Ben & Jerry's - Red White & Blueberry

Red White & Blueberry - Blueberry & Raspberry Ice Cream swirled with Vanilla Ice Cream with Strawberries & Shortbread Pieces 

Today is the second of the two new Walmart-exclusive flavors this year.  The first flavor was a cookies-n-cream-like flavor called Ice Cream Sammie.  This flavor is called Red, White and Blueberry.  A very patriotic-sounding flavor and very fitting for the summer holidays of Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.  The color comes from the fruit.  There is blueberry and raspberry in one base, vanilla in another and strawberry and shortbread mix-ins.  Looks quite interesting.

Removing the lid, I see that the blueberry-raspberry base is actually a bluish purple color.  It is marbled quite well with a vanilla base and I can see a couple of the strawberry pieces right away.  Digging in, I taste mainly blueberry in the blueberry-raspberry base.  I am OK with that because blueberry is a much less common flavor in ice creams than raspberry and with all the different ice creams that I try, I appreciate the novelty.  The flavor is pretty good and the marbled vanilla base helps to keep the fruit flavor from becoming too intense.   The strawberry pieces are frozen.  I have encountered this issue with Ben & Jerry's strawberry pieces before (also here).  Biting into frozen strawberries is no fun, but from experience I know to melt the pieces on my tongue before trying to chew them.  I was surprised to find that the shortbread pieces are dark green!  I think the pieces may have originally been yellowish orange like on the side of the carton, but must have absorbed some of the blueberry-raspberry base.  They don't look too appetizing, but they taste alright.  They provide a bit of gritty texture as well.

This is an interesting and fruity pint of ice cream.  It is basically the mix-ins from a previous Walmart-exclusive flavor Strawberry Not So Shortcake put into a swirl of blueberry-raspberry and vanilla bases.  I liked Strawberry Not So Shortcake and I applaud the use of blueberry in the bases, but I don't think the mix-ins matched the bases here.  The cosmetic issues (purple instead of blue and dark green shortbread pieces) were just that -- cosmetic -- but they took away some of the fun of what could have been a very colorful flavor.  The flavor was decent though.  If you like blueberry and you love Ben & Jerry's, you'll want to give it a try, but otherwise, I can see why this is an experimental limited batch flavor only available from one vendor.