MiiRO dairy free ice creams: Review

Hands up who’s been enjoying the heatwave? With warmer weather comes a whole host of great summery food and drink…ciders in the sun, barbecues with friends, picnics in Bristol’s parks – and, of course, a LOT of ice cream.

But what if you’re vegan or lactose-intolerant? Sure, there are plenty of fruit juice-based ice lolly options out there, but when it comes to actual ice cream, there are generally only a few choices in supermarket freezers, and they tend to come in big tubs.

MiiRO, though, are offering those who are vegan or following a dairy-free diet another choice. Their Magnum-style ice cream lollies are all dairy-free, naturally sweetened (using inulin), gluten-free, soya-free and vegan, with no preservatives and no artificial flavouring. So, when they got in touch to ask if I’d like to review their range, I was intrigued…

With so many “normal” ice cream ingredients stripped out, we were interested to see how they compared. And with a lunch! Innovation Challenge Silver Award, a gold in the Free From Food Awards AND a Great Taste Award under their belts, we were expecting good things.

MiiRO’s ice creams come in three different flavours – Peanut Butter, Chocolate Hazelnut and Salted Caramel – and we were sent a box of each of the three to try out…

The packaging for all three is beautiful: striking colours (although they don’t quite match the flavours…with the ice creams’ key properties clearly displayed on the front. Their branding looks pretty classy – although if I had one complaint, it would be that the individual wrappings of all three flavours were exactly the same, meaning we had to keep them in their boxes in the freezer instead of taking them out to save space if we actually wanted to remember which flavour was which…

Peanut Butter

Well, they certainly looked the part! The dark raw cacao coating is generously thick, with a great snap as you bite into it. It smells and tastes almost fruity, with an incredibly rich flavour – it’s absolutely delicious.

The ice cream inside certainly looks like “normal” ice cream, and while the texture is slightly different (it’s not quite as creamy), it’s certainly tasty: not as rich as dairy, but still delicious. The peanut butter flavour, we found, was very sweet but pretty subtle, and quite hard to taste when combined with the richness of the coating. On its own, though – fantastic.

Chocolate Hazelnut

I think the chocolate hazelnut – surprisingly – was my favourite of the three. Coated in the same delicious raw cacao, the flavours were stronger than in the peanut butter – the hazelnut coming through before the chocolate. Intriguingly, the lower level of creaminess gave the chocolate hazelnut ice cream a refreshing, almost sorbet-like texture, which I totally didn’t expect from those two flavours. Delicious.

Salted Caramel

The salted caramel was probably the most decadent-tasting of all three of the MiiRO flavours. Rich in flavour, it paired well with the raw cacao shell – and while it could have done with a tiny bit more salt (which is subjective, I guess), it certainly hit the spot.

MiiRO ice creams are available in a range of stockists, including Ocado, Holland & Barrett, Planet Organic and others. At the time of writing they were priced at £4.71 on Ocado (normally £5.89) for a box of three of any of the three flavours – more expensive than their Magnum counterparts, but on a par with other popular healthy/free from ice creams that are generally around the £5-£6 mark.

To find out more about MiiRO, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Please note: these ice creams were received free of charge, but in no way impacted on our opinion. We were not obliged to write a positive review, and the company did not see this review before it was put up on the site.