Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams is pushing its 2026 holiday limited-time offering deeper into the retail freezer aisle than any prior seasonal drop, adding two first-ever holiday novelties — an ice cream sandwich and a dipped bar — to a six-flavor pint collection now hitting shelves at Kroger, Whole Foods Market, Target, Harris Teeter, and Southeast Costco locations.
The novelty extension marks a meaningful channel play for the Columbus, Ohio-based Certified B Corporation, which has historically anchored its seasonal revenue in direct-to-consumer pint sales at jenis.com and its 90-plus scoop shops. Moving holiday-format novelties into club and mass doors — especially Costco, where club-pack velocity can dwarf conventional grocery turn rates — signals a deliberate effort to capture incremental impulse occasions during the highest-traffic freezer weeks of the calendar year.
The New SKUs
Leading the pint lineup is Sticky Toffee Pudding, a new flavor built on vanilla and date molasses custard layered with brown sugar cake and buttery toffee sauce. It joins five returning limited-time flavors: White Chocolate Peppermint, Pistachio Macaron, Boozy Eggnog (pints only), Cranberry Panettone with Chocolate Sprinkles, and Black Tie Tiramisu. The breadth of the assortment — spanning Italian pastry references, holiday cocktail profiles, and classic American cookie inspiration — gives category managers multiple planogram adjacency options across premium and better-for-you freezer sets.
The two novelties are the most retail-significant additions. The Buttercream Sugar Cookie ice cream sandwich pairs buttercream frosting ice cream with vanilla sugar cookies and rainbow sprinkles. The Mexican Hot Chocolate Brownie J-Bar swirls dark chocolate-cayenne and Mexican vanilla-cinnamon ice creams with chewy brownie pieces — a format rooted in one of founder Jeni Britton's earliest recipes. Both are available at Kroger and Whole Foods Market; the sandwich also doors into Target and Harris Teeter and is live now in Southeast Costco locations.
Retail & Category Context
The premium ice cream segment has been one of the more resilient freezer-aisle categories through recent cycles of consumer trade-down pressure, with velocity holding in natural/specialty and better grocery channels even as private-label share climbed in mid-tier. For specialty brands like Jeni's, holiday LTOs function as high-turn, low-slotting-risk events: retailers gain differentiated seasonal freezer content, and brands build household penetration among shoppers who may not engage with the core year-round assortment. First-time buyers acquired on a holiday novelty are among the most cost-efficient to convert to repeat pint purchasers — a dynamic that makes the Costco door particularly valuable for driving trial at scale.
With more than 90 scoop shops providing earned media and brand credibility, and direct-to-consumer e-commerce at jenis.com running alongside retail distribution, Jeni's operates a rare omnichannel footprint for an independent super-premium ice cream brand. That combination of DTC data and syndicated scan data from retail partners gives the brand strong velocity benchmarks heading into the holiday promotional window. The full Splendid Holiday Collection is available while supplies last, a supply constraint that retail partners can leverage to drive urgency and limit markdown exposure at season's end. For more on premium frozen dessert trends and seasonal LTO strategy in the freezer aisle, see recent Grocery CPG coverage.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
