Snack Review: Safeway Green Tea Ice Cream

I was so excited to see green tea ice cream in my Safeway - in the Safeway store brand! If Safeway is making this flavor, it must really have become mainstream. And if green tea ice cream is mainstream, can black sesame be far behind, at least in specialty brands?

Well, if you are a fan of green flavor, I will have mercy and not torture you with suspense: this was sooooo disappointing.

The first hint should have been that this green tea flavor comes with a big swirl of vanilla ice cream in it. I wondered, did they think that Americans would find this so scary that they needed something comforting and familiar mixed in?

Well, it’s worse than that. They thought that Americans would find this flavor so scary that they left all the flavor out.

I am someone who can appreciate subtle flavors. I really don’t require everything to slap me in the face and knock my socks off. I mean, sure, I like to be bare-footed and slap-faced by a taste as much as the next snack reviewer. But it doesn’t have to be every time, you know?

Still, there’s a minimum standard of how much something needs to taste like something - not just be the right color - in order to count. And to my tongue, this tasted pretty much like nothing.

I swear, I went out of my way to give it a chance. Cold dulls flavors, so I tried the melted parts. I made a cup of tea and drank that along with it, in case the first few bites had frozen up my mouth. No use. The flavor is so subtle as to be nonexistent.

On the bright side, it wasn’t as bad as the tragic Mikawaya mochi ice cream, which had that horrible imitation artificial green tea flavor. But only in the sense that “nothing” is a better thing to have in your mouth than “nasty.”

As a consolation I dug out of my freezer the last few pieces of the good Maeda-en green tea mochi ice cream. I’d done that thing where something is so good that I save it for a special occasion that never arrives before it gets old and stale. The wrapper had come loose and the mochi had dried out and I think there’d even been some thawing and re-freezing. I could smell that the outside was stale and freezer-burnt. But I dug the ice cream out of the middle, and it was still one hundred times better than the Safeway. Japan-flavor-philes, don’t waste your money.

• Safeway Website

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