Holiday Calendar

National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day

Next celebratedThursday, July 1, 2027

National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day is for the flavors nobody expected to work. Ask a scoop shop what is new this week, or make something odd at home and see who asks for a second bowl.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJuly 1
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYFood
SUBCATEGORYIce Cream
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The day's paper trail begins in a web archive, not a proclamation.

No founder, sponsoring organisation or establishing document for National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day was located in the indexes checked, which included the Federal Register, HathiTrust's digitised run of Chase's Calendar of Events, and English Wikipedia. The earliest trace found is a holiday listing page captured by the Internet Archive in April 2002, and a listing dates the listing rather than the day, so it sets a floor on how long the day has circulated and not a year of origin.

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INTRO

Inventing a flavor is the easy half

Ben & Jerry's keeps a cemetery. It sits on a hill above the company's factory in Waterbury, Vermont, and the granite headstones carry the names of flavors it has retired. National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day is the calendar's nod to the work that fills it.

Read the dates and the odds get plain. Thirty four of the graves on the online Flavor Graveyard print a year range. On 18 of those, the death year is the same as the birth year or one after it.

Dreaming up a flavor costs almost nothing. Getting one to a second summer is the expensive part, and that gap is what this day is really about.

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ORIGINS

Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day history

INTRODUCTION

A London cookery school put a cucumber ice on its list of ordinary flavors in 1885. In A. B. Marshall's The Book of Ices, Cucumber Cream Ice is recipe number 27, sitting alphabetically between Cranberry and Curaçao.

The method is plain. Peel a cucumber, cook it down with sugar and water, then pound it. A wine glass of ginger brandy goes in before it freezes.

Nothing in the book treats any of this as a stunt. The line between an ordinary flavor and a strange one keeps moving, and the trade that moves it has left a far longer paper trail than the holiday has.

CHAPTER 01

A winter course for a summer trade

Penn State began teaching dairy manufacturing in 1892, in the season when, as the department still puts it, farm work is least pressing. By 1925 ice cream had a course of its own. It runs every January, which the department describes as normally the slowest time for the ice cream industry.

Penn State calls it the oldest and largest program of its kind in ice cream science. More than 4,400 people have taken it, drawn from every state and from every continent except Antarctica.

CHAPTER 02

Five dollars, by post

In 1978 two men paid five dollars for a Penn State correspondence course on making ice cream. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their company later the same year.

Eight years on, a customer in Maine mailed the Burlington office a postcard proposing a cherry flavor named for Jerry Garcia. The first attempt copied a cherry cordial, and by the company's account it tasted good but they wanted great. The team went back and rebuilt it around whole bing cherries and smaller than usual chocolate chunks.

Cherry Garcia reached freezers on 15 February 1987, and the first eight pints went to Jerry Garcia himself. Ben & Jerry's says it quickly became one of its three most popular flavors.

The day that celebrates all this carries no comparable record. No founder, organisation or establishing document for it turned up in the indexes checked, and the oldest trace located is an archived holiday listing from April 2002, which fixes a floor rather than a beginning.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Cucumber ice, filed under C

A. B. Marshall's The Book of Ices lists a cucumber cream ice among its ordinary numbered flavors.

Penn State's first dairy class

The college began teaching dairy manufacturing in winter, the class its Ice Cream Short Course grew out of.

Ice cream gets its own course

The subject had grown enough that Penn State split it out of the general dairy programme.

Two students, one postal course

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took a five dollar Penn State correspondence course, then started their company.

Cherry Garcia reaches the freezer

The flavor a customer had proposed by postcard went on sale on 15 February.

The Flavor Graveyard opens

Ben & Jerry's opened it with four retired flavors on a hill above its Vermont factory.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day

ODDS

Retired to make room for a new one, in the company's own words.

Ben & Jerry's says its retired flavors were simply not best sellers, and that they were pulled to make room for a new one. New flavors keep arriving, so older ones keep leaving.

TASTE

Asked to name a favorite, Americans name the standards

The International Dairy Foods Association's April 2026 survey of more than 2,200 American adults put chocolate first, then butter pecan, vanilla, cookies and cream, and salted caramel. The strange flavors get the attention while the plain ones get named.

STAKES

Flavor is what decides the purchase

The same survey found flavor to be the top driver of an ice cream purchase, with seven in ten calling it very important. It also found that 97 percent of Americans say they love or like ice cream, so the audience for a new one is close to everybody.

Why don't you make a cherry flavor and call it Cherry Garcia?
Jane Williamsonthe customer whose 1986 postcard proposed the flavor

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day

An 1885 recipe book ends on curried fish, frozen

The last numbered recipe in Marshall's The Book of Ices is Souffles of Curry a la Ripon, built on onions, apples, coconut, almonds and a sole or whiting. One recipe earlier comes iced spinach.

One flavor got an actual funeral

When the peanut butter flavor What a Cluster was retired in 2015, Ben & Jerry's held a funeral for it at the graveyard. It was the first the company had staged.

US continuing education may have started with ice cream

Penn State says its Ice Cream Short Course is believed to be the first continuing education course in the United States. That is a claim about American adult education in general, not about teaching ice cream alone.

Marshall's book listed 51 cream ice flavors

A. B. Marshall's The Book of Ices numbers its cream ices made from ripe fruits from 10 to 60, with no gaps. That is 51 flavors, in a book of 117 numbered recipes.

Egg yolk decides what your scoop is called

GovInfo, citing 21 CFR 135.110, says the FDA calls it ice cream below 1.4 percent egg yolk solids by weight. Above that line, the name of the food is frozen custard.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Creative Ice Cream Flavors Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Build one flavor from a base and an idea

Pick a base you already like and add one thing that does not obviously belong in it. Write down what you were going for before you taste it, so you can tell whether you got there.

COOK

Cook a savoury ice from an 1885 book

Marshall's The Book of Ices is free to read in full, and the cucumber cream ice at number 27 needs a cucumber, sugar, water and a glass of ginger brandy. Serve it to someone without telling them what it is.

WALK

Walk the flavor graveyard in Vermont

The headstones stand on a hill above the Waterbury factory, and Ben & Jerry's closes the site for the winter season. Read a few epitaphs before you decide which retired flavor you miss most.

SIGN

Sign up for the ice cream short course

Penn State runs its seven day Ice Cream Short Course every January, with more than 20 workshops covering flavouring, freezing and hardening. About 120 students take it each year.

RUN

Run a blind tasting with three flavors

Put out three scoops, cover the tubs and ask people to rank them without knowing which is which. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you like a flavor or just like the idea of one.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Creative Ice Cream?

1 / 7

Which of these was a numbered cream ice recipe in an 1885 London ice cream book?

Answer

No. No statute, proclamation or agency designation for it was found in the indexes checked, so it is an unofficial observance and a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

10sources
9primary records
6independently dated
Primary records
U.S. Government Publishing Office1984
Public Law 98-333, 98 Stat. 290
The 1984 joint resolution naming July 1984 as National Ice Cream Month.
View source
U.S. Government Publishing Office1984
Proclamation 5219, 98 Stat. 3618
Reagan's proclamation of 9 July 1984, with its recitals on ice cream and dairy.
View source
Internet Archive1885
A. B. Marshall, The Book of Ices
An 1885 London ice cream manual with 117 recipes, cucumber and curry among them.
View source
Penn State Department of Food Science
Ice Cream Short Course
The programme's own history, curriculum and enrolment since 1892.
View source
Penn State Berkey Creamery
Our Story
The creamery's dated timeline, including the 1978 correspondence course entry.
View source
Ben & Jerry's
Flavor Graveyard
The company's list of retired flavors, each with its headstone years and epitaph.
View source
Ben & Jerry's2015
The Flavor Graveyard: Honoring our Dearly De-Pinted Flavors
How the Vermont graveyard began in 1997 and why flavors get retired.
View source
Ben & Jerry's2015
Cherry Garcia: The Long Strange Trip from Idea to Ice Cream
The postcard, the rejected prototype and the February 1987 launch.
View source
International Dairy Foods Association2026-04
Ice Cream & Frozen Novelty Trends Survey, April 2026
A poll of more than 2,200 US adults on favourite flavors and toppings.
View source
Additional coverage
U.S. Government Publishing Office
National Ice Cream Day feature
Federal documents on ice cream, including the FDA line on frozen custard.
View source
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