A while back, a friend of mine talked to me about a dessert product called Arctic Zero (www.myarcticzero.com) which claims to be 150 calories per pint. Given how much I love ice cream (and oh yes, I DO love ice cream), I have been seeking out this product locally, and until Tuesday, I hadn't seen it. But while shopping at Kroger I finally spotted it! Man this shit is pricey Like, more than Ben & Jerry’s expensive. But which flavor to choose? Well, the ones available were Cookies and Cream, Chocolate, and I think Vanilla Maple. I chose the Cookies and Cream for my experiment, since it is one of my favorite flavors of ice cream.
The packaging is reasonable. The Arctic Zero logo is sorta meh, but the carton is pretty standard, with “150 calories per pint” prominently slapped all over it. According to the nutrition label, there are 4 servings in this pint, each one clocking in at 37 calories. The lid has solid color rim, that I believe is indicative of the product within. For example, Strawberry would have a red rim, Mint Cookie would have a green rim, and so forth. What color is Cookies and Cream? Grey. Right, well, it wouldn't really be colored...yeah, it totally is a uniform grey.
Why in the hell would you color your weird diet food product, which is ALREADY going to make people leery of eating it, the appetizing color of gruel? Arctic Zero, you are NOT impressing me with your Cookies and Cream. No one, and I mean NO ONE wants to eat grey food. In fact, I was reluctant to dig into this “treat” after seeing it. Also, shouldn't Cookies and Cream have, you know, cookie bits in it? A monolithic wall of grey stared at me from the carton, with nary a hit of fabled “mix ins” that were once written about by Abdul Al-HaagenDaaz in his Dessertronomicon. I prepared a bowl of “frozen dessert”. It certainly smelled faintly of cookies and cream, like someone prepared a very mild perfume that used the scent.
It is not bad, but I wouldn't classify it as good either. The mouth feel is pretty much like ice cream, though it can get a little...well, chewy is the best word but it is hard to describe. It is extremely creamy in texture, and it looks a lot like ice cream. The taste is almost but not quite unlike cookies and cream ice cream. It tastes more like coffee or mocha ice cream than cookies and cream, but the flavor is very, very muted, like tasting a phantom of ice cream. It is not bad, just...it’s like eating frozen vapor that’s been scented with something. It does leave you feeling relatively full. Not “ate a pint of ice cream” full, but comfortably full.
The ingredient list is a hoot. The largest single ingredient is “purified water”, with whey protein concentrate, organic cane sugar, chicory root (???), dutch processed cocoa powder (with alkali!), guar gum, xanthan gum, the ever mysterious “natural flavors”, sea salt, and monk fruit (???) concentrate. This shit is some serious food alchemy let me tell you. It even contains 8 grams of fiber, somehow.
On a scale of 5 frowny faces to 5 smiley faces, I give Arctic Zero Cookies and Cream 0 faces. More than anything, it puzzles me. Who makes GREY food? Still, I’d be willing to give this stuff another go around, if only to try out the other flavors and see if they are as bizarre as this one. Being able to consume an entire pint of something dessert related would make dieting a bit easier on the stomach, if not the pocketbook.
