I Tried 7 Little Debbie Ice Cream Flavors And Ranked Them Worst To Best

As a Gen X-er who grew up in the '70s, I experienced the fast food revolution in real time. With the processed food industry booming and prepackaged snacks dominating grocery store shelves, I was bewitched by convenience food at a young age. And Little Debbie was one of my first loves. This iconic brand's baked goods graced my childhood cupboard and sweetened my birthday parties. Its Nutty Buddy Wafers, Swiss Rolls, and Honey Buns were even sold in my high school cafeteria (where I chose them over mystery meat nearly every day).

A fourth-generation business committed to family values and affordability, Little Debbie has been mass-producing sweet treats since the 1960s, when small-time baker O.D. McKee along with his wife, Ruth, rebranded the business with their granddaughter's likeness and built the first factory. With more than 75 varieties sold across 50 U.S. states today, Little Debbie still leads the industry at its price point, and fans of this brand were intrigued when it partnered with Hudsonville Ice Cream to deliver some of its classic treats in frozen form starting in 2022.

Sold primarily at Walmart, Little Debbie Ice Cream is still being made, and Chowhound thinks a taste test is long overdue. To rank seven Little Debbie ice cream flavors from worst to best, I evaluated each one, focusing on flavor, texture, and mix-in quality. I also made some comparisons to the original Little Debbie treat based on personal experience.

I remember Little Debbie Star Crunch Snack Cookies being a caramel-forward experience, but there was almost no discernable caramel in this ice cream revival. While I encountered a handful of golden ribbons throughout my scoops, Star Crunch Ice Cream didn't deliver any of the caramel taste I'd hope for. When isolated, the swirls had a faint corn syrup flavor but nothing resembling actual browned sugar. And the chocolate mix-ins were supposed to be fudge but tasted more like jimmies.

Another factor leading to this one's bottom ranking was the cocoa crispy rice bits. The heart and soul of this treat just don't freeze well, and the chew was smushy rather than crunchy. The rice bits were tiny and mostly pulverized, barely registering as a mix-in during both of my taste tests. And the overall flavor was less fudgy and more cocoa powdery than I would have liked. As a budget-friendly snack, I did not expect Star Crunch to contain high quality cocoa powder, which has a higher fat content, but the ice cream's synthetic chocolate scent and gritty palate were a big turnoff. Both on a cone and in a bowl, this one was a dud for me.

While there was a definite brownie scent and taste in this ice cream, the overall flavor was more preserved and artificial than the brownies your grandma used to make. But so were the original Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies bars, and that's not what earned this ice cream spin-off a spot near the bottom of my list. My problem with the Cosmic Brownies Ice Cream centered on the mix-ins — or lack thereof.

The brownie bits were sporadic and very small, disappearing into a weird texture that was grainy and thick. And the rainbow chips advertised on the carton were nowhere to be found. With the original snack package displaying brownie bars topped with colorful, candy-coated chocolate pieces, I'd expected at least a handful of pastel stars to shine through, but the whole thing came off muddy and rather unappealing. I was hard-pressed to unearth a cosmic chip, and when I did, its flavor resembled stale sprinkles. If this hadn't tasted at least a little like brownies, I might have given the Cosmic Brownies Ice Cream the bottom honors in my ranking.

I was never a fan of Little Debbie Fudge Rounds. On paper, the formula was a winning one: chocolate cookie, chocolate cream filling, and chocolate icing. What's not to like? But in reality, I found them soft, artificial tasting, and rather odd. Perhaps that's why this treat finished as the worst Little Debbie snack on store shelves in a recent Chowhound ranking.

Setting that bias aside for the purpose of this impartial culinary evaluation, I gave Fudge Rounds Ice Cream a fair chance but was still disappointed. On first inspection, the brown color was a little darker than the original cookie snack, but pretty much what you'd expect from a fudge-based ice cream. The nose was chocolatey, but the taste was more ice milk than ice cream, and the texture was grainy. From a spoon, Fudge Rounds Ice Cream was perfectly okay, but the scoop I licked on a sugar cone had no discernable fudge or cookie bits. The result was an overmixed, under-inspired chocolate ice cream I would not buy again. Not the worst, but it was far from the best.

Just thinking about eating Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies makes my teeth hurt. The McKee family's signature bakery item, which sold for a nickel apiece in 1935 and is still a top seller today, features two soft oatmeal cookies layered with vanilla cream. The original snack cakes were quite popular with my bell-bottom banana-seat bike crew but excessively sweet in my memory. So I was surprised when I actually kind of liked this ice cream reincarnation.

Creamier than most of the other bases in my trial, Oatmeal Creme Pies Ice Cream was soft on the tongue with a decent vanilla flavor and very little aftertaste. On the nose, it presented with more of a canned cinnamon roll scent than an oatmeal cookie one, and there was no real molasses flavor, but it was fairly tasty overall. The cookie chunks were good but super crushed and insubstantial. Otherwise, I might have ranked this one a little higher.

During my elementary school years, Little Debbie Birthday Cakes were a gift to exhausted moms who needed something to poke a candle in and top with ice cream. Sure, the cakes were a little dry, but they did the trick at kid parties where no one really cared how moist or authentic the dessert was. Originally, these sweet treats were small rectangles featuring confetti-infused vanilla cake layered with cream, coated with white icing, and topped with colorful confetti. They have since been reintroduced as a six-sided single-serve snack cake, but the taste is the same.

In ice cream form, I think this one's significantly better than its snack cake derivative. The scoop I tried smelled and tasted more like sugar cookies than confetti cake, but those two things are similar enough. The vanilla ice cream was smooth and creamy, and the rainbow sprinkles were way more substantial than the ones in the Cosmic Brownies Ice Cream, though they were a little broken. I wish the cake bits had been larger and tasted a little less like store-bought cookie dough (which we've ranked), but all in all, Little Debbie Birthday Cakes Ice Cream was pretty good.

I don't remember eating Little Debbie Strawberry Shortcake Rolls as a kid, probably because I thought Little Debbie was trying to sneak health food into my diet with the whole fruit thing, but the ice cream version I tried during my ranking was refreshing and delicious. Featuring significant pink swirls that held shape in a vanilla ice cream base without getting muddied, Little Debbie Strawberry Shortcake Rolls Ice Cream is something I'd definitely buy again.

Though I'd expected an artificial strawberry flavor to dominate the scoop I tried on an ice cream cone, what I got was a balanced ratio of strawberry to cream and a surprisingly natural flavor. On both spoon and cone, there was no grit, and the texture was smooth, making it feel like a higher end ice cream brand. The only hitch with this one was the shortcake bits. I wish they had been slightly larger and more prevalent in the mix. If they'd been a little saltier and more like a biscuit base than crushed cookie dough, I might have given this one top honors.

As a peanut butter and chocolate lover, I've consumed an embarrassing number of Little Debbie Nutty Buddy wafers during my lifetime. A masterclass in culinary coupling -– salty and sweet, crunchy and creamy, nutty and chocolatey –- a Nutty Buddy was my convenience store go-to when I was young. I'll still hit one today when the mood strikes or a road trip has me feeling nostalgic. But I had my doubts about how this snack icon would fare as an ice cream mix-in.

To my delight, Nutty Bars Ice Cream bowled me over with its similarity to the original snack. It may have even been better (gasp). The texture was thicker than a Culver's Concrete Mixer featuring frozen custard and mix-ins, which I consider the gold standard for ice cream and candy combos, but the density was similar. The peanut butter ice cream base was smooth and golden, supporting bits of fudge and wafer that were larger and more plentiful than those in any other ice cream in my trial. And the crunch was impressive. Just as the original Nutty Buddy wafers earned top honors in Chowhound's ranking of the best and worst Little Debbie snack treats, Nutty Bars Ice Cream took first prize here easily.

This ranking began with a treasure hunt for Little Debbie Ice Cream pints at the four Walmarts near my home in Milwaukee. The seven ice cream varieties I tried for this evaluation were the only ones I was able to get my hands on, though Hudsonville Ice Cream makes other Little Debbie flavors, too. I sampled each product right out of the freezer, using a clean ice cream scoop to fill a basic sugar cone and a small bowl. This gave me an opportunity to experience each ice cream with both my tongue and teeth, considering factors such as texture, chew, and mix-in size.

While keeping the $2.46 price point for a Little Debbie Ice Cream pint in mind, my primary ranking criteria was flavor and enjoyment. I also gave some consideration to each product's faithfulness to the original Little Debbie snack item, where relevant and possible. To determine where each pint landed on my ranking of these seven ice cream flavors from worst to best, I selected the top three first, followed by the bottom two and finally the middle two. My top three Little Debbie ice cream flavors were all pints I enjoyed and would purchase again.