The Blue Bell Ice Cream Recall That Affected 16 US States

Imagine this bewildering scenario: You open your freezer, take out a tub of Blue Bell Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, and remove the lid. You dip in your go-to ice cream scoop ... only to discover that it's filled, not with your favorite Blue Bell flavor, but something entirely different! Would you eat the mystery ice cream?

This is precisely what led Blue Bell to recall a limited quantity of its product in August 2025 — a limited quantity that unfortunately had already been distributed to 16 states, mostly throughout the southern and southeastern United States: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The mystery ice cream, in this case, was Blue Bell Moo-llenium Crunch, a vanilla ice cream with chocolate and caramel chunks, and three types of nuts: pecans, almonds, and walnuts. (For the record, Moo-llenium Crunch didn't fare too well in our ranking of Blue Bell ice cream flavors. Although the chunks and crunch were pleasant, overall, it was a bit boring.) It had been mistakenly packaged in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough-labeled tubs, with a Moo-llenium Crunch lid.

If you don't have a severe allergy, you may have happily embraced the mystery and taken your chances. But if you do have a nut allergy, this could have been a potentially fatal scenario. Thankfully, Blue Bell noticed the error before any tragedy took place.

Blue Bell is generally a highly regarded brand. In Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the Taste of Summer Blue Bell Ice Cream Festival draws thousands eager to sample Blue Bell ice cream and frozen novelty products. The brand excels at classic flavors like Dutch chocolate and mint chocolate chip but also has plenty of creative flavors to check out, like A&W Root Beer Float ice cream, which was released in May 2024. And its vanilla flavor even ranked an impressive second in our list of popular vanilla ice cream brands. 

However, the ice cream mix-up wasn't Blue Bell's first major recall. Back in 2016, Blue Bell recalled all of its cookie dough products due to possible listeria contamination. (Blue Bell wasn't the only brand affected by this; Blue Bunny also had to pull products.) And in 2020, Blue Bell received a court-order to pay $17.25 million in criminal penalties related to the spring 2015 listeria contamination. In this case, unfortunately, the affected product was linked to the hospitalization of 10 people. Blue Bell had to shut down its Broken Arrow plant for several months before eventually reopening in September 2015.