8 Ice Cream Novelties Everyone Ate In The 1970s

Before delivery apps and freezer aisles stocked three deep with pints, summer back in the day, especially in the '70s, ran on a single, happiest sound: the tinny jingle of an approaching ice cream truck. A kid would hear it two streets over, sprint inside for some change, and chase back out before the truck rolled past their house. What that small amount of money bought wasn't always ice cream in the strictest sense; sometimes it was a gumball hidden at the bottom of a slushie cup, sometimes it was sherbet twisted up out of a cardboard tube, but it was always a joyous event.

This was the decade Carvel turned birthday cakes into cult characters, Good Humor rolled cake crumbs onto everything that would go well together, and General Foods decided pudding belonged in the freezer aisle. Some of these treats are still around today, virtually unchanged, the taste of nostalgia still strong. Others vanished so completely that bringing them up is the fastest way to identify another kid who grew up enjoying the same novelties back in the '70s.

Below are eight ice cream creations that defined the ice cream truck's golden decade, sourced from company histories, archival brand pages, and the kind of nostalgia forums where people still argue about which one deserves a definite comeback.

The Bomb Pop's claim to "everyone ate it" status isn't just anecdotal; it's thoroughly documented in the newspaper. Merritt Foods invented it in Kansas City in 1955, and by the 1970s, the company's most iconic flavor combination, cherry, lime, and blue raspberry, had become an ice cream truck staple. Following its launch, it quickly became one of the company's best-selling items, thanks to its colors that represent the ultimate Fourth of July and American summer identity.

Plus, it solved the truck's oldest problem: a kid who couldn't pick one flavor. Cherry, lime, and blue raspberry ice, stacked into a single rocket-shaped pop, meant nobody had to choose. It was also cheap enough that a dollar covered one with change to spare. The eating experience itself is why it stuck in memory the way it did. There was no correct method; some kids worked top to bottom in neat layers, others gnawed straight through the middle chasing whichever flavor they fancied best. Either way, everyone ended up with a blue-stained tongue, which served as visible proof of what you'd just enjoyed. More than six decades after its launch, it's still sold in virtually the same red, white, and blue design, reigning supreme as a 4th of July classic.

Good Humor's Screwball made the list because it turned ice cream into a small game, and the company's own vintage archive credits it as a '70s product that evokes nostalgia. A cone-shaped plastic cup held cherry or tart blue raspberry slush, and buried at the very bottom sat a single gumball, positioned as the reward for finishing. That structure is exactly why kids gravitated toward it over simpler treats: it rewarded patience in a way almost nothing else on the truck did.

While other ice creams were a few determined minutes, a Screwball was a project, worked through with a small flat spoon, scraping and digging toward a prize that was often frozen solid and barely chewable by the time you reached it, but still extremely enjoyable. For the truly adventurous, there was a "Two-Ball" version with a second gumball hidden even deeper, proof that Good Humor understood exactly what was driving demand and built a premium version around it. Over the years, several competitors mimicked the concept, creating an array of flavors, but Good Humor remains the nostalgic king of the trend, with customer forums flooded with posts about how joyous users felt when they reached the bottom of the cup and uncovered the "barely edible" ball.

Good Humor originally introduced the Chocolate Éclair bar over 60 years ago, before its acquisition by Unilever in 1961, featuring vanilla ice cream around a chocolate core, rolled in the brand's crunchy cake coating. It became one of the three iconic bars in the lineup that Good Humor itself later designated "The Classics," relaunching all three together in 1992 after they'd become a defining trio of the brand's offerings throughout the '70s and '80s.

Its staying power is the strongest evidence of how deeply it was embedded in the truck-menu rotation. Multiple commenters on this Reddit thread back the ice cream novelty's popularity, calling it one of their favorites. This Facebook post shows how the ice cream bar had people in a chokehold back in the '70s, explaining how unique the eating experience truly was. It even made it onto Tasting Table's list of Good Humor's 10 best ice cream treats of all time.

Unlike its cake-coated sibling, Toasted Almond, the Chocolate Éclair hasn't been discontinued. It's still sitting in grocery freezers today, nearly 50 years after its debut, a rare run for any snack food category. News outlets covering Good Humor's 2022 discontinuation of Toasted Almond specifically noted that the Chocolate Éclair was spared due to high demand. Further, Good Humor's Chocolate Éclair and Toasted Almond have also secured a licensed collaboration with Java Factory to create iconic ice cream treat-inspired coffee flavors, cementing the fact that the popularity of these novelties will never wane. 

Just like the Chocolate Éclair bar, the Toasted Almond predates Good Humor's 1961 acquisition by Unilever, but by then the ice cream bar was part of a solid 85-item lineup.

Among the treats discontinued by Good Humor in 2022, it's the one that generated the most vocal, nostalgia-specific comments, despite not being as popular as its other siblings back in the '70s and '80s. Good Humor fielded complaints directly on social media, and a Change.org petition gathered new signatures years later. The bar paired vanilla ice cream with a crunchy, almond-studded coating, and this Reddit thread explains how beloved the flavor combination was for kids back in the day, with users comparing different homemade ways to recreate the taste since the original has been discontinued. The novelty lay in the crunchy outer texture and the not-too-sweet yet deliciously creamy interior, with a bite that captured it all perfectly.

This gap between "less famous in its day" and "more mourned now" is itself the evidence worth including. Toasted Almond had over sixty years on ice cream trucks and grocery shelves before its 2022 discontinuation, and it also made the cut for our 10 best Good Humor ice cream treats of all time. And nostalgia-focused social media threads dedicated to 1970s food still name it unprompted, writing paragraphs about how they're so devastated that they won't get to experience it ever again.

The third of Good Humor's cake-coated trio, Strawberry Shortcake is one of the two that you can still actually buy. It features strawberry ice cream wrapped in the same crumbly, sweet coating as the Chocolate Éclair bar and Toasted Almond, and was a steady truck-menu regular throughout the decade. Though not as popular as its other cousins, the bar's simple consistency earns it a place on this list. Users on this Reddit thread explain how the bar tasted just like real biscuit shortcake and strawberries. And it's this simplicity that turned out to matter.

While Toasted Almond was quietly discontinued in 2022, Strawberry Shortcake made the cut and remains available in major grocery freezers today, largely unchanged from its original recipe. In a Facebook review, a user expands on how they used to buy these back in the day and still do, with several commenters claiming that this novelty is one of their favorites to date. It's the second item on this list that doesn't require a nostalgia forum, a specialty retailer, or a hopeful petition to experience firsthand. Anyone can walk into the grocery store right now and taste, more or less exactly, what a 1970s kid tasted straight off the truck.

Jell-O Pudding Pops belong on this list because they represent a genuinely new format that consumers responded to immediately and measurably. General Foods test-marketed the frozen pudding-on-a-stick concept sometime in the late 1970s, freezing actual Jell-O pudding onto a stick rather than relying on the icier, water-based texture that powered nearly everything else in the lineup. However, the product didn't launch nationally until 1981, and the Bill Cosby ad campaign that made it a household name ran through the following decade. Cosby himself had actually signed on as Jell-O's general pudding spokesperson back in 1974, but the deal covered stovetop pudding and gelatin before the Pudding Pops were launched.

Reported first-year sales came in around $100 million, a number large enough to confirm this wasn't a niche product but a genuine category shift that consumers had been waiting for without knowing it. The appeal was entirely textural. A Bomb Pop or a Screwball delivered flavored ice: a Pudding Pop was dense and creamy, closer to frozen mousse than to an ice cream or a popsicle. They're also ridiculously easy to make at home. But that textural distinction is also why it belongs specifically on a "1970s" list rather than a broader nostalgia list. It's a '70s-conceived, '80s-exploded story; the groundwork happened in the decade this list covers, even if the payoff landed just after it.

The Push-Up Pop's case for inclusion is mechanical rather than historical: a cardboard tube filled with orange, cherry, or grape sherbet, pushed up from the bottom as you ate, solved every practical complaint a kid could have about a melting treat on a hot day. No wrapper to peel, no drips to catch running down a hand before you'd finished half of it; just roll them between your hands to warm them up and enjoy. The documented history of the specific Flintstone-branded version that made it nationally famous landed somewhere in the early 1980s, and then re-popularized in the 1990s, becoming the epitome of '90s kids' summer, but the plain orange-sherbet tube predates that by an unclear margin that no source pins down precisely, though consumers remember eating them in the '70s.

That design is precisely why it became, and remained, a childhood constant. The appeal was as much about controlling the experience as it was about the flavor, though users still complain that they melted way too fast to their liking. Though the tube itself did double as insulation, keeping the sherbet the right temperature and mess-free longer than nearly anything else sold off a truck window or freezer. It's also one of the few entries here still sold in essentially the same format today, regardless of brand or decade, which is evidence in itself: nothing about the original ever needed fixing.

The Creamsicle's case rests on simple math. Frank Epperson patented the frozen treat-on-a-stick format back in 1905, originally calling it "Eppsicle" before it became the now-iconic Popsicle brand in the 1920s. The Popsicle Corporation introduced the Creamsicle in 1937, pairing a vanilla ice cream core with a layer of orange ice cream, a combination that followed a period of management changes.

By the time the 1970s arrived, the Creamsicle had already been on the market for roughly four decades, giving it the kind of unquestioned, no-introduction-needed presence that newer novelties spent the whole decade trying to build. So much so that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers created a '76 version of their jerseys, which they aptly named the 'Creamsicle' uniforms for their resemblance to the ice cream novelty. This just proves that the ice cream never needed a gumball, a celebrity mascot, or a mechanism to justify itself; just a citrus-and-cream combination, sold the same way for decades running with no reformulation or rebrand, to stay a popular ice cream treat.

That's one of the reasons why this entry features no discontinuation story or comeback campaign. Creamsicles are still sold today, functionally unchanged, because the formula worked the first time, and nobody involved ever saw a reason to touch it. Longevity, in this case, is the whole argument; a treat doesn't stay on the shelves for ninety years by accident.

This list draws on company and brand archives, contemporary newspaper reporting, and consumer forums and social media platforms that capture firsthand, nostalgia-led reactions from people who grew up in the 1970s, trading memories and stories about specific ice cream truck orders. We prioritized treats with a verifiable origin, sales record, or popularity window tied specifically to the decade, and included two items, Jell-O Pudding Pops and the Push-Up Pop, that are not technically ice cream but were inseparable from the 1970s truck and freezer culture.