The Most Popular Ice Cream Flavors in Every State

What is the most popular ice cream flavor in America?

Vanilla. In searches it’s way ahead of everything else, and chocolate gets about half its volume. Strawberry and matcha tie for third, at roughly a quarter. After those come mango, then coffee, then chocolate chip. Read the table with vanilla as 100. A flavor at 10 gets about one search for every ten of vanilla’s.

One caveat: a flavor search isn’t always someone picking dessert. Plenty are people looking up a recipe, a brand or a shop.

Every state’s signature ice cream flavor

A signature flavor is the one a state searches for most compared with the average state. That’s why it’s rarely vanilla, even though vanilla tops nearly every state’s list. The number in brackets says how far above the average state it runs, so Wisconsin searches for Blue Moon 8.5 times as much as the average state does.

Kansas and Wyoming are the two places where vanilla isn’t the most searched flavor, and we’d treat both results with care. Both states have small search volumes, so Google’s sample is thin. Matcha searches there came in bursts, not steadily: 16 of 53 weeks had any data in Kansas, and 7 in Wyoming. The only related search Google showed in either state was “matcha ice cream near me.” That looks like people hunting for somewhere to buy it, more than a long-standing taste.

Regional favorites, from Blue Moon to huckleberry

The signature flavors cluster by region.

• Great Lakes: Blue Moon is the signature flavor in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio and Iowa. In Wisconsin it’s the second most searched flavor overall, ahead of chocolate. Superman, the red, yellow and blue swirl, runs 5.6 times the average in Michigan and spills south: it’s the signature flavor in West Virginia and Kentucky.
• New England: Moose tracks is the signature in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Coffee is a top-three flavor in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and it’s the signature in Maine and Vermont.
• The South: Peach leads in Alabama, South Carolina and Arkansas. Butter pecan leads in Georgia, Maryland and Tennessee, and birthday cake in Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and Oklahoma.
• Hawaii and the West: Ube runs 8.2 times the average in Hawaii, one of the biggest leads on the map, and it’s the signature in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Virginia too. Mango leads in Texas and Washington, and on the East Coast in New Jersey.
• The Plains: Lemon is the signature in Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

A few flavors were too rare to rank fairly. We left out any flavor with search data in fewer than 35 of the 51 places, because a handful of searches can make a small flavor look huge. Eight flavors fell below that line, and some of them are clearly local. Huckleberry is the third most searched flavor in Montana, with Wyoming and Idaho next. Black raspberry peaks in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island. Maple walnut shows up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, black cherry in Rhode Island and Michigan, and rum raisin in Delaware and New Jersey.

Why ice cream flavor maps disagree

The maps don’t agree because they aren’t counting the same thing. One counts searches, one counts groceries, one counts survey answers.

• What people buy: Instacart’s 2025 purchases, mapped by Visual Capitalist, put vanilla first: “Vanilla remains the most popular flavor nationwide.” That’s the same answer our search data gives.
• What people say: The International Dairy Foods Association’s 2026 survey of more than 2,200 adults, run with Morning Consult, named chocolate the favorite, then butter pecan, vanilla, cookies and cream, and caramel. Butter pecan does far better when people are asked than when they search; it’s 14th in our search ranking.
• What people search: Innerbody Research also used Google Trends and called strawberry “the undisputed national champion.” We get vanilla at almost four times strawberry. Innerbody doesn’t publish how it put different flavors on one scale, so we can’t say exactly where the two methods split.

One detail changes search results a lot. Without quotes, Google Trends counts searches that contain all the words in any order, so “mint chocolate chip ice cream” gets counted as a chocolate ice cream search. In quotes, it counts the exact phrase. When we tested it, leaving the quotes off made chocolate 3.4 times bigger. Short flavor names swallow searches for longer ones, so chocolate and vanilla get inflated. We used exact phrases for all 32 flavors.

There’s also the difference between the most popular flavor and a signature flavor. Instacart’s map shows the flavor each state buys more than the national average, and our table shows both. Vanilla is the most searched flavor almost everywhere, and the signature flavor almost nowhere.

What should an ice cream shop put on its menu board?

Put vanilla, chocolate and strawberry up there first. After that, add whatever your state’s signature flavor is. The three classics cover the top of the list in nearly every state. In the 17 places where strawberry drops out of the top three, the flavor that replaces it is a hint: matcha in California, New York, Florida and Louisiana, coffee across New England, mango in Nevada, New Jersey and New Mexico.

The signature flavor is what people in your state search for that a national chain might not carry. In Kansas and Wyoming, the “near me” searches for matcha suggest people are looking for it and not finding it. That’s a guess from search data, but it’s a cheap one to test with a single tub.

Once the flavors are set, the cups follow the scoop. Our ice cream cup size chart shows which cup holds a single scoop, a double or a sundae. If you’d like your shop’s name on the cup, see our custom printed ice cream cups. Thinking about adding gelato or frozen yogurt next to the scoops? Here’s how gelato, custard and froyo differ from ice cream.

How we measured it

Everything here comes from Google Trends: US web searches, state by state plus DC, between October 29, 2025 and October 29, 2026. Each flavor went in as an exact phrase, “pistachio ice cream” for example, and we got the numbers through the DataForSEO Google Trends API.

• Most searched: Google Trends compares up to five searches at once, so we ran the 32 flavors in groups of five. Every group included “cookie dough ice cream,” which has data in all 51 places and sits mid-table. That shared flavor let us put all 32 on one scale, in every state.
• Signature flavor: Google scores every state from 0 to 100 for each flavor, and 100 goes to the state that searches for it most. We took each state’s score, divided it by the all-state average, and the flavor with the biggest ratio won.
• Too rare to rank: We picked the 35-of-51 cutoff before we saw any results. Eight flavors didn’t make it: black cherry, black raspberry, butterscotch, french vanilla, huckleberry, maple walnut, rum raisin and salted caramel.
• The limits: Search interest isn’t sales. It shows what people looked up, which includes recipes and shop searches, and small states have noisy data.

Questions we get

What are the 10 most popular ice cream flavors?

Going by searches, it’s vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, matcha, mango, coffee, chocolate chip, neapolitan, rocky road and cookie dough. The IDFA asked people directly in 2026 and got a different top five: chocolate, butter pecan, vanilla, cookies and cream, then caramel.

Is strawberry or vanilla more popular?

Vanilla, by a wide margin in our data: strawberry gets about a quarter of vanilla’s searches. Visual Capitalist’s map of Instacart’s 2025 purchases puts vanilla first too. Of the sources we checked, only Innerbody’s search ranking puts strawberry on top, and it used a different method.

Which state searches for Blue Moon ice cream the most?

Wisconsin, at 8.5 times the average state, then Michigan at 6.2 times. It’s the signature flavor in seven Great Lakes and Midwest states.

Why is matcha ice cream so high?

Matcha ties strawberry for third nationally and is a top-three flavor in California, New York, Florida and Louisiana. Kansas and Wyoming put it first, but that’s a few weeks of “near me” searches in two small states.

Sources

1. Visual Capitalist
2. International Dairy Foods Association’s 2026 survey
3. Innerbody Research
4. Google Trends counts searches