The Missing Ingredient in Halo Top Peanut Butter Cup

TINA.org reader Samantha S. wanted cups. Instead, she got swirls, and not even the chocolate kind represented on the packaging. For her purchase of Halo Top peanut butter cup ice cream, Samantha had to settle for peanut butter swirls.

Samantha didn’t want to make a big deal out of something so small (her word) so we’ll do it for her: Peanut butter cups and peanut butter swirls are not even in the same ballpark and the reason is that one has a chocolate shell and one doesn’t. Reese’s doesn’t make a peanut butter swirl and if they did there wouldn’t be a bowl of them in our office right now like there is of the candy brand’s peanut butter cups, attracting the attention of passersby. What would that even look like, individually wrapped peanut butter swirls? You might as well empty out a jar of peanut butter into a bowl and toss the spoon in the center. It’s ridiculous.

Regardless, it doesn’t say peanut butter swirl on the Halo Top ice cream. It says peanut butter cup. And TINA.org can attest to the utter lack of the latter. We bought a pint and here’s what the ice cream looks like under the lid:

After a few spoonfuls, there were still no peanut butter cups in sight. In lieu of cups we found swirls or, more accurately, twig-like clumps of peanut butter such as this one:

In addition to a lack of peanut butter cups, we also didn’t dig up any chocolate swirls, despite a series of chocolate-colored squiggly lines that wrap around pints of Halo Top peanut butter cup ice cream. That was another complaint of Samantha’s. Though Halo Top lists “high fat cocoa” as an ingredient, our taste buds did not detect any chocolate.

A spokesperson for Los Angeles-based Halo Top did not respond to a TINA.org request for comment. Last August, Halo Top announced in a press release that it was “America’s best-selling pint” and the “world’s first all-natural, low-calorie ice cream brand.”

But the way we see it, at least this particular flavor is simply the latest in a chain of products that don’t live up to their name.