We all know McDonald's soft serve as a sweet and cold fast food staple ( , that is). But these days, all ice cream treats have been getting a little bit of extra scrutiny, because when you look a little more closely at some products, some aren't actually classified as ice cream. Take for example, and is called "soft serve" since it doesn't meet the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) definition of ice cream.
Don't get us started with the same way regular ice cream does, because that's a whole different story. So is McDonald's soft serve technically ice cream, and what is it made of? First off, yes, McDonald's soft serve is, in fact, ice cream. Its ingredients are milk, sugar, cream, corn syrup, natural flavor, mono and diglycerides, cellulose gum, guar gum, carrageenan, and vitamin A palmitate.
But it falls under a specific subset of ice cream: reduced-fat ice cream. That means that when you pick up a swirly cone, you're getting a treat that legally falls under the category of ice cream. Just one that's not too heavy on the fat.
What is reduced-fat ice cream? The FDA defines "reduced-fat" ice cream as having 25% less total fat than regular ice cream.Note that the main ingredient in McDonald's soft serve isn't cream, but rather milk. Heavy cream has 38% fat content, and since it's not as big of a factor in McDonald's soft serve ice cream as milk is, the end product is naturally a little lighter in fat.
Some of the other ingredients like cellulose gum, guar gum, and carrageena.