“You scream, I scream we all scream for ice cream”…but the FDA says that does not apply to the ice cream you get from Dairy Queen! 

Dairy Queen is known for their soft serve, which also serves as the foundation for their famous (and delicious)  Blizzards — but that soft serve concoction can’t technically be called “ice cream” according to the FDA. 

Regulations from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require a product to contain at least 10% milk fat, which is the fatty portion of milk, in order to be qualified as “ice cream.” 

Dairy Queen’s soft serve “ice cream” only contains 5% milk fat, meaning it doesn’t meet the fat requirement and therefore doesn’t fit the government’s technical  definition of ice cream.

The lawyers for Dairy Queen apparently know this. The Dairy Queen menu, doesn’t use  the words “ice cream” — instead, their signature dish is simply referred to as “soft serve.”

The FDA used to classify the DQ soft serve as “ice milk,” which included frozen desserts with a milk fat content between 2.5 and 10%. But in 1995, regulations shifted and products that were classified as ice milk were redesignated as reduced-fat, light, or low-fat ice cream, depending on the fat content. Despite that change, Dairy Queen never changed their recipe. So while Dairy Queen’s soft serve qualifies as “reduced-fat ice cream” that’s still not ice cream in the FDA’s eyes. 

But don’t tell that to those of us who still scream for Dairy Queen “ice cream”!

Steve Gill is Publisher of TriStar Daily and an avid fan of whatever Dairy Queen puts in their cones. And the fact that their ice cream machines always seem to work.