Food Healthy Meal Ideas

Meet the Feel-Good, Low-Sugar Ice Cream of Your Summer Dreams

Well+Good Editors

July 1, 2018

Perfect summer days always involve noshing on brain freeze-worthy scoops of ice cream, but how do you make a perfect day even better? (Not a trick question.) By loading that craveable summer snack with supercharged benefits, à la your post-workout smoothie.

Don't believe something as delicious as ice cream could ever actually be healthy (while still tasting good, to boot)? Take a spoonful of ENLIGHTENED ice cream for a taste test.

The OG better-for-you ice cream was founded in 2013 when freezer aisles of most supermarkets and neighborhood bodegas looked way different (think: the bare minimum in terms of variety). "The ice-cream landscape at the time was very limited—mostly high-sugar, high-fat options," says Michael Shoretz, founder and CEO of ENLIGHTENED.

Most "healthy" frozen treats were frequently flavorless and completely off texturally.

While working as a personal trainer at a gym in New York City at the time, Shoretz realized most "healthy" frozen treats were frequently flavorless and completely off texturally. "They were marginally better nutritionally than regular ice cream," Shoretz says. "There was always a catch: low fat but high sugar, or low sugar but with artificial sweeteners. There wasn’t anything out there that was truly all-around good."

ENLIGHTENED was created to fill that gap with decadent-tasting crowd pleasers that have fewer than 100 calories per serving. Translation: It's got the creaminess, silky texture, and amazing flavor of regular scoops from your fave neighborhood shop, plus an impressive amount of wellness-boosting protein and fiber. It's the stuff of sweet dreams.

Keep reading for 3 reasons why you’ll want to stock your freezer with this ice cream all summer long.

1. It’s a family-owned company

The idea for a well-made ice cream (laced with goodness) that you can eat year-round was inspired partly by Shoretz's father, who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. "Before then, I never thought about food’s nutritional value," he says. "I’d only look at a label to check out the flavor but his diagnosis opened my eyes to the world of health and nutrition."

Since building a budding ice-cream empire from the first iterations of high-protein ice cream in his personal kitchen, the company remains in the hands of Shoretz's family. His mother is at the helm as the company's president, his sister is directing brand strategy, and his father provides financial insight.

The team takes their family-oriented vibes seriously, which means a quality product ice-cream obsessives can trust. "We imagine families like our own that will take our ice cream home, serve it at birthday parties, enjoy it together while watching a movie," he says. "And we know what it means to them to have our ice cream, especially for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to enjoy ice cream at all."

2. The creamy, silky goodness

Whether you enjoy spooning the frozen goodness straight out of the pint, or scooping your favorite flavor into a bowl with goji berries and extra chocolate chips, one thing you'll notice as you dig into a high-protein, low-sugar pint of ENLIGHTENED is that the texture (and taste) mimics traditional ice cream.

"We hold our ice cream to a high standard," Shoretz says. "We don’t want people to say it tastes good 'for a healthy ice cream.' We want people to be able to forget about the incredible nutrition and just enjoy it."

"We don’t want people to say it tastes good 'for a healthy ice cream.'"

What's the secret? A mix of quality ingredients and generous amount of mix-ins like brownie bits and swirls of maple syrup ensure a silky-smooth texture and decadent taste. "We pack as many chips, chunks, and swirls as we can while still keeping the calories low," he says. "You just have to open a pint to see the difference."

3. You'll never get bored of the flavors

Go beyond vanilla or chocolate and choose a flavor inspired by Friday-night movie dates (popcorn ice cream with chocolate bits and a caramel swirl) or your fave summer dessert strawberry cheesecake. With 27 pint flavors and 11 ice-cream bar flavors (and counting!), flavor fatigue will never be a thing.

The dessert gurus at ENLIGHTENED are always on the lookout for new flavor inspo. "We look back to nostalgic flavors of our childhoods like peanut-butter-and-Marshmallow-Fluff sandwiches, which is the inspiration for our Marshmallow Peanut Butter flavor," he says. "Dessert is inherently over-the-top and a little bit fanciful, so we embrace that by tapping into our inner kid in a candy store (ice cream shop, in our case)." All you have to worry about is which flavor to try first.