This Wildly Striped 1960s Ice Cream Was Actually Just Plain Vanilla

We all have different likes, dislikes, and points of view, but one thing that unites us is ice cream. You feel like a kid again when you have an ice cream cone in your hand. That's probably why your favorite ice cream flavor says more about when you grew up than you realize. Your favorite may be birthday cake, rum raisin, or maybe Crazy Vanilla. And if it's that last one, you most likely grew up in the '60s. It was around 1965 when Sealtest Ice Cream put a wacky spin on vanilla with red, yellow, and blue stripes.

When you view Crazy Vanilla through a 21st-century lens, you might think the stripes are added fruit flavors, maybe an artificial berry mashup. As it turns out, the stripes in this flavor were for appearance only. The ice cream was indeed plain vanilla with artificial coloring — a bit of a departure, taste-wise, from the creative flavors Sealtest was known for. To put it in perspective, another visually stunning Sealtest flavor was its Cherry Vanilla Checkerboard, a cherry vanilla ice cream that in its box had a pink and white checkerboard design to visually indicate the flavors. Then there was the Red, White, and Blueberry flavor — likely a big hit around July Fourth — designed with three discrete flavor sections: red for raspberry, white for vanilla, and blue for blueberry. In comparison, Sealtest's one-note Crazy Vanilla seems tame, though the only surviving ad for it featured three hip-looking teens having a wild time enjoying the colorful vanilla ice cream.

When it came to ice cream, the '70s were a bit of a revolution as new brands like Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's entered the market with premium offerings. These types of premium ice cream brands focused on higher butterfat, less air, and real fruit in their ice creams. Even candy chunks and chocolate chips got larger. Such is the case of Graeter's, which uses French pots to make its premium ice cream with chocolate chunks that don't even fit on a spoon sometimes. In contrast, Sealtest appeared to remain a standard, mainstream offering that, for whatever reason, slowly lost appeal with shoppers across the decades. Kraft Foods, Sealtest's parent company, sold its ice cream division to Unilever in 1993. Out of this acquisition, Unilever prioritized Breyers and ultimately phased out the Sealtest line.

Thankfully, the concept of Crazy Vanilla didn't completely go away. If you're in the eastern part of the United States, you can find it at Hershey's Ice Cream shops. Hershey's Creamery also distributes to other states, so you might be able to find it in select stores. If that's not an option, you can always recreate it yourself at home. Vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste will make your homemade vanilla ice cream taste like it's from a creamery. Add in some natural food coloring and you can recreate the magic that was Sealtest's Crazy Vanilla.