Introducing Italian Ice: The Making of Our New Treat!

This month, we’re so excited to announce our newest super-fruity addition to our DeeBee's Organics product family: Organic Italian Ice!

Available in three deliciously scoopable flavors, our DeeBee's Organics Italian Ice combines certified organic ingredients you’ve come to love with inspiration from Sicily’s traditional icy delight, the Sicilian Granita! Our innovative and on-the-go take on traditional Italian Ice is perfect for families looking for a healthy sweet treat with a dash of adventure and some extra juiciness!

Just like our DeeBee's Organics SuperFruit Freezies, our Organic Italian Ice cups are made with real organic fruit and free from refined sugars, artificial colors, additives, and pesticides. Our scoopable Italian Ice also makes the perfect compliment to dips in the pool, hours in the sun, and afternoons spent picnicking. Ready for summer to get a whole lot sweeter? Let’s take a peek into all our juicy flavors!

Our Italian Ice Flavors

Our scoopable Italian Ice is now available in three unique flavors: 

Raspberry Orchard: Stuffed with delicious assorted berries and pears, our raspberry orchard Italian Ice is one of our most unique flavors! With the high levels of potassium and Vitamin K found in pears and the antioxidants found in berries, our Raspberry Orchard Italian Ice is bursting with both health-promoting superfoods and a unique flavor profile! 

Tropical: Ready for our newest take on the DeeBee’s Organics flavor you know and love? With a plethora of tropical fruits, our Tropical Italian Ice is jam packed with immunity-boosting vitamins and minerals like Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Folic Acid, and Calcium. 

Berry Grape: Overflowing with grapes and berry deliciousness, our Berry Grape Italian Ice is loaded with antioxidants including polyphenols and disease fighting vitamins and minerals like Vitamin C and potassium. And did we mention grapes are also high in soluble fiber and promote a healthy gut?

How To Make Your Italian Ice Taste Perfect

Ready to cool off this summer with all three of our Italian Ice flavors? To ensure best taste, simply shake the sealed cups for a few seconds to make sure the ingredients aren't separated, flip the cup over so the lid is on the bottom, and freeze flat! When you’re ready to enjoy your frozen treat, simply take the cup out of the freezer, let thaw upside down for approximately 10 minutes (until scoopable) and dig in! Be sure to pack in some extra family time while you wait for your Italian Ice - we recommend playing a game of charades, working on a puzzle, or having an impromptu dance party in the kitchen!

Have an impatient tiny tot at home? Here’s a speedy hack to get your cup to thaw faster: try running an Italian Ice cup under warm water for approximately one to two minutes to enjoy sooner!

How We Created Our Italian Ice - An Interview!

To hear more about the process behind creating our new DeeBee’s Organics Italian Ice, we sat down with Executive Vice President of Brand and Commercialization Becky Julseth to hear her thoughts on the journey of creating our new treat and how it's coming to shelves near you!

Where did the first inspiration/idea for Italian Ice come from?  

On a recent business trip, we tried Sicilian Granita and absolutely fell in love with it. Sicilian Granita is a delicious, almost-frozen blend of sugar, ice, and fruit that Italians eat for breakfast with a fresh brioche. It was delicious, and we couldn’t stop thinking about it ever since we got back home. 

Did you know right away after the idea was fully formed that it was something spectacular or did that ‘yes!’ feeling come much later in the creation process?

Our team experimented with so many different fruits and flavor combinations before finally getting it perfect. In all honesty, we were not absolutely certain we could get the result we wanted without having to add sugar! Sugar helps make frozen things softer and thus, more easy to scoop. 

Along the way, we learned that certain fruits work much better than others for this product because of their unique fiber content and structure! So no - we didn't really get it straight away, but by round two of the development phase, we were getting very excited about what it was shaping up to be!

How long did it take to get Italian Ice from thought to where it is today? 

It took our team over nine months to create our Organic Italian Ice from scratch! During our research and development phase, our team worked really hard to get the formulation just right at our manufacturing facility in Italy. There was a lot of thinking and doing involved!

What was the lowest point that you had to push through during the making of DeeBee's Organics Italian Ice? 

Initially, our food science team wasn’t even sure it was possible! This was definitely the toughest thing we were grappling with. We weren’t sure we could actually achieve the texture we wanted without adding cane sugar, which was a no-go for us as a company and not what we wanted to end up doing. Thankfully, with our amazing team’s deep understanding of fruit structures, we were able to get to our end result without sacrificing what we believed in!

When it comes to building out the flavor combinations, how long did that process take? How many combinations/options did you go through before settling on the final three flavors?

We actually ended up going through just about every fruit combination imaginable! But then, when it came to what actually worked, it became very apparent that the texture of the Italian Ice and how 'spoonable' it could become relied so much on the structure of the fruits used - this limited the flavor combinations we could actually work with in the end. This entire process also pushed us to try new fruits we hadn't really worked with before, like pears (found in our Raspberry Orchard flavor!) and Moscato grapes (in our Berry Grape flavor!) 

What is your favorite thing about our new Italian Ice?

Many people don’t know that shelf-stable sorbetto is already a big item in Europe! We figured, why not use organic and sugar-free ingredients and really take this to the next level!? 

Shop Now

Ready to dig in? Shop our scoopable Italian Ice right here and also at select retail locations across the US. Livin’ la dolce vita!