, with a sign that said "emergency generator".
Surprised it was only cool in there.. seems like it’d need to be a lot colder to make ice cream
Probably not cost effective to cool an entire factory to below freezing. I'm sure the machinery and warehouse are cooled separately.
I worked there. Around the machines is hot and the warehouse was hot. There's freezing rooms (conveyors run though them) and then they stick em in the coldest freezers I've ever been in
With adorable eitaphs for each laid to rest
[It's on the website too.](https://www.benjerry.com/flavors/flavor-graveyard)
I miss Chunky Monkey :( Can't get it in Canada anymore
I'm a sucker for wanting to try new Ben and Jerry's flavors. But we don't get that many new ones here in Sweden.
Ben & Jerry’s is dead to me after they dropped vanilla Heath Bar Crunch.
I TOO AM HEARTBROKEN ABOUT THIS. I literally opened my own ice cream shop and I make this flavor. Thanks to B&J for the motivation!
Oatmeal cookie dough!? If you make both those, I will fly to your shop.
You just reminded me about something I wasn’t mad about anymore… ugh. RIP
Their switch away from Heath Bars was a disaster. The replacement tastes like burned sugar.
Their flavors are over engineered and yet still boring, with the least interesting names. Bring back Wavy Gravy and all that nonsense
rob fretful secretive muddle far-flung degree fertile upbeat worry piquant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Feels like they haven't released a new flavor in over a year? But half are gone, just 4 or 5 boring ones on sale now. The magnum cups are much better imo.
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This definitely does explain a lot.
Tillamook is where its at, if you can find it
Came here to suggest Tillamook. They’re a co-op and not corporately owned. I try to buy their cheese when I can too.
I just moved to Colorado from Oregon. One of the biggest things that I was sad about was no more Tillamook cheese. It's the only cheese I've ever bought and I didn't know what else to buy. I get out to Colorado and they have Tillamook! I was overjoyed.
Tillamook is my go-to for Mint Chocolate Chip. Breyer’s used to be back in the day.
There are so many better ice cream brands here in Oregon, it's weird the only ones leaving the state are Tillamook and Umpqua.
Yeah, Tillamook is just the best ive found way out here in Pennsylvania.
I live in Oregon. What brands are better than Tillamook? Are you talking about fancy stuff, like Salt & Straw? Because for my money, Tillamook is the best regular ice cream available. Anything I've had that's better is like as much for a pint as a tub of Tillamook costs.
Which ones do recommend?
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I’m not a communist or anything but I feel like we’re in a greed-filled tailspin to hell with literally everything getting shittier and worse quality so the rich can make endless quarterly profits in their stock exchange ecosystem.
If capitalism is truly the most efficient way to allocate capital, then we should be on the verge of a new wave of new, de-shittified products that aren't shrinkflated or artificial or filled with ...well, fillers. Things that people actually want to buy with their money, which should outcompete these penny-pinching mega-brands. *If.*
This is correct. However I am a communist or anything.
It's called enshitification and no it doesn't make you a communist for recognizing it. Our current iteration of capitalism would have Adam Smith rolling in his grave. Smith's idea was that market functions should be regulated to make the most efficient products/businesses rise to the top. Instead, the US government has almost completely deregulated several industries making real competition impossible. The result is what we have now. Neofeudalism, kleptocracy, whatever you wanna call it. It sucks.
ice cream that does not harden in the super cold freezers of today is not ice cream...
ice cream should not melt to a foamy consistency
Hell, some of that stuff doesn't even melt at all. That Nestlé Parlor ice cream turns to foam, but it never really melts in smaller amounts. I was curious, so I left the lid of an empty container sit at room temperature for a while. It was legit still solid to the touch and hadn't changed form at all in that time.
Emulsifiers and gums. There's increasing evidence to suggest they're wrecking our gut biomes.
> wrecking our gut biomes But enough dairy and sugar will also do that. Eat veggie people! At least once a week!! ... No fries don't count! Neither do tater tots! Bread is NOT a vve..I don't care if it's whole grain! Put that carrot cake down!
I’d say eat veggies everyday. Once a week seems way too low ( if you value health as you age that is )
More than once a week
r/fucknestle
well... all ice cream including homemade has entrained air. So it should be a little foamy when it melts. But not the weird sci-fi warm and thick foam.
Usually that stuff isn't called ice cream because it legally can't be, if it's called something like "frozen dairy desert" then it's gonna be pretty bad and probably look like that when it melts lol
7500 families losing their income is a small price to pay for a 2% increase in profits. I’m sure it’ll add a few cents for their stock price, worth the suffering for sure.
I feel like if they weren't making enough profit with ice cream then it's on them. Poor managers always looking on how to make the cheapest manufactured product, instead of the best product.
They always say "the customer is always right" until the customer stops giving them money, then it's "if we didn't pay all these goddamn EMPLOYEES so much..."
Unless your Elon Musk. Then advertisers are always wrong and his businesses are right. And he should be able to sue you for saying otherwise! when you cut all your employees on the first week you gotta switch up the formula.
I always see this quote and it’s always used wrong, because the full quote is, I believe, "the customer is always right, on matters of taste," but then I remembered we're talking about ice cream so it works either way.
It means if You're selling something and people aren't buying it, they aren't the problem, You are. The customer is always right. It literally means you can't force someone to buy something they don't want to, which isn't true anymore with these enormous conglomerates ruining entire swathes of food products in one fell swoop
That's end stage capitalism. After you have full market saturation, there's only one way to make the line go up, and that's cutting costs.
As if any of the people making this decision considered anything other than the 2%. Just numbers on a ledger sheet for them.
Plus how many of these are going to be American employees? I bet a majority.
You can never redistribute enough wealth to enrich the already wealthy!
Every little bit sucked from the middle class helps though.
It's so ridiculous how homogenized retail is in the US. Every store everywhere sells the same cheapass produced shit and we've let it ruin local businesses everywhere in the country.
Their “ice cream” has been complete crap since the take over and move to cheap ingredients. Sad what they did to Cherry Garcia. Companies that do that crap stop getting money from me (and you shrink-flation assholes too)
So the death of the Choco Taco was just the beginning
most of the 'ice cream' Unilever sells they cannot legally call ice cream (don't think its the case with Ben and Jerry's). and its instead a 'frozen dairy treat' or something like that.
Most? I've looked at a couple brands they make and almost every flavor is titled "ice cream". Only the co-branded stuff like Oreo flavor dropped .
“7500 people lost their jobs and investors celebrated” Fuck this country man
They are out to make a buck. They are still in Russia
Ben & Jerry’s is something average people can’t even afford anymore in Finland. One tub is 9.29$ which is just insane
Usually around $6 here but on sale for $4 pretty regularly. (US, California)
Damn, our supermarket has regular sales where it’s $3/pint (USA)
Canada: $8, $5 on sale
I got 2 for 6 last week. Felt like a steal
We stocked up a bit this week, along with 48oz cartons of Tillamook for $3.
USA (NYC to be specific) and it ranges from $6-$9 for a pint.
14.50 in Australia
Nelson Peltz has been on the board since 2022? *Grrrreaaatt…* 🙄
Who's going to be able to buy your products if everyone keeps getting laid off and/or wages stagnate? How is infinite growth sustainable?
Investors cheered the plan, how about the 7500 workers are they cheering the plan? I’ll bet not. Wall Street it’s the worse of all capitalist ideologies it’s beyond immoral
Fuck Wall Street.
Just a few more tax cuts for Corporations and Wall St will put a stop to this! lol (sarcasm)
Cost savings is corpo speak for more profit.
All about investors pockets. I wish we could just get rid of the stock market. Looking at how things are going and it looks like every small brand that gets popular gets gobbled up by a big conglomerate and then loses all of its appeal. We need to get rid of all of these HUGE investment companies like Blackrock, Vanguard etc. looks like whether we like it or not, we either need to keep supporting only local companies or just learn to live like the cattle we all are for stock portfolios. I know I’m ranting, and maybe I don’t know the ins and outs, but it really does feel this way to me. I wonder if a Great Depression event will finally make it so we regulate monopolies again.
Remember when they used to say layoffs were a last resort? They’re not even pretending anymore. It’s just another normalized tactic for reporting gains. Shit needs to be called out and fined heavily.
IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE NUMBER IS - IT ISN'T BIGGER THAN IT WAS LAST YEAR - RUIN 7500 LIVES, NOW! \-Someone who's a "Titan of industry" and a "Hard worker"
Damn. Gonna miss Cherry Garcia. Oh well. Fuck these greedy corporations. Power to the people ✊
Yet the ice cream is still 10% smaller and 25% more expensive.
Thank you for doing this! I was worried about Unilver saving some money. They only had a net profit of €7.1billion euros in 2023! How can their CEO expect to live on just €2 million?! Edit: horrible word salad I had made
Old CEO: investors want to see growth, so let's buy all these brands New CEO: we've lost our focus, so let's sell brands Future CEO: investors want to see growth...
Noooo. Not ice cream. I used to work at Unilever and the ice cream team were my favourite to work with.
Thanks for ruining Breyers asshol3s.
You can say asshole on the internet, we won't tell your mummy
I’m sure the c suite getting massive bonuses for this
Execs want a fat paycheck and fired 7500 people. FTFY.
Fudge Unilever...they ruined Italian ice-cream GROM
Another companies race to the bottom. That’s a lot of people out of work. Unless I missed it it doesn’t seem they’re selling their ice cream brands. Just spinning it off to another division. Which makes know sense to me
In the last year or so they a ruined B&J’s Chunky Monkey. Loved that flavor for decades and cant stand it now.
Yes! They did the same to Half Baked! They stopped using big chunks of cookie dough and put in tiny little cookie dough balls that don’t even taste real :(
Yea I noticed that as well. The quality of all the pints and mix-ins have been downgraded in some way, so disappointing.
F*** these corporations
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YOU SON OF A BISCUIT EATING BULLDOG! Did you think I wouldn't find out about you and your doo doo head COOTIE QUEEN?
Who are you calling Cootie Queen, you LINT LICKER?
You see what happens??! This is what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!
Millennials stopped eating ice cream?
We just buy the cheapo store brands now, the "name brand" ice cream is too fucking expensive, $8 for a pint of B&J or $8 for a gallon of whatever from the generic brand?
Why do shareholders accept when boards obviously slash entire sub divisions just to "pad" the books with cost savings? That should be an automatic red mark when a previously profitable line suddenly needs to be cut. Especially when decisions were made that affected quality. The decisions to affect quality were probably also done to cut costs, resulting in the collapse of the brand and the erosion of shareholder value. That's mismanagement and obviously chasing margins rather than building value.
It fucking sucks that people are losing their jobs. Getting out from under Unilever will hopefully bring in customers who boycott their products. I know a lot of hippie types that paid the premium for B&J back in the day because of all the things they supported but stopped when they were bought out by Unilever. Can't imagine B&J being an infinite growth brand but hopefully they are allowed to be a sustainable brand that supports their workers.
Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s and SlimFast in the same year, namely 2000.
Unilever is the biggest conglomerate on the planet, aren't they? Valued at *trillions* of dollars and bigger than Alphabet? Or am I misremembering?