Multiple Base Flavors
We began by asking what's the most popular base flavor? But we quickly realized that it wasn't as easy as it seemed!
Ben & Jerry's has simple, classic flavors with one base flavor like Chocolate Fudge Brownie (chocolate ice cream with brownies) and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (vanilla ice cream with cookie dough & chocolate chunks).
However, part of their popularity is how they combine different flavors together. Half Baked, for example, mixes the two aforementioned flavors together into one. This leaves Half Baked with two base flavors, vanilla and chocolate.
Top Base Flavors
Once we classified flavors with two base flavors as mixed we were able to identify chocolate as the most popular base flavor.
Chocolate is featured in 33 flavors. 20 flavors only have a base flavor of chocolate while 13 flavors are chocolate mixed with something else (5 of which are vanilla!)
All other base flavors, everything from brown sugar to pistachio to cookie milk, we grouped into other.
Top Flavors
Hesham wanted a way to prove that a vanilla base flavor was not boring and that Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough was the best flavor.
Conveniently, every year Ben & Jerry's publishes the top flavors in each country. We aggregated the 2019 lists and looked at the number of countries a flavor was in to come up with the top 5 flavors in the world:
23 countries, 2.7 average rank
13 countries, 4.0 average rank
19 countries, 4.7 average rank
29 countries, 5.2 average rank
Flavor Types
Lindsey (a vegan) was excited when Ben & Jerry's introduced non-dairy ice cream in 2016.
So, we were curious how the non-dairy line compared to the dairy or Moo-Phoria (light ice cream, introduced in 2018) lines.
Is chocolate the top base flavor for all types? Kind of. In non-dairy there is a three way tie for first while it is the clear winner in Moo-Phoria.
Did Ben & Jerry's simply recreate dairy flavors or did they introduce new flavors exclusive to the non-dairy line? Well, as it turns out, it's a little bit of both! 17 of the 98 flavors are available in non-dairy. Of those, 9 are also available as a dairy option while 8 are only available as non-dairy.