Luxury Ice Cream Brands Bet On Convenient Formats

There’s little that captures the heart of American summertime more than licking a half-melted ice cream cone during the twilight hour. Consumers are eager to spend their money replicating that experience, now in a way that aligns with evolving values on what they eat.

That will always include indulgence, but through real, simple ingredients, clearly evident beyond the frosted doors of the novelty ice cream set, known for its convenient, single-serve formats.

The subcategory does look different than in previous generations–modern brands taking away shelf space from its legacy competitors. Modern brands who not long ago were most known for their premium pints of ice cream one door over. Premium, not necessarily in price point, but in their exceptionally high butterfat content, beyond 10%.

The frozen novelty category in the US has shown a steady year-over-year increase, according to data from NielsenIQ (NIQ). In 2022, the frozen novelty category was worth $7 billion and in the summer of 2025 sits at $7.8 billion. It largely correlates with the increase in the umbrella frozen category which has grown in that same time period from $75.8 billion to $78.5 billion.

Three premium ice cream brands stand out for adding novelty ice cream products to their line of premium pints. Another thing they all have in common: nostalgia with a twist.

Alec’s Ice Cream Culture Cups

Alec Jaffe remembers making homemade ice cream for class projects when he was a kid. His blood is practically part dairy. His family has been involved in sustainable agriculture well before it became more mainstream. He also focused heavily on nutrition while he was a running back at USC. Mix all of those up and thaw them out, and you get Alec’s Ice Cream.

In less than five years since hitting its first store shelf, pints of Alec’s Ice Cream are beginning to become a familiar sight behind those frosted doors. It’s largely known for its impressive commitment to high-quality dairy. “Not all dairy is created equal,” Jaffe says. “It’s one of the original superfoods.” Specifically, Alec’s began sourcing organic A2 dairy from ROC Certified and Verified Land to Market pasture-raised dairy farm Alexandre Family Farm in California’s Redwood Forest, but has since begun sourcing from other similar A2 farms because his demand grew so much. ROC Certified cane sugar in Alec’s Ice Cream is sourced from Brazil’s Native.“It’s just about being able to offer what I believe the next generation of consumers is looking for, which is caring about the products that I’m buying, their impact on me and also the planet,” he adds. “But especially in something like ice cream, I’m not going to sacrifice eating some bland thing that doesn’t taste good.”

To continue that ethos, Alec’s recently released its first foray outside of pints: Culture Cups. It’s like a Dixie Cup, but make it Alec’s. “You need to speak a language with what you’re doing that has broad appeal, but also stands out in a way that catches someone’s attention,” Jaffe says.

As if the functional benefits of the pints weren’t already attention-grabbing, the Culture Cups take it to another level–all while maintaining the integrity of real ice cream. “It’s a completely different recipe than our pints…lower calories, lower sugar.” It’s still made with A2 dairy, but the Culture Cups, as the name suggests, also contain pre- and post-biotics, making it the supreme gut-health ice cream on the market. “It allows us to tell the A2 story and the whole digestion story of our product in a much cleaner and simpler way,” Jaffe explains.

But you wouldn’t know it from eating it. Especially given the added layer of indulgence via the chocolate crackable shell resting on top of each Culture Cup. “Texture is such an important part in my mind to novelties, so the chocolate shell was a really fun way for us to do that,” he says.

Right now, Alec’s Ice Cream Culture Cups come in packs of four in the flavors Madagascar Vanilla, Dark Chocolate Honeycomb Crunch, Peanut Butter Cup, Chocolate Covered Strawberry and Mint Chocolate Cookie–all a little more restrained from the more experimental flavors in the pints. But if Jaffe were ever to sell the Cups in a grab-and-go retail format, he believes he will embrace the portability even more by including a spoon under the lid. “Week one, day one, [Culture Cup] was selling out at stores across the country,” he says.

Rosebud Soft Serve Pouches

For Sam Rose, founder and CEO of RoseBud Ice Cream, the nostalgia is the point. “I just have a lot of positive associations with ice cream…going to the beach with my family on vacation and we’d go to watch the sunset, but really where my eyes were drawn was the blue ice cream in my hands,” he tells me.

His original plan, at the suggestion of friends while living in Denver, was to create a THC-infused ice cream, but soon realized, in 2016, the market wasn’t quite ready for such a product. That made him realize that his brand wasn’t about what you could put in ice cream, but the ice cream itself. “The foundation of the company has always been on really high quality ice cream and to focus on ice cream that has the power to make a bad day good and a good day great.”

RoseBud is classified as super premium American ice cream, meaning it has a very high butterfat content–14%–and does not contain eggs. By 2024, RoseBud pints were in about 300 stores nationwide. “Everything’s been done bootstrapping and just learning things along the way,” Rose says. Even though that number is expected to double by 2026, he was still concerned about the demand for his pints, until his sister swooped in with a makeshift mom move. “She made this suggestion to put ice cream in baby food pouches for my nephew. Her words were, ‘he’ll go ‘ape’ for that.’”

That was the genesis of RoseBud soft serve pouches. Rose couldn’t sleep some nights because he was so fixated on the idea of this additional strategy that would eventually trigger new momentum in his business. “This is a good fit to go sell at a movie theater or baseball games,” he says. “…so many places that a pint would never go.”

He needed to create a new formula from his pints for a lighter texture, more appropriate for a pouch. “You can only find [soft serve] out of a machine,” he says. “So this doubles down on the uniqueness.”

As opposed to most soft serve which contains a low butterfat around 2%, RoseBud soft serve has a 7% butterfat content. “I want to maintain that this is premium, high quality ice cream,” Rose says. “We’re going with just a higher overrun because that’s what gives it that more whipped, softer textures, the more air.

The soft serve pouches are not just for kids; the pouch format is growing among other demos who view the products as something for the entire family. “Part of our target audience is millennials who are now having younger kids, but we want them to be able to eat the pouch versus feeling like they’re eating baby food.” Aside from ease of use, that’s also the reason why the nozzle is about twice the thickness of a typical pouch nozzle. But for convenience’s sake, there’s also no scooping or dishes necessary in this format.

Once consumers fall in love with the soft serve pouches, they could potentially become brand loyal and then get into RoseBud pints. “The novelty case keeps getting bigger,” Rose says. “We’re seeing more brands like us in the premium space who have long done pints starting to get into it. It’s a natural progression of bolstering a brand’s power to have placement in multiple places in the freezer.”

“It’s renewed my passion for the business,” Rose says. “We’re seeing that the pouches have the possibility to be as big as I thought they could be.”

RoseBud soft serve pouches include Original Vanilla, Classic Chocolate, Cookies n. Cream, and Blue Moon–while not blue in color, Rose describes the flavor as “citrus marshmallow,” and is a nod to the blue ice cream that would drip down his hands on summer nights as a kid.

Jeni’s J-Bars

Jeni’s Ice Cream is no stranger to innovation. From Brambleberry Crisp to Bubble Gum, founder Jeni Britton created the brand based upon sourcing each of its ingredients in a highly intentional way.

As Head of Innovation, Beth Stallings oversees the Jeni’s test kitchen. “90 something percent of what you taste is actually what you smell,” Stallings explains. “We joke that ice cream is kind of like an edible perfume. We’re really good at locking those flavors into this higher butterfat content ice cream.”

More than 20 years ago, Britton opened her first scoop shop in Columbus, Ohio, and formats have slowly trickled in over time. She would hand-pack pints in addition to scoops on cones and cups, and those pints inevitably rolled out into retail. “Our shops are sort of our testing ground,” Stallings says. “Then you get that national distribution where we can make it more available to our customers, who are really asking for it on the bars now.”

The first venture into the novelty space in retail came two years ago with Jeni’s ice cream sandwiches, of which the Key Lime Pie flavor performs best. “Sandwiches were something that we used to do by hand in the shop,” Stallings says. “You might be looking for something that’s more single serve.” The successful retail rollout of the sandwiches gave Jeni’s the confidence to roll out its other scoop shop novelty in retail: J-Bars. “[Jeni] used to hand mold, hand dip those…The Caramel Vanilla Sundae bar is an ode to the very first bar that Jeni ever did.”

Jeni’s J-Bars are chubby blocks of Jeni’s ice cream stuck on a popsicle stick. “In addition to the flavor profiles we were going for, we spent a lot of time talking about the experience when you bite into the bar,” Stallings says. “Everyone keeps calling [nostalgia] a trend,” Stallings says.” I think it’s just always going to be a motivator…like I’m like seven or eight, chasing that truck down.

Other J-Bar flavors, all exclusive to the bars, include Passionfruit Dreamsicle–a nod to creamsicle with a tropical twist–Dark Chocolate Bombe–made with the same deeply intense chocolate ice cream from the pints but with an outer chocolate shell–and Chocolate Churros & Cream (only available at Whole Foods Market) –of which the cinnamon cookie crumble sticks to the sides of the bar in the most nostalgic of nostalgia bombs. And yet still, Stallings says, “it feels new…It had to hit all of the hallmarks of what we consider the perfect Jeni’s experience.”