Five '70s ice cream flavors fans want back: Butter Brickle to Maple Walnut

Walk into most ice cream shops today and you'll find the usual suspects: cookies and cream, salted caramel, mint chocolate chip. But ask anyone who grew up in the 1970s what they really want, and you'll hear a different list entirely—flavors that have largely vanished from freezer cases across the country, replaced by whatever the current trend demands.

Butter Brickle is the one that comes up most often. The flavor traces back to a butterscotch candy invented in Omaha, Nebraska, during the 1920s, but it was the 1970s when butter brickle ice cream—studded with crunchy toffee pieces—became a genuine national staple. People remember it vividly. In online forums dedicated to 1970s nostalgia, fans return to it again and again, describing those toffee bits with the kind of specificity that suggests the flavor left a real mark. Today, finding it requires effort most shoppers aren't willing to make.

Rum raisin has a longer pedigree. The flavor emerged in the 1930s, but its moment came in the 1970s, when rum-soaked raisins suspended in vanilla ice cream showed up in shops and grocery stores everywhere. The flavor even reached the White House—President Richard Nixon reportedly served it for dessert. It still exists in pockets of the country, but many regions have watched it disappear from shelves. On Reddit, ice cream enthusiasts post about missing it, calling it their favorite flavor, as if confessing a loss.

Baskin-Robbins introduced Pink Bubblegum in the 1970s as something genuinely unusual: bright pink ice cream with actual pieces of chewy bubblegum mixed throughout. It was strange enough to stick in memory. Some people who ate it as children recall the ritual—finishing the ice cream first, then chewing the gum that remained. Baskin-Robbins has brought it back occasionally for limited runs, which only deepens the sense that it belongs to a past that companies can briefly resurrect but not quite restore.

Heavenly Hash started as something else entirely: a fruit salad made with whipped cream, marshmallows, candied fruit, and nuts—the kind of dish that defined mid-century American entertaining. Sealtest transformed the concept into ice cream in 1969, combining marshmallows, almonds, and chocolate chips into something that resembled Rocky Road but arrived first. When Sealtest's ice cream line folded, Heavenly Hash went with it. People who remember it speak of it fondly, as if mourning a small, specific pleasure that the world decided it no longer needed.

Maple Walnut has deeper roots than the others. Maple ice cream appears in some 19th-century cookbooks from the Northeast, and the addition of walnuts made it a New England fixture. In the 1970s, you could find it without searching. Now it has faded from most ice cream aisles, though the memory persists—people recall their grandmothers loving it, remember eating it as children, and note with some surprise that they haven't seen it in decades.

What happened is straightforward: consumer tastes shifted. The flavors that dominate freezers now are different from those that dominated then. But the nostalgia is real and persistent. People online don't just mention these flavors in passing—they express genuine longing for them, as if the disappearance of Butter Brickle or Maple Walnut represents something larger about what gets preserved and what gets left behind. Food companies have noticed. Limited-edition revivals of discontinued flavors have become a strategy, a way to tap into the market of people who want to taste their childhoods again. Whether that satisfies the longing or simply reminds people of what they've lost remains an open question.