The Unlikely Popularity of Grape-Nuts Ice Cream

Ice cream is a food open to wild experimentation. Unique ice cream flavors can make international headlines, and travelers often go out of their way to try regional specialties.

For example, in New England and Nova Scotia, some parlors serve Grape-Nuts ice cream—not as a modern novelty, either. The mixture of vanilla ice cream and Grape-Nuts predates the cereal-milk flavor trend by a century.

Grape-Nuts—the crunchy breakfast cereal—are not a decadent ingredient, to say the least. Though they have a subtle malty sweetness, they’re a far cry from the usual sumptuous ice cream add-ins. Really, the cereal is the most basic option available at the average American grocery store, without any food coloring, trendy flavors, freeze-dried fruit, or a cartoon mascot.

The plain white box and pebbly-looking nuggets inside give off a stern, health-food vibe. But when the Postum Cereal Company began selling Grape-Nuts in 1897, that’s exactly what they were going for. The American cereal industry, based in Battle Creek, Michigan, found success more than a century ago selling Americans a breakfast that took seconds to prepare and could be eaten cold or hot. But, most importantly, for a population dogged by the miscellaneous gastrointestinal ailments known under the umbrella of “dyspepsia,” a fiber-filled breakfast that also served as a gentle laxative was a godsend.

But making a breakfast cereal was not the original intention of Charles William Post, the founder of the Postum Cereal Company (better known these days as Post). After a stint at the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Post started his own local company to sell health drinks, namely the caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Grape-Nuts were actually intended to become a beverage, as well. But Post decided that Grape-Nuts would instead be marketed as the most super of all superfoods.

Advertisements called Grape-Nuts “brain food,” and claimed that they could ease the symptoms of everything from an inflamed appendix to tuberculosis. The cereal often came packaged with booklets entitled The Road to Wellville (also the title of a novel and movie about Kellogg), which espoused the cereal’s health claims and offered suggestions on how to eat it. As early as 1916, the Postum company included a recipe for Grape-Nuts ice cream in one of these publications. The method was simple: Just add Grape-Nuts to vanilla ice cream. There were also recipes for Grape-Nut sundaes, Grape-Nut pudding, and a number of savory Grape-Nut dishes.

For decades, Grape-Nuts included a simple ice cream recipe in many of its advertisements. But it’s unlikely that the Postum company invented this concoction. Before 1916, cookbooks sometimes included Grape-Nuts in ice cream. It wasn’t because cooks especially loved Grape-Nuts. Rather, they were a substitution for crushed almond macaroons in a long-lost ice cream flavor called bisque.

In the early 20th century, ice cream made with crumbs of almond macaroons, stale cake crumbs, brown bread, Nabisco crackers, or cereal, often with the addition of vanilla or sherry flavoring, were all referred to as bisque. However, some ice-cream makers were of the opinion that swapping out crushed macaroons for something cheaper was a cop-out. In one 1924 book for aspiring ice-cream makers, the author writes that “Bisque crumbs for Bisque ice cream should consist properly of stale, dry macaroons that are broken up into crumbs of the correct size.” Grape-Nuts, on the other hand, “tend to become soggy, tough or leathery.”

Yet in New England and Nova Scotia, Grape-Nuts ice cream has mysteriously endured, outlasting both bisque and trendy flavors. Fans of Grape-Nut ice cream speak of how the cereal softens slightly in the cream but doesn’t overwhelm its vanilla base, and how it represents both their childhoods and the area’s unique culinary history. But while it’s still relatively a niche treat in the United States, it’s become a top flavor somewhere else: Jamaica.

“It’s my favorite ice cream,” says Jamaica-born food blogger Yanikie Tucker. In Jamaica, she notes, it’s one of the most popular flavors, alongside pistachio and rum raisin. “We have no other reference in our cuisine for Grape-Nuts,” she says. “So coming [to the U.S.] and realizing that it wasn't very popular here, I was very shocked. Not being able to find the flavor in the supermarket, I thought, This is crazy. Where is the Grape-Nuts ice cream?”

Ice cream in Jamaica, Tucker explains, is distributed a bit differently than in the States. “Our ice-cream guys usually are on a motorcycle, and you can find them in some towns during the week, but ice-cream day is Sunday,” she says. “That's the day they come around with a box on the back of their motorcycle, with dry ice to keep the ice cream frozen.”

On ice-cream days, Grape-Nuts were a guarantee. “They may not have rum raisin, and they may have our idea of Neapolitan, [which] is more like a rainbow ice cream…But they will always, always have Grape-Nuts,” Tucker says.

According to Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture by B.W. Higgins, Grape-Nuts reached the island in 1901, as did Postum’s advertisements. But according to Higgins, in modern Jamaica, Grape-Nuts isn’t considered a breakfast at all. Tucker agrees: “When I came to the United States and learned that it was actually cereal, and people were having it with milk, I was like, Well, that makes sense.”

Tucker, who has published a Grape-Nuts ice cream recipe on her blog, waxes rhapsodic about its flavor. “I like what happens to [the cereal] after it sits in the ice cream. It becomes softer and a little bit chewy,” she says. “I'd love for more people to try it. It’s the luxury version of how you would have it in cereal.”