The estimated size of the plant-based ice cream market in the U.S. is US$2.6-billion and projected to more than double in size in the next decade, a recent report says.Photo illustration by Christie Vuong; Food styling by Nicole Billark/The Globe and Mail
Midway through her first week in operation, Bailey Vernon sold out of ice cream at her downtown Dartmouth scoop shop Churned. For two days, the doors remained closed while staff busied themselves in the kitchen, creating enough litres of rhubarb ginger, dirty chai and wild blueberry crumble to satisfy the crowd they were anticipating on the weekend.
Churned ice cream shop in Dartmouth, N.S.Neighbourhood Media & Co./Supplied
They blended coconut milk with sunflower seed milk, streamed in simple syrup, melted coconut oil and cocoa butter, and added flavourings such as vanilla before putting it through a large commercial ice cream maker to churn and chill until a voluminous creamy concoction poured out.
The growing customer base is seemingly unbothered by – and sometimes unaware of – the absence of dairy in any of Vernon’s products, which she calls “premium ice cream.”
“The ‘vegan’ word, that’s such a scary word,” she says, though she herself is vegan. Her signage and website identifies her products as plant-based, but she didn’t develop them for a niche market. “I didn’t want it to be about being vegan. I wanted it to be about having ice cream.”
Plant-based ice cream has come a long way in the past decade. The gritty, ice-crystal-studded frozen desserts of yore have been supplanted by rich, velvety products that look, taste and melt much more like their dairy counterparts, thanks to advancements in food science.
On a recent morning, Vernon was busy in the shop’s open kitchen, making waffle cones, tasting the prototype for a new flavour (strawberry preserves swirled through a grassy matcha base) and preparing to bake 50 vegan cookies topped with black sesame seeds, which would sandwich a scoop of umami-rich black sesame and miso caramel ice cream. Each day, Churned produces 80 litres of ice cream, but Vernon anticipates that volume will soon grow with wholesale distribution.
Bailey Vernon, who started Churned, works at the plant-based ice cream shop.Neighbourhood Media & Co./Supplied
More people are buying plant-based ice cream – not just vegans or those who are lactose-intolerant, but also ice cream lovers who are concerned about the treatment of dairy cows and the environmental impact of animal farming.
Breyer’s, Häagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum have all expanded or reformulated their non-dairy offerings in recent years. In the U.S., the estimated size of the plant-based ice cream market is US$2.6-billion and projected to more than double in size in the next decade, according to a March report by Future Market Insights, Inc., a market research firm.
The first documentation of plant-based ice cream dates back to 1899, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that commercially made products became regularly available in health food stores: frozen confections made with tofu or plant-based milks.
It was these products that Ashley Wittig encountered during her early days as a teenage vegan in the late nineties. At the time, the options were slim. There were fruity sorbets or vegan ice creams with such low turnover that they were often freezer burnt. Wittig recalls the thin, watery and unsatisfying first taste of rice milk ice cream – a major reason the ice cream enthusiast went back to eating animal-based products. “I ate a bite of Rice Dream and then I was like, ‘Okay, goodbye.’”
Wittig returned to veganism at 25, and now, at 41, she runs Honey’s, a plant-based ice cream business in Toronto that opened its first storefront in 2020.
The vegan blueberry crumble ice cream at Churned.Churned/Supplied
For two years, she researched the way fat, water and sugar play together in dairy ice cream and ran her own vegan experiments at home. The winning combination of cashews and coconut is the base for most of her flavours – those fats replicate the richness and body of cow’s milk, giving her ice cream a dairy-like finish.
Wittig’s formula has proven so successful that she opened a second location last year in Toronto’s east end. Between the two shops and wholesale clients, Honey’s makes 500 pints a day in flavours as varied as tiger tail, double pistachio and peanut butter with saltine crackers.
These vegan products are at their peak when scooped in-store, but the makers offer advice to customers buying take-home pints: Vernon recommends leaving the tub out to soften for five to 10 minutes before scooping, and Wittig suggests putting a sheet of parchment on top of the ice cream before putting it back in the freezer to prevent freezer burn.
While plant-based ice creams were predominantly made with almond, coconut and soy from 2020 to 2024, the Future Market Insights report predicts a major shift toward other bases including oats, cashews, hemp and peas in the decade ahead – and it’s already under way. Ben & Jerry’s made their non-dairy ice cream with either almonds or sunflower butter for almost a decade, but last year reformulated it to be made with oat milk. Häagen-Dazs launched its own plant-based collection in 2023 with an oat base.
Ashley Wittig is the owner of Honey’s, a plant-based ice cream business in Toronto.Honey’s/Supplied
But the most important ingredient to pay attention to is the protein source, says Douglas Goff, an internationally renowned ice cream scientist who teaches an annual ice cream technology course at the University of Guelph.
“It’s easy to find a good fat. It’s easy to find the sugars that you need and the stabilizers. The question is, what are you using for a protein that’s going to give you a nice foam?”
In dairy ice creams, milk protein is key to emulsifying the fat, as well as creating small, stable air bubbles when the base is whipped that give the finished product a creamy texture.
Most plant proteins don’t perform those functions as well as dairy does, Goff says. Oftentimes the air bubbles are too big, which creates opportunity for large ice crystals to form.
Enter legumes, which have emerged in the past few years as an effective source of protein in ice cream.
The early versions of pea protein isolates were awful, Goff says. “They tasted green and they tasted like peas.” But industrial investment in growing and processing peas has led to much improved versions, which have a clean, neutral flavour and whip up a luscious finish. They’re now used in Ben & Jerry’s non-dairy version of the Tonight Dough (caramel and chocolate ice cream with cookie dough and chocolate cookie swirls) and Häagen-Dazs’s plant-based chocolate peanut butter – both of which have a creaminess, flavour and melt that make them convincing dupes of their dairy-based brethren.
Between Honey’s two shops and wholesale clients, the company makes 500 pints a day.Honey’s/Supplied
Legumes were also the key to creating a tastier vegan soft-serve at Winnipeg’s Bridge Drive In, a city institution since the 1950s. Owner Justin Jacob tried to combat the icy texture of BDI’s non-dairy ice cream – first made with coconut powder and then with oat milk – by adding a lot of stabilizer to the base. But that created a new problem: It took on an off-putting rubbery, pudding-like texture when melted.
Working with a team of food scientists at the University of Manitoba, Jacob learned about an Alberta company, Lupin Platform Inc., that was growing sweet lupin beans for use as a plant-based protein. The legume creates a luxurious texture that works well to mimic dairy soft serve. Using that, BDI now sells more than double the vegan soft-serve it did five years ago.
The one hitch is the mild flavour the lupin beans impart, which Jacob describes as similar to brewed tea.
Some can’t stand it, he says, “But for every person like that, there’s probably about eight or nine that say, ‘This is the best vegan soft serve that we’ve ever had.’”
