The law requiring chains to display calorie info doesn't seem very effective at ice cream parlors. The muckrackers at, um, Good Housekeeping just finished a sting operation on five ice cream shops in NYC, buying 50 scoops from Cold Stone Creamery, Haagen-Dazs, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel and Ben & Jerry's. What they found may shock you.
All but one of the shops dished out too much ice cream! Except for Ben & Jerry's, all the shops exceeded their serving sizes by a range of 11 percent to 48 percent. After buying the ice cream and rushing it back to the lab for analysis, researchers found that Baskin-Robbins was the most generous, dishing out an average of nearly 2 ounces more than the serving size, which amounts to 133 calories over the publicized calorie count. Cold Stone Creamery came closest to the correct size most often, only deviating by 109 calories on one occasion.
Haagen-Dazs servings were consistently over by about an ounce, while Carvel was the most inconsistent, sometimes under-serving by half an ounce and sometimes going over the top by as many as three ounces, to the tune of 175 calories. As for Ben & Jerry's, the Unilever subsidiary is the only one that consistently served less ice cream than what customers paid for, averaging 46 fewer calories than stated. So Ben and Jerry, of all people, think we're fat.
