My local grocery store has started stocking a "limited edition" apple pie ice cream (message me for the details, don't want to be shilling). It's one of my favorites -- not only does it have chunks of real apple and graham cracker crust, but the ice cream itself has a delicious apple flavor. The whole thing tastes like you took a slice of apple pie with vanilla ice cream and blended it chunky style.
I always figured there was some boring food-science reason you couldn't make a decent apple ice cream, but this shows it's perfectly possible. So why isn't it more common? Apple pie is one of the most popular deserts, and you find apple flavoring in plenty of drinks and candies. What gives?
Pure speculation on my part, but it's probably a safe guess to assume some market studies and/or trial runs they did on the flavor showed it wouldn't make enough profit. It's always about the money. I'm sure many people would buy it and enjoy it, but we are talking about corporations run by people with expensive college degrees in min-maxing everything for profit.
That's a bummer. I have noticed products like that will often vanish. Or drop dramatically in quality when they swap out quality ingredients for cheaper ones.
Maybe, but you definitely see more niche flavors like pistachio, coffee, mango, pineapple-coconut, rum raisin, etc. Hard to believe apple would be less popular, unless it's more expensive to make for some reason.
Maybe it's less popular because so many people buy ice cream to eat with actual apple pie, or some other kind of pie which might taste weird with apple pie flavors.
Jesus. So you expect companies to produce products that lose money?!
Or, do you expect them to remove more profitable products, which by definition are widely loved, from the limited shelf space and replace them with less profitable products, which by definition, fewer people enjoy? You'd fail running a lemonade stand.