Best Fast Food Soft Serve Ice Cream, Ranked: Drive-Thru Diary
CALIFORNIA — Supermarket shelves may be filled with delicious ice cream flavors from manufacturers like Ben & Jerry’s and McConnell’s, but sometimes even the finest ice cream scoop can’t satisfy your ice cream craving.
The essence of soft serve ice cream, with its deliciously creamy consistency, depends on it being swirled out of a special machine just before it reaches your hand – something you just can’t have at home.
Fosters Freeze is the place to go, with no-frills burgers and cones served out of a window. But there are vast swathes of the Golden State that don’t have Fosters locations, so where’s a soft serve ice cream lover to go—ice cream trucks, no-frills cone vendors, and local gems notwithstanding?
Find out what’s happening in Los Angeleswith free real-time patch updates.
In search of an affordable waffle, I decided to put some of the country’s most well-known restaurants to the test and create a ranking of the best fast food vanilla flavored soft serve ice cream cones.
The competitors are all fast-food chains where ice cream isn’t the main attraction—sorry, Dairy Queen. But as I perused these offerings, I found that some drive-thru ice creams are worth the drive alone, while others are underwhelming.
Find out what’s happening in Los Angeleswith free real-time patch updates.
4. McDonald’s beautiful, not cold bag with fluff
If the Golden Arches waffle has anything going for it, it’s unparalleled convenience and accessibility – assuming the machine at your local restaurant isn’t cleaned or isn’t working properly.
But the McDonald’s vanilla ice cream cone is otherwise pretty disappointing. Its shiny surface glittered in the harsh neon lights of the restaurant lobby and looked more like a plastic movie prop than something I wanted to bite into.
And when I did, I realized that the ice cream had a strangely fluffy consistency, reminiscent of slightly chilled marshmallows – how can this ice cream be so uncold and still hold its perfect shape? Its impressive structural integrity seems to be made for those who hold the cone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other.
However, like most McDonald’s products, the taste is just right, with a pleasant vanilla flavor and just the right amount of sweetness.
My verdict: Skip it and get a McFlurry instead, which offers a more satisfying variety of textures.
3. Chick-fil-A – this is not ice cream
Oh, how I wanted to like this one even more. Chick-fil-A is known for its commitment to a quality fast food experience, but its Icedream Cone doesn’t quite live up to the reputation of its chicken sandwiches.
First, I noticed the humorously over-the-top presentation: After ordering at the counter, an employee handed me a waffle propped up by an upside-down dome lid resting in a beverage cup. It was a tremendous waste of paper and plastic for a tiny frozen treat—by far the smallest among competitors.
The waffle’s striking golden hue revealed its greatest strength: a distinct French vanilla flavor that tasted the most “real” of the other three ice cream flavors.
But here’s the catch: The cutesy, copyrighted name of the Chick-fil-A bag obscures a truth. It’s not ice cream, but “frozen dairy dessert,” a government-regulated category that includes low-quality frozen foods from the supermarket.
After learning this via Chick-fil-A’s website, my assessment began to make sense: that the creaminess of the ice cream – er, frozen dairy dessert – was masked by its sweetness. The USDA requires, among other things, that anything labeled ice cream contain at least 10 percent milk fat.
2. Burger King beats McDonald’s
On my night of reviewing soft serve ice cream, I was pleasantly surprised by Burger King’s offering, as it was a palate cleanser of sorts for McDonald’s unsatisfying cone.
I noticed immediately that BK’s ice cream had a lot more structure than its arch-nemesis. In fact, this swirl got top marks for what I consider to be the most important quality of soft serve ice cream: iciness.
It was cold and had ice crystals that gave it a pleasantly chewy consistency.
Even though it was sweeter and had a less pronounced vanilla flavor than McDonald’s, I wanted to eat more of Burger King’s waffle—and faster—perhaps because it melted much faster than Mickey D’s warm and stiff abomination.
1. Tastee Freez exists, deliciously, outside of this song
I know what you’re thinking: How can the self-proclaimed purveyors of the “original soft serve” rightly appear on this list?
Tastee Freez was immortalized as the setting for John Mellencamp’s characters in “Jack & Diane” and is mentioned in at least 18 other songs, but the chain has seen better days since its heyday in the 1950s, when it had nearly 1,800 stores.
Today, only four standalone stores remain, as Tastee Freez’s recent owners have saved the brand from becoming nothing more than a pop culture footnote by offering a limited ice cream menu at a few wiener schnitzel and hamburger stands.
I would argue that Tastee Freez is still an unknown brand, even though the waffles are on the menu of—or in some cases co-marketed with—dozens of fast-food restaurants across California.
Despite its obvious fall from grace, Tastee Freez delivered a cone piled high with creamy, custard-like streaks of golden ice cream. Like its competitors, the cone cost about $3, making Tastee Freez the clear winner in terms of value for money.
The ice cream was extremely rich, with a distinct vanilla flavor complemented by a pleasant sweetness. This is a drive-thru cone that feels like “going out for ice cream.”
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free patch newsletters and alerts.
