What Happened to Talenti?

jawnswoop · Aug 3, 2026

I used to be a Talenti evangelist. I would not shut up about the creamy gelato that came in a fancy plastic tub when it hit my local grocery store in the early 2010s.

“You couldn’t believe we’d never heard of it,” my friend Katie said of the time in 2012 when I triumphantly showed up at her house bearing a plastic pint of Mediterranean Mint.

In my early 30s, buying Talenti was a mark of adulthood. Spending $5 on a pint of super-fancy gelato instead of a standard half-gallon of ice cream felt outrageous but worth it. The flavors were special. Talenti said it used high-quality ingredients. The texture was soft and dense, closer to that of soft serve than traditional American hard-pack ice cream. And it came in reusable plastic jars that I collected to store snacks and bring lunch to work.

In a grocery aisle filled with boring Breyers, impossible-to-spell Häagen-Dazs, and the hippie darling Ben & Jerry’s, Talenti seemed new, different, grown-up.

Many people felt this way. And not just because it was delicious.

“I felt like that the jar really screamed luxury or higher-end, and it was visually appealing. And then, of course, if you don’t deliver once they eat it, it’s over.” — Talenti founder Josh Hochschuler

The Wall Street Journal elevated the idea that Talenti fans could eat it right out of the container, with the packaging and contents justifying the price tag. “Talenti’s clear plastic pint package with a screw-on lid is more upscale than the traditional cardboard pint. And with flavors like Sea Salt Caramel, Blood Orange and Sicilian Pistachio, gelato commands a price roughly 25% to 50% higher than premium ice creams,” the WSJ wrote in November 2013.

A brand strategist told Bloomberg in June 2013 that the unique plastic jar that Talenti gelato came in “has a totally different, more confident posture that grabs your attention by saying less.”

That was intentional.

“We called it the ‘rainbow effect,’” Talenti founder Josh Hochschuler told me in a video interview. “We would have a shelf of seven flavors. It was very important to us to get different colors, so we’d always try to push a raspberry or mango. That would catch people’s eye. … We did not have a budget to really go out and advertise, so we were trying to capture them at point of sale. I felt like that the jar really screamed luxury or higher-end, and it was visually appealing. And then, of course, if you don’t deliver once they eat it, it’s over.”

Talenti made $160 million in sales in 2014, Hochschuler told me. It was purchased by Unilever in December of that year. (A representative from Unilever declined my multiple interview requests for this article.)

In the dozen years since the acquisition, my love of Talenti faded. I stopped using my jar collection to hold leftovers and rubber bands. Every so often, I’d accidentally melt one in the dishwasher when I grew tired of hand-washing it, and I’d toss the deformed, Dali-like plastic cylinder into the recycling bin with a sigh. Eventually, I switched to storing food in glass. Is this adulthood?

But after all these years, despite barely thinking about Talenti much, I still considered it a premium product and a mark of sophistication. When Wirecutter’s kitchen team was planning their taste test of vanilla ice cream last spring, I enthusiastically encouraged them to include Talenti Madagascan Vanilla Bean. The company has gotten a lot of flack over the years for the jars’ being hard to open, but I was positive that what was inside was excellent, though I hadn’t eaten it in probably a decade. Of course our taste-testers would name Talenti as a pick.

Except they did not.

Members of the Wirecutter kitchen team noted in taste tests that the Madagascan Vanilla Bean gelato had a frothy consistency. Traditionally, gelato is dense.

“I went into it thinking, ‘This is so unfair to other ice creams.’ I thought it was going to be really rich and skew our results,” said Ciara Murray Jordan, the co-author of our vanilla ice cream guide. “But it was noticeably subpar compared to our other picks. It was thin and gray and tasted of overripe fruit.”

Thin! Gray! Subpar!

I didn’t understand.

And so, in the name of journalism, I committed myself to tasting an awful lot of Talenti gelato to figure out if the flavors I once loved had changed — or if I had.

Thirty-four pints later, here’s what I learned.

Here’s the scoop

We eat our way to insight

Maybe the vanilla gelato that our taste-testers had panned had been an anomaly. Maybe it was just a bad recipe in a lineup of otherwise perfectly crafted flavors.

I pulled together my own panel of four Wirecutter experts to taste a whole lot of Talenti, including two people from our kitchen team who were originally on the vanilla ice cream taste-test panel.

We chose nine flavors of Talenti gelato, including the vanilla, and tasted each one, with no knowledge of which brand was which, against a close-matching flavor from a purveyor that we recommend in our guide: Aldi, Häagen-Dazs, or Van Leeuwen.

Our testing team scooped samples into coded mugs so that tasters wouldn’t know which brand’s offering was which

My disappointment with Talenti began right away. I couldn’t finish a single bite of the vanilla.

It was strangely sour. One of our taste-testers picked up notes of banana. Another said it seemed as if the vanilla pods were dried out, stale.

Ciara told me that since vanilla is such a pure, straightforward flavor, recipe developers have to work extra hard to make it good, because they can’t hide behind chunks, chips, swirls, or other flavors.

But several of those other Talenti flavors also didn’t fare well. As the tasting progressed, the word that came up multiple times around Talenti’s offerings was “foamy.”

“Gelato should be creamy, luscious, like an ultra-thick frozen pudding,” said kitchen writer Maki Yazawa. “It shouldn’t be foamy and frothy.”

The tasting notes were revealing.

Remember the Mediterranean Mint I’d championed with my friends years ago? The contents of the jar I tried in June ended up in the trash. The texture was odd. The flavor was off.

I have never in my life thrown away ice cream — it’s criminal behavior. And yet.

Still, there were a few Talenti flavors we didn’t hate.

What changed?

How did the Talenti of the 2010s that I so admired become this inconsistent and often-disappointing mishmash in the 2020s?

It helps to understand how gelato is made.

Gelato gets its rich, creamy texture and full-bodied flavor from a long cook and a slow churn. It’s also often lower in fat than ice cream, because it’s primarily made with milk, unlike custard-based ice creams, which are made with cream and eggs. As a result, technically it’s not premium ice cream. In fact, the United States Department of Agriculture has no definition of gelato, and products that have less than 10% milkfat are considered “frozen dairy dessert.”

Talenti, therefore, exists in a netherworld.

“You can write ‘gelato’ on the container, and you can put any formulation you want inside,” said Dana Cree, author of Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: The Art and Science of the Scoop, in a video interview. “For something marked ‘gelato,’ you can definitely cheap out on the ingredients if you want.”

Since the screw-top jars are made of plastic with the ingredients printed right on it, and since plastic never dies, I invited myself over to the homes of a few Talenti obsessives who had been keeping the jars for years. I then cross-referenced the ingredients lists and the best-by dates on the bottoms of the jars.

Of the seven flavors whose jars I examined, with a range of best-by dates from 2015 to 2027, every single one had at least one change on the ingredients list, and they all added more gums. (The gelato was likely made 12 to 18 months prior to its best-by date, according to Hochschuler.)

Traditionally, gelato is eaten shortly after it’s made, more similar to soft serve. The idea of packing gelato in pints and blast-freezing it for transport is anathema to gelato purists, and in fact, when Hochschuler decided to pivot to packed pints, his Argentine business partner balked.

Adding gums and stabilizers to the recipe for a grocery-store pint allows it to better handle a freeze-thaw cycle and retain the soft scoopability that sometimes gets lost in the industrial processing. Talenti is not alone in including such things as ingredients. A spokesperson for Unilever told The New York Times back in 2013 that Breyers, a brand known for its “all natural” simple ingredients, had released a line of frozen dairy desserts that included additional gums and corn syrup due to customer feedback on texture.

One food scientist I spoke to was perplexed by the additional gums’ appearance in Talenti gelato over the years. The earlier flavors I examined contained carob gum; Talenti later added tara gum and guar gum, and in the case of the vanilla, all three.

Pandemic-era supply-chain issues could have been at play. Or maybe the company switched to a new supplier that offered a blend of gums. But still, using multiple gums is unusual, as carob, tara, and guar gums are all in the same family, and premium brands tend to want to have shorter, more recognizable ingredients lists.

By contrast, Häagen-Dazs, which was founded in 1960, uses cream, skim milk, cane sugar, egg yolks, ground vanilla beans, and vanilla extract in its Vanilla Bean Ice Cream.

I discovered other Talenti recipe changes, too.

Of the seven flavors whose jars I examined, with a range of best-by dates from 2015 to 2027, every single one had at least one change on the ingredients list, and they all added more gums.

The company has had at least three iterations of vanilla-bean gelato. Hochschuler, during his tenure, went to great lengths to procure rare Tahitian vanilla beans. At some point, the company switched to non-varietal beans, likely around 2016 or 2017, judging from angry online reviews (unfortunately, the best-by date on the jar I examined had rubbed away). By 2018, Unilever was using more-common Madagascan beans. The ingredients list also changed from whole vanilla pods to vanilla extract and vanilla seeds. And the most recent recipe uses “vanilla specks,” which are the ground-up husks of vanilla pods, rather than the interior seeds.

Our tasting team found the specks off-putting. “They were gritty and bland,” said kitchen writer Maki. “The dried-out husks lack the warm, complex flavor of fresh vanilla beans.”

In addition, the Brazilian and Colombian coffee that Talenti uses in its Coffee Chocolate Chip was no longer listed on the jar as fair-trade sometime between the 2023 and 2025 best-by dates.

And the company switched from fresh mint to mint “extractives” in the Mediterranean Mint sometime between the 2015 and 2020 best-by dates.

While a Unilever spokesperson did not comment on any ingredient changes except to say, “We continue to evaluate and source our ingredients so we deliver the premium product our consumers have come to expect from Talenti,” manufacturing is not static. Ingredient availability, quality, cost, changes to the production equipment, and even a conflict involving the Strait of Hormuz — essential for petroleum-based plastic products — can all impact how something is made and what its retail price will be.

And then there’s the impossible-to-open jars

It’s not just the quality of the gelato that people complain about these days. It’s also the signature plastic jars.

Devotees have had to hack, saw, or use heavy force to get the goods inside. Much has been written about this phenomenon, so much so that Talenti itself has acknowledged it as a problem. In May 2025, Talenti, tongue in cheek, gave away a gripper called the Talenti Twist and said it had a full team working on a permanent solution to the issue.

Hochschuler told me it’s been a challenge since at least 2007 or 2008. His team would occasionally have to throw away product because the lids were too tight.

When Unilever acquired Talenti in 2014, Hochschuler’s team tried to explain the problem to the new parent company. “They were like, ‘Oh, we know. We understand screw-on lids really, really well. We’re experts in this. We own Hellmann’s, and we deal with this all the time. Don’t you worry,’” Hochschuler said. “I’m like, ‘This is different. You gotta understand what happened.’”

I was dying to know what happened.

The filled jar goes through a blast freezer to help the texture of the gelato retain its creamy mouthfeel and long shelf life. “The product inside is actually expanding outward because it’s freezing, so it caused the lid to slowly turn and tighten,” said Hochschuler. “And it just keeps tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening until it is so tight, it could almost break it.”

The plastic itself is also part of the problem. The jar and the lid are made of two different types of polymers. That means they’ll react differently to various temperature conditions and will shrink or expand at different rates, causing the two pieces to work against each other, rather than with each other, said Patricia Santos, a professor in the Rutgers packaging engineering program, who previously worked at Mars and Kraft.

I was curious about what was happening between the lid and the thread, so I asked our friends at the industrial CT-scanning company Lumafield (who had helped us dig into the mystery of why Ralph Nader’s pens were drying out).

They put several jars of Talenti gelato into their machine, both new and already opened, and compared those pints against other screw-style jars in the grocery store. “The shape of the thread seemed very unusual,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield, who wrote an article on the scan results. It’s sharp — even sharper than threads of other plastic containers you might find. Those pointy threads could be clawing into the lids, further contributing to the issue, which is why Hao said the internet hack of running a butter knife between the jar and the lid should make it easier to open.

The folks at Lumafield put a closed Talenti jar and a closed mayonnaise jar through an industrial CT scanner to compare how the lids interacted with their respective bases. The Talenti jar is “a very unusual, definitely very custom design,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield. Lumafield

When Unilever bought Talenti, it had to invest millions in specialty equipment, including machines to fill the plastic tubs, because the jars are different from the cardboard containers that nearly every other manufacturer uses. The too-tight lid issue started gaining traction online shortly after the parent company moved Talenti’s production facility from Georgia to Missouri in 2016; Talenti responded, blaming a new lid-capping machine and declaring the matter resolved.

That one incident of an overzealous machine might have been fixed, but the intrinsic issue with the containers remained. And Talenti’s production line is moving much more product than it did in Hochschuler’s era. “We were doing, like, five a minute,” he said. “They’re doing, like, 500.”

But the solution to Hochschuler’s manufacturing issue was — and my goodness, what a life lesson — a light touch.

Blast freezing essentially allows the lid to close itself. “So you just put [the lid] on a little bit so that it keeps the product food-safe, and then it will tighten as it goes through, but not so much that you can’t open it,” Hochschuler said. “If you put it on any tighter, it’s going to tighten itself so much that it will be too tight afterwards.”

Likely compounding the issue, Unilever added an interior safety seal, rather than the clear plastic pull-tab around the outside that Hochschuler used. Unilever says this is meant to “provide consumers with a clear indication that the product has not been opened prior to purchase, in a premium way.” But it also creates additional friction between the jar and the lid.

People with small hands, arthritis, or low grip strength may find the task of twisting the 3.687-inch plastic Talenti lid challenging even when the thread or the coefficients of thermal expansion aren’t acting up.

Of course, Talenti is not the only food brand to have notorious packaging problems. Customers complained about Grillo’s, a top pick from our pickle guide, which had a plastic lid with a “break-tab tamper-evident feature,” where you need to snap off a piece of plastic and then pry up the lid to separate it from the main jar. Grillo’s switched to a screw-top lid in 2024. Aldi uses a similar break-tab design in the Sundae Shoppe line of “gelato” it sells. We tasted the Sundae Shoppe Triple Chocolate Gelato and can recommend neither the packaging nor the contents.

A spokesperson for Talenti originally told me that they would have some news on the packaging by Q3 of this year, but then declined participation in this article because the lid conversation had died down. In response to our fact-checking question asking whether the company had made any progress on the lid issue, they said, “The solutions we’ve already implemented have resulted in a substantial decrease in consumer queries to date.”

But during my research and reporting, I found multiple lids quite challenging to unscrew, even when we allowed the product to thaw a bit before opening.

From idealistic beginnings to corporate growth

While I was struggling to pay bills in my first apartment as a poorly paid but plucky young assistant at a magazine in New York City in 2002, Talenti was being born 1,500 miles away in Dallas.

Hochschuler moved to Argentina shortly after college graduation and fell in love with the gelato culture there. He eventually apprenticed under an expert gelato maker and opened up a shop in his hometown of Dallas in 2003. He named the brand Talenti after Bernardo Buontalenti, the likely inventor of gelato.

Hochschuler’s storefront business wasn’t making money, but customers loved the product, so he shifted to grocery retail, hand-packing the dessert in distinctive plastic jars that allowed the colors of the gelato or sorbetto to show through. Hochschuler loved the idea of a clear jar that was reminiscent of the gelato-shop cases, where you could look at the beautiful swirls and inclusions in the base. (Fun fact: He had originally chosen a different style of plastic jar, but his girlfriend at the time — now wife — wisely told him that they looked like urine-sample containers.)

Hochschuler was clearly passionate about creating the best gelato he could. He would use excellent ingredients from around the world — Alphonso mangoes from India, Tahitian vanilla beans, chocolate from Belgium. After importing dulce de leche directly from Argentina, Hochschuler scoured the US to find someone who could make it stateside, ultimately working with a Colombian man named Mario Florez, who made Argentinian-style dulce de leche.

Hochschuler and Florez grew their businesses together. “He was very small and getting started and needed help,” Hochschuler told me. “I would go to Florida with my head of operations to his facility to help him better understand efficiencies and best practices for food safety. We became friends and helped one another.”

Hochschuler and his American business partners (who had previously been responsible for developing high-end Chopin and Belvedere vodkas) expanded Talenti nationally over the course of 2007 to 2011. Unilever came knocking on their door in 2012 and bought the brand for millions after 18 months of negotiation.

Hochschuler was no longer involved in day-to-day operations after 2016, but he stayed on for another couple of years to support new flavor development as well as marketing and PR efforts. Today, he is an investor and is involved in a small chain of retail garden centers.

As for Talenti, its sales thrived under Unilever, nearly doubling to over $200 million by 2023, almost a decade after acquisition.

In December 2025, Unilever divested its ice cream division, which became the Magnum Ice Cream Company. Since all of the jars we bought for our testing still have the Unilever branding, we have referred to the company as Unilever. A company representative declined our multiple interview requests.

Unilever continues to paint a picture of what Talenti was — special, selective, premium. “Still today we remain as rooted as ever in crafting Old World style gelatos and sorbettos that will capture your heart,” Talenti says on its website.

Of all the Talenti flavors I’ve tasted, the Sea Salt Caramel is my absolute favorite. So as I was thinking about Talenti’s past, I was curious about “our friend Mario, who uses an Argentinian recipe has [sic] been passed down for several generations,” as the Talenti website says. The Sea Salt Caramel is still rich and dense, and I assumed that was thanks to Mario Florez and his team. I gave them a call.

Unfortunately, no one there would speak to me. They kept me on hold for a long time and then asked me to send an email, to which they never responded.

Though it’s likely that the team is still making the dulce de leche the long, slow, considered way and shipping it up to Missouri to be included in Talenti’s formulations, Mario Florez died in 2019. Talenti’s website still refers to him in the present tense.

The past, the present, the future

Today, fancy ice cream is common. Brands such as Jeni’s and Van Leeuwen charge a true premium, sometimes as much as $12 per pint.

The relative newcomers (“third-wave ice cream,” as Cree refers to it) are packed in standard, easy-to-open cardboard containers, and while you can’t see the beautiful contents inside, they achieve the rainbow effect that Hochschuler coveted.

Van Leeuwen is available in many grocery stores nationally, with the packaging creating a rainbow effect of its own.

More consumers are shying away from plastic in general, though Talenti’s clear jars still have an enthusiastic fan base. People reuse them again and again — Talenti calls it pintcycling — to hold all sorts of things. Office supplies. Bits of pretty yarn. General Tso’s.

My friend Katie, a science teacher, uses the empty, clean jars for tornado experiments with her school-age students. “It’s cool because they each get to pick their own ‘flavor,’” she told me.

The rainbow lives on. I visited a Talenti-jar fan who had bought the gelato as far back as 2015 (but no longer purchases it because of the added gums). The jars now hold little woolen treasures. Annemarie Conte

But many of the people I spoke with who love the jars so much rarely buy Talenti anymore. They say they have all the jars they need. (You can buy empty ones on eBay, sometimes for as much as $3 apiece — no dessert necessary.)

I recently showed up at Katie’s house bearing today’s version of Mediterranean Mint. She was pensive as she tasted it. “It’s okay. It’s good. It’s not the same as I remember,” she said. “And I wouldn’t pay $6 for it.”

Can you shake something that was once so inherent to your identity? Hochschuler did. “I threw in the towel on gelato making,” he said, “although I am now involved in ice cream sandwiches.”

Change is, of course, inevitable. Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes for the worse. And sometimes it’s neither better nor worse, just different.

Perhaps that’s why, despite my disappointment in the Talenti of today, I’m still eating it. I have three pints in my freezer. I slurped a spoonful while I typed this sentence.

Of course, it’s not as I remember it. But being reunited with something that once meant so much to me still brings me a certain nostalgic calm. It’s an imperfect facsimile, and my exuberant proselytizing is in the past. What I truly loved is lost to the ephemerality of time. But at least, in the case of Talenti, I know why.
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