Is it nuts to assume a scoop of pistachio ice cream should contain actual pistachios? Or how about real butter in a dish of butter pecan?
Such weighty questions about a favorite summertime confection could soon be decided by the courts.
A federal judge in New York has given the go-ahead to a Long Island woman’s class action lawsuit that claims consumers are being duped by Cold Stone Creamery when they purchase certain flavors that “do not contain their represented ingredients.”
Lead plaintiff Jenna Marie Duncan purchased her serving of pistachio ice cream from a Cold Stone Creamery store in Levittown, New York, in or around July 2022. According her lawsuit, Duncan “reasonably believed that the Pistachio ice cream she purchased from defendant contained pistachio.”
It’s also cold stone, so you can get a mix-in of pistachios and actually have real pistachios in your pistachio flavored ice cream.
Also: Now I wonder if the cheese cake ice cream has cheese cake in it. I usually assume everything is artificially flavored unless it’s plain chocolate or vanilla.
Vanilla is a pretty expensive spice and vanillin can be synthesized from oil or wood, you should probably assume most things vanilla flavored are artificially flavored. There is way more demand for vanilla than the amount of vanilla pods grown in the world.
Also, the little flecks of vanilla bean in ice cream is often not vanilla bean.
Nor, as I have learned, are there sufficient strawberries in the world to flavor the “strawberry” ice consumed in the US.
Luckily, one can create “natural strawberry flavor” by pressure cooking pine wood shavings in alcohol.
I think this has me on the fence.
Cold Stone mixes the ice cream in front of you. Like, that’s the schtick. To make that easier, their ice cream doesn’t have any nuts or candies or anything already mixed in.
So they can’t add actual pistachios to their pistachio ice cream. They could use natural pistachio flavor, but I understand why they don’t.
Anything that is artificially flavored should be properly labelled, so I think this is a valid lawsuit. But I would have expected that Cold Stone uses artificial flavors in most of their ice cream.
Pistachio ice cream doesn’t have large pieces of pistachio in it. It has pistachio that’s been blended into a paste and mixed with ice cream. Like how creamy peanut butter doesn’t have chunks of peanut in it but peanuts are still the main ingredient.
I don’t usually get pistachio ice cream, but I remember having some that had pistachio pieces in it. Thinking back, I would guess that the pistachio pieces were there to lend authenticity to the artificially flavored neon-green ice cream. And I know I’ve had ice cream with peanuts in it. Rocky Road maybe? Or maybe a Ben and Jerry’s flavor.
In fact, the pistachio pieces in the green stuff could have been peanuts for all I know.