Summer is back. So what's the best grocery store ice cream? Recent taste tests -- Consumer Reports, Tasting Table, Sporked, BuzzFeed, Mashed, Eat This Not That -- don't crown one winner so much as split into three sharply different framings of what "best" even means.

1. The Texture Camp -- Tillamook and Häagen-Dazs

High butterfat, simple ingredients, dense scoop. That's what you're actually buying.

Häagen-Dazs keeps winning the vanilla taste tests. Reviewers across Tasting Table, ThirstyBear, and Eat This say its texture is denser, creamier, and richer than the mix-in-forward competition, and a vanilla blind test is where ice cream gets exposed for what it really is.

Tillamook is the dark horse with the same logic. It tops strawberry head-to-head, and its Vanilla Bean flavor gets called out for the actual specks of bean you can see and taste -- same premium-dairy argument as Häagen-Dazs, at a Pacific Northwest price point.

2. The Chunks Camp -- Ben & Jerry's and Jeni's

Cream is cream. The job is the cookie dough.

The cookie dough is doing the work. Ben & Jerry's is repeatedly named the best grocery-store ice cream for one reason -- it built the chunk-and-swirl experience that everyone else copies. These fans treat ice cream as a delivery vehicle for what you put in it -- pretzels, brownies, cookie dough -- not a dairy meditation.

Jeni's is the upgrade in this category. Founded by Beard-winning cookbook author Jeni Britton, the brand makes unconventional flavors like brown butter and Earl Grey. Costco just added Jeni's Key Lime Pie Frozen Dessert Sandwiches at $14.49 for eight, which is the closest a cult brand has gotten to mass distribution.

3. The Store Brand Wins (Consumer Reports)

A $3 Kirkland scoops the same as a $7 premium. You're paying for the label.

Take off the label and the store brand wins. Consumer Reports ran a blind vanilla taste test of seven store brands against Häagen-Dazs and Breyers, and the verdict was: "all of the supermarket vanilla ice creams tasted great and were less expensive than the big name brands."

The kicker is the ingredient list. Consumer Reports also said the store brands they liked had as few additives as the premium ones; Stumptown Savings' Portland blind test reached the same conclusion. The shelf math is that the markup at the top of the freezer is largely the brand.

Where This Lands

Nobody actually disagrees about taste -- they disagree about what ice cream is for. If it's the dairy, the answer is Tillamook or Häagen-Dazs; if it's the chunks, the answer is Ben & Jerry's, and Jeni's if your grocery store stocks it; if it's the price, Consumer Reports says the store brand on the bottom shelf is doing the same job for half the money.

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