What Flavor Is Superman Ice Cream?

Superman is a Midwestern ice cream, and above all a Michigan one. You will rarely see the name on a carton. Superman is a DC Comics character, so dairies sell it as SuperScoop, Super Rainbow, Scooperman and similar names.

Which flavor is which color

The colors are fixed. The flavors behind them are not.

Two well-known versions show how far it moves. Hudsonville's SuperScoop is black cherry, Blue Moon and vanilla.² Stroh's Super Rainbow, the version most often called the original, is usually described as Blue Moon, Red Pop and lemon.

The blue is the most consistent part, and the hardest to pin down. It is usually Blue Moon, a regional flavor whose formula has never been published. Some makers use blue raspberry instead.

Eaten together, the three blend into general fruit candy. That blur is part of the appeal. Nobody expects to taste three clean flavors.

Where it came from is unproven

The usual story: Stroh's, the Detroit brewery, made it in the 1920s after Prohibition pushed the company into ice cream. That would predate Superman's 1938 debut, so the name was attached later because the colors matched the costume.

A Michigan Public fact-check in August 2026 found no evidence that Stroh's created it. Stroh's did make ice cream during Prohibition, but the current company does not claim the flavor. The earliest ad the reporter found ran in a Wisconsin paper in 1941 and did not list flavors. Michigan ads appear from 1972, and most later advertising is from Michigan.¹

So the honest answer is that it grew up in the Midwest, it is most at home in Michigan, and nobody has shown who made it first.

Making one

It is three ice creams, not one. Each color is its own mix with its own flavor and color, filled together so the streams stay separate. Brief and approve each component, then approve the combination.

Taste across the swirl. People eat a spoonful that cuts through all three. A strong cherry or Blue Moon can take over the scoop, while a vanilla yellow mostly adds creaminess. Judge a mixed spoonful, frozen, not each mix alone at room temperature.

Cold hides flavor. Ice cream is eaten cold enough to dull aroma, so each component needs more flavor than it would in a drink. The dairy hub explains why.

Lemon comes from oil, not juice. Juice brings acid that a dairy mix does not want. A lemon yellow uses lemon oil or a lemon flavor. A strawberry or Red Pop red usually leans on a candy-style strawberry profile rather than fresh fruit.

Watch the colors where they meet. Water-soluble dyes can spread across the borders between swirls over storage, more so if the product partly melts and refreezes. Blurred stripes look old even when the flavor is fine. If you are moving to natural colors, you need a red, a yellow and a blue that all hold up in a frozen dairy base. Test them together, because colors that look right alone can muddy where they touch.

Do not use the name. Without a license from DC, keep "Superman" off the pack. The established dairies already work around it.