Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle Ice Cream is back on shelves! Please find our review below, originally published on 15 November 2016.

Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle.

You may have never heard of it, but here’s the abbreviated description via Trader Joe’s website: “Jingle Jangle is an assortment of a whole bunch of things that taste terrific bathed in chocolate.”

Milk chocolate covered pretzels with a white chocolate drizzle. Dark chocolate covered caramel popcorn. Dark chocolate covered Joe-Joe’s. Candy coated chocolate gems. Milk chocolate peanut butter cups. Also, dark chocolate peanut butter cups. I think the only thing missing is chocolate covered ice cream, but it’s pretty difficult to add ice cream into a snack mix.

Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to add the snack mix into ice cream.

Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle Ice Cream

Trader Joe continues his impressive streak of being a glorious bastard with Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle Ice Cream. The description is lazy but who cares: ice cream with Jingle Jangle candy mix.

My jingles are already jangling.

Welp, my jangling stopped. That’s because Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle Ice Cream sounds so much better than it actually is.

“Ice cream with Jingle Jangle candy mix” is an accurate description, but unfortunately they forgot to flavor that ice cream with anything at all. If it’s supposed to be vanilla, it’s bland and unrecognizable. Is it supposed to be sweet cream? If so, they missed. It just tastes like cold, boring nothingness.

Like shitty frozen milk.

While it’s impossible to overlook a poor base, a high density of Jingle Jangle could have saved it. Again, it misses wildly in this regard.

The above photo includes a more fortunate scoop that contained a modest amount of mix-ins. But you might be staring at the lone pretzel in the entire container. And wasn’t that pretzel supposed to be covered in chocolate?

As a point of reference, here’s what REAL Jingle Jangle looks like. Look how happy it is:

You really have to put in a lot of effort to find the good stuff in Jingle Jangle ice cream. It’s a lot like an archeological dig; sure, you might discover a tasty peanut butter cup or a chocolate-covered Joe-Joe chunk here and there, but excitement fades fast once you get right back to tirelessly digging. And something about soaking in this cold, boring ice cream dulled the mix-ins’ flavors instead of enhancing them. It’s like, “hey, wait a minute… these old dinosaur bones don’t taste that good.” 

The candy gems are a nonfactor and I’m still searching for that chocolate covered caramel popcorn.

Where are you?

Trader Joe’s Jingle Jangle Ice Cream isn’t even a victim of ridiculous expectations – the ice cream is just not good. On top of that, there isn’t enough candy to compensate. The idea was devilishly brilliant but the execution lazy.

Maybe Trader Joe outsourced this one to The Grinch. Shit sucks.

Jingle Rating: 6 out of 10
Jangle Rating: 2 out of 10
Overall Rating: 4 out of 10

To keep up with all of our products finds and Junk Bantering in real time, follow us on social media at the links below!

Facebook: www.facebook.com/junkbanterblog
Instagram: www.instagram.com/junkbanter
Twitter: www.twitter.com/junkbanter
Snapchat: junkbanter

To contact us via e-mail, send a message to junkbanter@gmail.com