Little Debbie Ice Cream Ultimate Ranking!

...... And other lengthy hot takes on these frozen treats.

All My Children, indeed.

This is a weird time to air it, but I have had a deep fear of rejection for as long as I can remember. My parents will have to verify, but I recall never asking them for things at the grocery store. In my trash baby heart of hearts, I hoped they would read my mind and place into our cart Lunchables, Go-Gurts, and Fruit by the Foot. Luckily, Little Debbie made her way into my life without much intervention. Oatmeal Crème Pies made appearances at my house as one of my dad’s favorites. My grandma used to buy me boxes of Zebra Cakes, of which I would eat an entire box in one sitting and just hope she didn’t notice (??). Star Crunch bars were a daily treat at a summer camp program I attended for many years.

The morning I found out these Little Debbie ice creams had hit shelves, I reluctantly rushed to Walmart to scoop them up. At $2.50 a pint, they are accessible to most but I was instantly worried about quality. At the very least, I can confirm they do not suck and I have confidently ranked them from best to worst.

7) Oatmeal Creme Pie ice cream- Upon opening this pint, you’d be hard pressed to find the difference between this and a pint of classic vanilla. I jabbed deep with a spoon, searching for morsels of the soft oatmeal cookie we all know and love that sandwiches the cream. The ice cream is unremarkable and somehow even the nuggets of oatmeal cookie I found were nearly tasteless. Twenty dollars says I find this ice cream in our freezer four years from now, uneaten and frost bitten. And it will be deserved!

6) Zebra Cake ice cream- It deeply pains me to write this. But the Zebra Cake ice cream is a tragedy. It was the flavor I was most excited for by far since Zebra Cakes are my tip top favorite Little Debbie snack. I should have known they wouldn’t be able to capture that familiar waxiness in ice cream, or it would be undesirable there. Little bits of cake found are virtually tasteless and of poor consistency, which makes sense! The rest of this tastes exactly like Hershey’s chocolate syrup swirled in vanilla ice cream like you would find at an ill-equipped sundae bar. Please respect my privacy at this time, I’m SAD that this sucks.

5) Honey Buns ice cream- I’m going to be honest; I just don’t care about Honey Buns. I would maybe eat one if I was on a road trip with someone that brought a box. Maybe if our car veered off a cliff and neither of us had anything else to eat while we waited for search and rescue to find us, I would enjoy one of these. This ice cream has the exact flavor profile of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal milk. If it were to be based on the cereal, at least it would likely have a crunchy element. I almost didn’t buy this flavor because I was so confident it would be the worst and yet, here we are at the fifth spot.

4) Cosmic Brownie ice cream- Now we are reaching the really good stuff in the countdown. This ice cream is most recognizable to its snack cake due to its multicolored chocolate chips. They are clearly very authentic and have a great crunch on the snack cake as well as in this ice cream. My husband says of these, “tastes exactly like it melted in my car only cold” because he once suffered that Cosmic Brownie fate and I think that’s a spot-on assessment. I’m slightly disappointed it’s not a more dynamic chocolate flavor. But it tastes exactly like brownie ice cream and that’s the original product. Consider it captured!

3) Swiss Cake Roll ice cream- There’s little worse in ice cream than when you visit Dairy Queen and find only that mediocre vanilla at the bottom half of a Blizzard, all the toppings concentrated at the top now gone. I just don’t like plain vanilla ice cream and I’m done apologizing! I try to avoid this as much as possible by ordering Blizzards with chocolate ice cream as the base. This is likely why Cosmic Brownie and Swiss Cake Roll ice creams are more charming to me. Swiss Cake Roll takes a step ahead due to the dynamic swirls of cream filling. I don’t recall the snack cake having a marshmallow flavor in the cream but it does appear here and I find it delightful.

2) Strawberry Shortcake ice cream- My husband and I taste-tested these at the same table but very individually, hoping to collect and compare notes only at the end. But when I tasted this flavor, I said “wow” aloud. The base flavor of the ice cream is dynamic, you can taste the shortcake element, and the strawberry is really vibrant! Sometimes swirls of strawberry in ice cream taste similar to cough medicine to me, but not this.

1) Nutty Bar ice cream- I feel like I could have anticipated this if I had only thought about it before, but I was surprised this was such a win. Nutty Bars are very well suited for ice cream. They do not take on the moisture of the ice cream the way most of these cakes do, they have great crunch, and great flavor. It took basically no time at all to find this was the best flavor and my husband independently came to the same conclusion. If you are partial at all to chocolate and peanut butter, this is the superior flavor.

Do a lot of these flavor profiles already exist in the ice cream aisle?? YES. But capitalism finds that nostalgia is a powerful pull and it certainly found me. Like anything nostalgic, it can inspire fun and it can inspire hurt. I am just hoping my relationship with Oatmeal Crème Pies can heal.

And my only lingering thought after all this? Where the heck is the Star Crunch ice cream? Now that would really slap.