UPDATE (10/25). Turns out Wellesley isn’t completely lacking Schweddy Balls ice cream. A reader tipped us off that in fact the Shell gas station and food mart at 987 Worcester St., carries the product. There it is, right between Late Night Snack and Phish Food.
Not that I’m particularly excited about tasting it, but Ben & Jerry’s controversial “Schweddy Balls” ice cream flavor appears not to have made its way onto Wellesley store shelves since debuting late last month.
Ben & Jerry’s has said the limited-batch flavor (Fair Trade vanilla ice cream with a hint of rum and loaded with fudge covered rum and milk chocolate malt balls) is a fun ode to the old Saturday Night Live skit guest-starring Alec Baldwin. But the ice cream maker has been lambasted by a group called One Million Moms and some others for giving the ice cream flavor a name too racy for kids to eat, and as AP reports, some supermarkets haven’t been stocking the flavor (a Cape Cod Times report also notes that neither Stop & Shop or Roche Bros., is carrying the flavor on the cape, but spokespeople didn’t seem to entirely rule out doing so if the flavor survives past its planned run through December).
I have in fact gone UNDERCOVER as a shopper at Roche Bros., and Whole Foods in Wellesley (as well as the Rte. 27 Stop & Shop in Natick) several times since the ice cream went on the market in an effort to spy the elusive treat and take a picture of it on a Wellesley store shelf. I’ve come up empty, though have seen plenty of other new flavors such as Late Night Snack and Red Velvet Cake, leading me to suspect Schweddy Balls was either selling out or not getting onto shelves in the first place. Roche Bros., said through its helpdesk: “Right now we do not carry that particular flavor… It may be something we carry in the future but as of right now we our stores do not carry it through our distributor.”
Ben & Jerry’s website features a “flavor locator” for its many offerings — with the conspicuous exception of Schweddy Balls. A fan wall devoted to the flavor is filled with comments from people unable to locate the flavor.
A reader wrote to say she bought Shweddy Balls at the Ben & Jerry’s store in Natick: “I mentioned that I couldn’t find it in grocery stores, and the guy waiting on me said he wasn’t aware of any local stores that had it. It was OK. Not a flavor I would buy again, but everyone in my family ate their serving. With 5 of us, it lasted one sitting.”
Naturally, you can also find the hard-to-get ice cream on eBay (where some sellers are just selling the empty container as a collectible), though you’ll need to pony up $20 or more.
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