As Americans celebrate National Ice Cream Month this July, the brand they’re searching for most online is one that takes an unconventional approach to making frozen desserts.
Halo Top was the most-searched ice cream brand from April 2025 through April 2026, according to Google search trends from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., analyzed in a study from Innerbody Research.
Halo Top markets its ice cream as a “feel-good treat” with “fewer calories and less sugar than other leading brands, with a good source of protein.”
“From the beginning, Halo Top has taken a different path,” the company’s website says. “While most ice cream brands hide their calorie counts, we put ours right on the front: big, bold, and impossible to miss.”
Halo Top was founded in 2011 and named “Food Disruptor of the Year” in 2017 by Food Dive after it reported a 2,500% increase in sales the previous year.
Ice cream manufacturer Wells Enterprises, which also owns Blue Bunny, acquired Halo Top in 2019.
The other ice cream brands with the highest search interest after Halo Top were Cold Stone Creamery, Breyers, Talenti, and Häagen-Dazs, according to the Innerbody Research report.
Searches don’t necessarily translate to sales, however. In 2025, Breyers, Blue Bunny, and Turkey Hill were the top-selling brands by dollar sales, Dairy Foods Magazine reported.
“A most-searched list is often a mirror for our anxieties,” food scientist and Johns Hopkins University senior lecturer Kantha Shelke told Fox News Digital.
“Halo Top is winning the search bar because it promises indulgence without the consequences naturally associated with that experience.”
The Halo Top curiosity is the GLP-1 era translated into dessert, Shelke said.
“Protein-forward, portion-sized, low-sugar and guilt-free indulgence,” she said of Halo Top.
Consumers looking for foods that they can enjoy without the guilt is not a new concept, said Maeve Webster, president of Vermont-based food and beverage consulting firm Menu Matters. It happened before with the frozen yogurt trend.
“What is new, particularly with Halo Top, is the technology for how you create a healthier ice cream without the crystallization or the poor flavor or the poor mouthfeel that we may have seen in some previous iterations of these kinds of efforts,” Webster told Fox News Digital.
“The technology is catching up,” Webster added. “And increasingly, we’ll be able to create healthier versions of these kinds of products that are closer, if not almost exactly like, the original full-indulgence ice cream experience.”
Webster also believes social media and inventive marketing played a role in people becoming more interested in Halo Top recently.
“With the volume of information people get on a daily basis, they’re probably seeing a lot of things they’ve never heard of before, haven’t seen in the stores and suddenly they’re curious about it because they see some video on social media,” she said.
Ice cream is often cited as America’s favorite dessert, with 97% of Americans saying they love or like ice cream, according to a 2024 International Dairy Foods Association survey. The average American consumes about 20 pounds — almost four gallons — of ice cream each year, the association also reported.
Because consumers eat ice cream so often, they’re more likely to make an effort to find a brand that enables them to “enjoy ice cream without that guilt and the feeling that you’re doing something wrong or bad for yourself,” Webster said.
Foods marketed as “natural” are not the same as “risk-free,” and “high protein” is not the same as healthy, Shelke noted.
“Safety and benefit are designed at the formulation stage, not conferred by a claim on the front of the box,” she said.
Consumers should beware of light ice creams that use the sugar alcohol erythritol, which is produced through the fermentation of corn, Shelke said.
She cited a 2023 Cleveland Clinic study, published in Nature Medicine, that linked higher blood erythritol levels with increased rates of heart attack and stroke and found the sweetener appeared to make platelets more likely to form clots.
“The context matters: that is an association in at-risk cardiac patients, it concerns circulating blood levels rather than any single serving, and it has been debated in the literature. The authors notably called for long-term safety studies,” Shelke said.
“Not a reason to panic. Just a reason to pay attention.”
Read the full article here
