Flake news … families are spending an average of £50 a child on ice-cream this summer. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty ImagesFlake news … families are spending an average of £50 a child on ice-cream this summer. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images‘A 99 with a Flake? That will be £7, please’: what’s behind the surge in ice-cream van prices?From the cost of milk and chocolate to diesel and electricity, every part of producing the summer treat has been hit by the climate crisis and other shocks
Name: Iceflation.
Appearance: An ice-cold rip-off, with a Flake on top.
Ah, here we go – expensive ice-creams. It seems like only yesterday the two eight-year-olds who went viral on TikTok were complaining at having to pay £9 for two screwballs from an ice cream van. It was 2024 – and the cost of licking has only risen since then.
Wow, gross expression, but go on. According to a survey of 2,000 British parents commissioned by Aldi, they are spending £50 a kid on ice-cream over the six-week summer holidays this year. The average cost of a 99 is £2.65, but one vendor outside the British Museum in London is reportedly charging £7 for one scoop with a flake. A survey of 33 seaside resorts by the credit card company Zable found a single-scoop cone in Porthmadog in north Wales cost £3.85.
Any cheaper spots? It would cost you a more reasonable £1.95 for one scoop at Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire.
I guess that’s where we’re heading on holiday then. What’s causing this round of iceflation? Exactly what you’d expect: as an Ice Cream Alliance spokesperson told the Daily Mail, “Almost every part of serving a 99 has become more expensive.” Milk and chocolate are among the five most climate-impacted foods, according to a recent report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, and ice-cream vans need to keep products cool and travel around at a time of rising diesel and electricity prices.
A sorry state of affairs. But hasn’t ice-cream always been pricey? Not everywhere: in Naples, it was a popular treat for all classes in the 18th century. “Penny licks” – reusable glasses customers licked and returned – democratised ice-cream as a street treat in Britain in Victorian times, though you might get a free cholera topping, according to an 1879 medical report.
Yuck! You’re putting me off ice-cream altogether. It may actually be good for you – a mysterious, seemingly beneficial “ice-cream effect” has been observed in diet-related research multiple times. One Harvard study in 2005 found men who ate two or more servings of ice-cream a week had a 22% lower risk of diabetes; a 2016 meta-analysis of multiple studies also found that eating as little as half a cup was associated with a 19% lower risk.
Ice-cream vans should broadcast those findings instead of catchy jingles. Unfortunately, many scientists are sceptical that the ice-cream effect is real.
Unlike the wallet effect, which definitely is. Is it too late to tell the kids the van only plays a tune when it’s out of ice-cream?
Do say: “I got 99 problems but a Flake ain’t one.”
Don’t say: “I scream, you scream, we all scream for high ice-cream prices caused by acute and sustained climate and energy shocks!”
Explore more on these topicsShareReuse this content
