Choco Taco
The waffle-cone shell folded like a taco, packed with vanilla ice cream, fudge, and peanuts under a milk-chocolate coating — the ice cream truck's most architecturally ambitious treat. Klondike's Choco Taco was a summer ritual until it was discontinued in 2022.
The Choco Taco was dreamed up in 1983 by Alan Drazen, a mobile-vending manager for Philadelphia's Jack and Jill Ice Cream Company, and rolled out the following spring for 89 cents. The idea was pure novelty: a disk of waffle-cone material folded into a hard-shell taco shape, filled with reduced-fat vanilla ice cream and artificially flavored fudge, then coated in milk chocolate and chopped peanuts.
It found its natural home on the ice cream truck, but it spread fast. By the summer of 1985 it was selling in supermarket three-packs across 30 states, and its ownership climbed the corporate ladder — from Jack and Jill to Gold Bond Ice Cream, then to Unilever in 1989, which folded it into Good Humor–Breyers and eventually sold it under the Klondike brand as "The Original Ice Cream Taco." It even turned up at some Taco Bell locations and overseas as the "Winner Taco."
In July 2022, Klondike announced it was discontinuing the Choco Taco, citing surging demand across its other brands and the need to keep them in stock — a decision that set off a wave of online mourning from grown-up '90s kids. Whatever became of the recipe, the Choco Taco stayed fixed in memory as the definitive it's-summer sound of a truck's tinny jingle.
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