Heavenly Ascent: Why TIME Named Halo Top Its Ice Cream of the Year

Halo Top keeps topping itself when it comes to accolades. The latest—the low-calorie ice cream sensation was named one of TIME‘s “25 Best Innovations” of 2017, joining such heady company as the iPhone X and Tesla Model 3.

Concocted in his kitchen in a Cuisinart by a California-based attorney-turned-entrepreneur, Justin Woolverton, the low-sugar, protein-packed ice cream had a slow ramp-up for a few years—until consumer trial in local stores built Halo Top into a mania. Sales increased by a whopping 2,500% in 2016, and Halo Top now beats Ben & Jerry’s and all other brands as the best-selling ice-cream pint in America.

Such is the brand’s confidence that it has even produced a quirky short film this year that it distributed to cinemas to play before movies.

The keys to Halo Top’s success: the use of stevia and sugar alcohol, which is sweet but contains fewer calories than sugar, and a riot of 25 flavors that include Cinnamon Roll and Lemon Cake. Its name—and eye-catching packaging, with its gold-rimmed lids—also perform a certain magic for the brand.

Halo Top, it turns out, started life as Eden Creamery but Woolverton knew they could do better. “We picked the most inoffensive [name] we could” from a list of 300 potential names backin 2o13, Wolverton told us about stumbling on “Halo Top” as its brand name. “And who knows what it means? Who knows what ‘Starbucks’ means?”

Call it divine inspiration. TIME rhapsodizes that Halo Top “sounds almost too good to be true” because it passes the ice cream taste-and-texture test and yet never exceeds 360 calories per pint, giving Americans what Woolverton calls “an option to eat ice cream again.”

Not that they need permission; nor is the ice cream innovator resting on its accolades. Woolverton has opened his first brick-and-mortar Halo Top Scoop Shop in Los Angeles, introducing low-calorie soft-serve ice cream and such “secret ingredients” as “puffle” cones in flavors such as chocolate and red velvet.

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