With the summer months come beach weather, traveling, and best of all, ice cream. July is nationally recognized as Ice Cream Month, and the United States is showing its love for the cold and sweet treat by talking about their favorite flavors on the social media platform Twitter. Twitter itself then ran some analytics and was able to create a map showing the favorite ice cream flavors around the U.S.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan enjoying ice cream.
In 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that the month of July would henceforth be known as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of July as National Ice Cream Day. This year, that will be July 16. The country’s favorite dairy treat has enjoyed a long, popular history and has come in more and more flavors as time. From classics like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, to newer flavors such as coffee and cookie dough, ice creams shows some major trends in America’s tastes.
Coffee and cookie dough are the dominant secondary flavors across the U.S. (vanilla and chocolate have been disregarded due to their overwhelming preference throughout most states). Coffee is the flavor of choice on the West Coast and in New England. Coffee flavored ice cream is also popular in parts of the South. Cookie dough, on the other hand, has its stronghold stretching from the Midwest through the Rust Belt. It’s difficult to say why these flavors are popular in these areas, but we see a trend of regional preferences; rarely are there isolated pockets of favorites, but rather there are fairly large geographic areas that share common tastes. The South and Rocky Mountain regions enjoy brownie flavored ice cream, with scattered tastes for strawberry or mint chocolate throughout the rest of the U.S.
California is the largest ice cream producer in the U.S.
California is by far the largest ice cream producer in the U.S. followed by Indiana in a distant second. Dreyer’s and Häagen-Dazs, among others, have their headquarters in California, and three of the top 10 ice cream consuming cities per capita, Long Beach, Bakersfield, and Fresno, are located in California. Interestingly, while many of California’s cities top ice cream consumption lists, California itself doesn’t even crack the top ten in individual states. Among the states, it is actually Washington D.C. that consumes the most ice cream per capita. Overall, it is the West and Northeast that produces and consumes the most ice cream, making those the best places for ice cream lovers to spend their summers.
Created by Twitter, 2016