This Is Canada's Best Supermarket Ice Cream Sandwich

Quite reliably, whenever I buy a box of ice cream sandwiches while grocery shopping, I’ll put them in the freezer when I get home and then promptly forget that they’re there. Not because I don’t enjoy them: there’s something comforting about their bricklike shape and the unavoidably soft texture the cookie gets from being packaged with ice cream and frozen. Since my freezer is smaller than most fridge models, I’ll take them out of the box, and their white wrapping blends in a little too easily among the bags of corn and ice trays. My kids love to dig around in the drawers looking for them after dinner, their plain packaging never giving away whatever brand I’ve picked up.

Now that the mercury is finally rising again, we decided to brush up on our earlier ice cream sandwich taste test and see if our old favourites still hold up. We stuck to the classic vanilla ice cream-chocolate cookie version, and picked up every box-store brand available to us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was one of our more popular taste-test categories in the office and we had more participants than usual. The results, however, were surprising! Read on to find out more.

Nestlé Parlour, $5 for 12

Multiple tasters detected an aftertaste to Nestlé’s version of the classic vanilla ice cream sandwich, with notes that varied from olive-y to salty. Whatever it was, the flavour overpowered the cocoa in the cookie.

Selection, $5 for 12

“The ‘sandwich’ aspect of this cookie doesn’t feel very substantial,” wrote one tester, noting that there wasn’t enough ice cream between the cookies. More than one editor also noted a banana-like flavour to the ice cream, which they did not love. 

Compliments, $8 for 12

Editors were divided on Compliments’ version, with some appreciating the dense and chewy texture of the cookie and the high cocoa content, and others bemoaning the lack of flavour in the ice cream. 

No Name, $10 for 24

The results on this former fave were shocking: for a few years now, No Name’s classic chocolate and vanilla brick has remained a top pick among Chatelaine editors. This year, when tried under the conditions of a blind taste test, testers were quite unmoved. “Reasonably biscuity biscuit, forgettable ice cream,” wrote one. “It’s kinda whatever.”

Great Value, $5 for 12

Our runner-up entry lost to our winner by a single vote. Despite multiple comments about the ice cream being quite soft even while frozen, editors really liked this Walmart house brand sandwich! “Good biscuit taste, strong vanilla flavor,” wrote one. Of the top two, this pick had the more pronounced cocoa flavour in the biscuit.

Chapman’s, $7 for 12

Support for this classic Canadian ice cream brand was strong, with a near unanimous vote cementing Chapman’s vanilla ice cream sandwich as our top pick. The biscuit had a decent bite, it stayed intact against the ice cream and had a slight hit of salt which held up nicely to the ice cream and gave the overall flavour a bit of complexity. As one editor wrote: “It tastes the most iconically summer of all.”

How we select our products. We’re committed to finding the best and most accessible pantry ingredients, and that means being able to test and judge them fairly: in the same place, at the same time, under the same conditions. This means not every single brand available on the national market is going to make it to our Toronto-based kitchen. Some items are only regionally available in a specific province, while others are priced well out of the average grocery budget. Here’s what we guarantee: at least half of our picks will always be available nationally, we will always include selections from major grocery store chains. And if there’s a pick you really think we missed, we’d love to hear about it: letters@chatelaine.com.