I Asked Seven People What Ice Cream They Eat When Nobody's Watching

I heard it's National Ice Cream Day, which always sneaks up on me, because -- seriously -- who needs a holiday to eat ice cream? I have never in my life needed a designated day, a permission slip, or a reason. Hand me a spoon in February. Hand me a spoon at a funeral. I have never met an ice cream I didn't like, and I mean that as a confession, not a boast.

Some of my fondest memories growing up are just the logistics of it. The trip to the store. Thrifty scoops, that specific cylinder shape the scoop carved, a double cone for roughly the price of nothing. And Frusen Glädjé, my beloved, that gloriously fake-Scandinavian little 80s brand with an umlaut it absolutely did not earn. It came in this distinct white plastic package that looked like something Elon Musk would design if he ever decided to build an ice cream plant -- and now that I've typed it out loud, honestly, someone get him on the phone. My husband brings it up to this day specifically to soul-crush me, because once he's said the name, there's nowhere for me to go. It's discontinued. It's gone. You can't buy it. He knows this. That's the whole move.

And Farrell's. If you know, you know. For a birthday they'd bring out the Zoo -- something like twenty-one scoops of pure glory in one trough of a bowl, sirens going, a whole staff parading it to the table like we'd won something -- and a pack of us would descend on it with spoons drawn and take it down to the ceramic. No shame. No survivors. Nobody's mother in sight. We were feral little animals and it was the happiest I have ever been. And the ice cream truck. There is still something genuinely magical about that tinny little song floating down the street, some ancient part of your brain sitting straight up going: that's for me, I have to go, this is the most important thing happening on Earth right now.

So here's what got me thinking. A little while ago I went to my local Van Leeuwen, and I swear to you I felt like I had never eaten ice cream before in my life. Flavor combinations I had genuinely never heard of. Things that sounded less like dessert and more like a candle or a small European perfume. I stood there like an amateur -- me, a person who has eaten ice cream professionally for decades -- and asked the poor scooper what was popular. And even after the answer, I was still standing there thinking: really? That's what we're doing now? The scoop was so small for $7, I had to lie to my husband and tell him it was $5 to not look like a complete idiot.

Meanwhile my husband and I recently fell into one of those YouTube rabbit holes, a video titled something like "Ice Cream Brands You Should Never Eat," and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every single grocery store brand I have ever loved was on the list. All of them. The whole freezer aisle of my childhood, indicted. At a certain point you stop taking notes and start taking it personally.

Which left me with a real question, and questions are what SmartFocus.ai is for. Is the seven-dollar black-garlic-honeycomb scoop what people actually want? Or is it just what we've all agreed to say we want in public? And I wanted the answer now. It was Sunday, seven in the morning, on the day of the World Cup final -- which is to say every human being I could possibly recruit was either dead asleep or already emotionally committed to a soccer match. Where exactly was I going to go for this? So I ran a panel. And here's the part that still amazes me: these seven people don't exist. They're AI personas, built for me, on demand, for exactly this moment when I had a question at dawn and wanted an answer before my coffee got cold. Not a scheduling email, not a two-week recruit, not a rented conference room with a one-way mirror. Seven people, no two alike -- a dietitian in Arizona, a specialty-food buyer in Oregon, a school office manager in Iowa, a widowed library assistant in Arkansas, a Gen Z visual merchandiser in New Jersey, a Cajun ice cream shop owner in Louisiana, and a fleet-maintenance supervisor in Wyoming who I could tell from his first sentence was going to keep the whole room honest. And I asked them the one thing nobody asks at the counter. Not "what's your favorite flavor," but "what's your favorite flavor, and what are you actually going to eat when no one is watching?"

The gap between those two answers is the entire point and what I needed to know now... Sunday morning.

Here's the first thing that got me - ask people their favorite and they perform. Nikhil, the food buyer, will tell you black sesame, maybe calamansi if he's feeling on-brand, because it signals he pays attention. Then he admitted the tub he actually buys most is mint chocolate chip. He nailed it: one question is a craving, the other invites a little theater. Marisol, the dietitian, leads with cookie dough specifically to prove she isn't turning dessert into a wellness project -- and then confessed she eats it from the pint and picks the dough chunks out first. The comedy isn't that she does it. It's that being the person who gives everyone else food advice makes it feel like something you'd whisper to a priest.

And then there's Graham, who owns an actual dairy, who says butter pecan first because it tells him whether a shop knows what it's doing, and who then announced that after closing he eats neon-blue bubble gum with sprinkles "like a man with no reputation to protect." I want that embroidered on something.

But here's where the bit turned into something actually useful, which is the whole point of a good panel. I assumed the embarrassment was about the flavor. Too sweet, too childish, too much. It is not. Almost nobody was ashamed of wanting something rich. What made them wince was the costume around it -- the frosting colors that look, in the merchandiser Sora's words, "aggressively kid-party on Instagram." It's the excess being announced, not the excess itself. She'll happily eat the loaded soft-serve with cereal bits and a ridiculous drizzle. (I'm convinced Fruity Pebbles was made for this) She just wants it in a clean little cup so she can call it "fun" instead of feeling caught.

Which brings me back to my seven-dollar scoop and the part that genuinely got me. I had assumed the fancy beige tub was the grown-up fix, the permission structure. The panel dismantled that in about four sentences. Graham called the premium version "a bow tie on vanilla." Wade, my Wyoming truth-teller, said a twelve-dollar pint doing all its work on the label is just candle-wax nonsense in a nicer box. Over and over, in different accents, they said the same thing: don't sell me a moral story, don't whisper, don't wink, don't make a pint of ice cream need a priest and a confession booth. Just tell me it's custardy and cocoa-forward, put it in a normal single serving, and charge me something that isn't dinner money. Make it, as Sora put it, beautifully normal.

That's the finding I keep chewing on. We've spent a whole decade making ice cream apologize. Either it's "guilt-free" and pretending to be health food, or it's "artisanal" and pretending to be architecture. And what actual humans want is for it to just be good, be plainly what it is, and cost about what a treat should cost. The permission people are hunting for isn't a fancier carton. It's a brand that stops acting like wanting ice cream requires a note from your mother.

And here's the part I'm worried a whole generation is skipping. Vanilla, chocolate, butter pecan -- the panel flat-out refused to call them boring. They're a quality test, they said. Vanilla has nowhere to hide. Darla, my honest baseline from Arkansas who has loved butter pecan since she shared it with her grandmother and has never once pretended otherwise, said a thin, oversweet vanilla is a genuine heartbreak precisely because there's nothing else in the bowl to cover for it. Familiar isn't the absence of a choice. It's the highest bar there is. Those grocery brands the internet wants me to be ashamed of? Some of them clear that bar and some of them don't, and a YouTube list telling me to be scared of all of them is doing the exact thing my panel begged brands to quit doing -- selling a story instead of a flavor.

So here is my genuine worry, and it's the reason I ran this at all. I think a lot of young people are getting talked out of the good part. They're standing at a Van Leeuwen counter feeling like a philistine for wanting vanilla, being handed a list of forbidden freezer brands, learning to perform taste before they've even had the chance to just enjoy it. And meanwhile the ice cream truck is coming down the street playing its dumb perfect song, and some kid's ancient brain is sitting up going that's for me -- and that kid has it exactly right, and doesn't need a single focus group to know it.

Anyway. It's National Ice Cream Day. I'm going to go have some, it will not be black garlic anything, and if my husband says "Frusen Glädjé" on this holy of holy days... I might be arrested.

If you're interested in answers now... and you want to test your own ideas, decisions, hypothesis... try SmartFocus.ai. My husband's co-founded it and I'd like to think he did it for me... for moments like this!