The Best Selling Ice-Cream Brand In The World

Ice cream is a frozen dessert made mostly from dairy, usually cream and milk, blended with sugar and flavorings and churned as it freezes to keep the texture smooth. Not every frozen dessert qualifies as ice cream, since sorbet, gelato, and frozen yogurt each follow different recipes. It is also a large global business. The worldwide ice cream market was worth roughly 75 billion euros, about 88 billion US dollars, in 2024, and it has been growing by around 3 to 4 percent a year.

The brands people recognize have not changed much since the 2010s, but the companies behind them have been reshuffled dramatically. A run of mergers, joint ventures, and spin-offs has redrawn the industry, most recently in 2025, when Unilever separated its entire ice cream division into a standalone company. The guide below covers the leading global brands and, just as importantly, who actually owns them today.

A Business That Has Been Completely Reshuffled

The biggest change came from Unilever, long the world's largest ice cream maker. In 2025 it spun off its ice cream arm into The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which became independent on July 1 and began trading on the Amsterdam, London, and New York stock exchanges that December at a valuation of about 9.1 billion US dollars. The new company controls roughly 21 percent of the global market, making it the largest ice cream producer in the world. Its portfolio includes Magnum, Wall's, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto, Breyers, Klondike, Carte d'Or, and Talenti. Four of those, grouped as Heartbrand (the Wall's family), Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, and Cornetto, brought in about 6.5 billion euros in 2024 alone.

Its closest rival is Froneri, a joint venture Nestlé created with the private equity firm PAI Partners in 2016. Nestlé handed most of its ice cream business to Froneri, including its US Dreyer's, Drumstick, and Häagen-Dazs operations in 2019. Froneri now holds around 11 percent of the global market, so together the top two companies account for roughly a third of all the ice cream sold worldwide.

The rest of the field is fragmented. General Mills owns the Häagen-Dazs brand everywhere except the United States and Canada, where it is controlled by the Nestlé and Froneri side. Ferrero, the Italian company behind Nutella and Kinder, bought the American maker Wells Enterprises in 2023, picking up Blue Bunny, Halo Top, and Bomb Pop. Mars sells ice cream versions of Snickers, M&M's, and Dove, and large regional players such as Amul in India and Blue Bell in the United States round out the market.

Sales And Market Share

Comprehensive sales figures are not published for every brand, but the 2025 stock market listing of The Magnum Ice Cream Company exposed the clearest numbers the industry has seen in years. Measured by 2024 retail sales, the biggest-selling brands in the world all sit inside that one company. Its four self-described "power brands" sold about 6.5 billion euros, or roughly 7.2 billion US dollars, between them in 2024.

At the company level, The Magnum Ice Cream Company accounts for about 21 percent of global retail sales, and its nearest rival, Froneri, holds around 11 percent, so the two together make up roughly a third of the worldwide market. That market was worth about 88 billion US dollars, in 2024. In the United States, Ben & Jerry's is consistently the top-selling branded ice cream, although store-brand "private label" products taken together outsell any single name.

Magnum

Magnum is the brand the new company is named after, and it is frequently described as the world's best-selling single ice cream. It is a thick chocolate-coated bar, developed in Belgium and first sold in Germany in 1989, and it has always been marketed as a premium, grown-up indulgence. Sold in more than 100 countries and made with Belgian chocolate, Magnum sits at the higher end of the price range and is eaten mostly away from home.

Wall's And The Heartbrand Family

Wall's is less a single product than an umbrella. It began in London in 1922 and now anchors the global Heartbrand, the heart-shaped logo that appears on locally named ice creams around the world: Algida in Italy, Frigo in Spain, Kibon in Brazil, Ola across much of Africa, HB in Ireland, and Kwality Wall's in India, among dozens of others. Taken together, Heartbrand is actually the company's largest brand by revenue, at roughly 2.8 billion euros in 2024, ahead of Magnum's 1.8 billion.

Cornetto

Cornetto, Italian for "little horn," is the company's signature cone. The wafer cone is lined and topped with chocolate so the first and last bites stay crunchy, and like Wall's it is sold under different names in different markets. It remains one of the most recognized handheld ice creams in the world and one of the four brands the parent company counts among its biggest.

Ben & Jerry's

Ben & Jerry's was founded in 1978 by childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont, and it built its name on dense, chunky flavors and outspoken social activism. Unilever bought the company in 2000, and it now belongs to The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which has expanded it into 46 countries by 2024, up from 26 in 2010. That activism has also caused friction with its corporate owners, and the relationship between Ben & Jerry's and its parent has been strained in recent years.

Häagen-Dazs

Häagen-Dazs is the super-premium name with the famously invented, Danish-sounding title. Reuben and Rose Mattus created it in the Bronx, New York, around 1960, choosing a foreign-looking name to suggest old-world craftsmanship. Its ownership is unusually split: General Mills owns the brand across most of the world, while in the United States and Canada it is controlled by Nestlé and produced by Froneri.

Other Major Brands

Several familiar names fill out the top tier. Breyers, founded by William Breyer in Philadelphia in 1866, is one of the oldest American brands and now sits within The Magnum Ice Cream Company. Dreyer's, sold as Edy's in the eastern United States, was started in Oakland, California, in 1928 by William Dreyer and Joseph Edy, and today belongs to Froneri. Klondike, the chocolate-coated vanilla square with the polar-bear mascot, was created by the Isaly Dairy Company in Mansfield, Ohio, in the early 1920s and is also a Magnum company brand. Blue Bunny, Halo Top, and Bomb Pop come from Wells Enterprises of Le Mars, Iowa, now owned by Ferrero. Beyond the packaged brands, scoop-shop chains like Baskin-Robbins, owned by Inspire Brands, and India's cooperative giant Amul, with its long-running Amul Girl ads, reach enormous audiences of their own.

Where The Market Is Heading

Two forces are reshaping what sells. Plant-based and better-for-you options, lower in sugar or higher in protein, are among the fastest-growing parts of the category, and the spread of weight-loss drugs has the industry watching its sugar-heavy core nervously. At the same time, the quickest volume growth is in Asia, led by China, even though North America and Europe still account for most of what is eaten. Consumption is uneven around the globe, and New Zealand, the United States, and Australia regularly rank among the heaviest per-person consumers.

Major Global Ice Cream Brands And Their Owners

The table below maps the leading global ice cream brands to the companies that own them as of 2025, a lineup very different from the one that topped the sales charts a decade ago.

The Same Scoops, New Owners

The flavors in the freezer aisle look much as they did ten years ago, but the names on the corporate paperwork have almost all changed. Joint ventures, a major Italian acquisition, and the breakup of the industry's largest player have handed the world's favorite ice cream brands to a new set of owners. The Magnum Ice Cream Company and Froneri now tower over everyone else, while Ferrero, General Mills, and a handful of regional champions divide up the rest. For shoppers the experience is unchanged, but the business of ice cream has rarely moved this fast.