Jeni's - Green Mint Chip

Green Mint Chip - Peppermint Ice Cream and Chocolate Chips, with Spirulina added for Color

For the sixth and final pint of my Jeni's shipment -- and my last pint of 2017 -- I chose Green Mint Chip.  Long-time readers know that mint chocolate chip is my favorite ice cream flavor so I am quite curious to know how a super-premium brand like Jeni's handles their implementation.

Jeni's has an interesting blog post about this flavor.  Evidently, mint chocolate chip ice cream is a relatively recent invention.  There was an ice cream flavor contest to decide what to serve at the royal wedding of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips in 1973.  "Mint Royale" by Marilyn Ricketts was the winning flavor and the flavor become an instant success.  I would have guessed the flavor was much older -- it seems like an old-fashioned flavor combination.

Also from the blog-post, Jeni seems sold on green color for mint cream as "color has a big impact on how we perceive flavor".  She won't use artificial colors though, so she came up with the idea of using spirulina.  The pictures at wikipedia and google-image search make it look like soylent green, but I have been assured that spirulina is not made out of people.  Spirulina is a cynobacteria or blue-green algae with a surprising amount of health benefits.  Leave it to Jeni's to use "perhaps the world's healthiest food" as a coloring agent.

Enough talk, lets eat.  The top of the pint is bright green with small chocolate specks visible.  Digging in, the ice cream is a bit hard.  The base has a fairly potent peppermint flavor.  The spirulina adds color, but not flavor.  The chocolate chips are quite crunchy and very chocolatey.  Coupled with the hard ice cream, the chips help create a crunchy texture to the whole pint.  It reminds me of hard-packed scoop that you might get an old-fashioned ice cream scoop shop -- only with top-shelf Jeni's-caliber ingredients.


I really enjoyed this pint of ice cream. It is bold and unique yet with a not to the old-fashioned crunchy green ice creams of childhood.  My favorite mint chip pints are still Graeter's and McConnell's but this one is very close.  Those both have softer chocolate chips, though, so it is not an apples to apples comparison, though.  I can see someone preferring this one for the crunchy chips.