Not sure if this place was mentioned yet, but they have some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had:
(The place is called 親山農園…I think they just sell on this website. Had it in Chi Shang. P good.)
Nice one from Lithuania bought at 7-11. Vanilla ice cream all down to the bottom of the cone, and a chocolate coating inside the cone. A little pricey at 105 nt (getting close to the Haagen Dazs price).
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I just tried this.
The first bite…wow. Caramel corn and ice cream go really well together.
This one is good, very good.
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Looking back—and now looking down on my waistline—I don’t think I’ve had a bad ice cream from the Baltics. They have ranged from good (most of the Pols bars) to very good (those fruit concoctions from Lithuania) to utterly dangerous and please get these things away from me (as discussed in the dedicated thread on Ekselence ice cream). 
Guy
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Tell me more.
They are called “Shapetime.” I was alerted to these tasty fruit concoctions earlier in 2023 by @OrangeOrganics who posted about them here:
I haven’t seen them for a while. The bars I found were at Family Mart, not at 7-11. I’d be delighted to see them back.
Guy
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Good news! The Yu Chocolatier soft-serve is back in Family Mart! It just became available and the dark choco cones were already sold out at my nearest shop. 
It’s as good as last year, BTW.
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I just saw this new soft serve flavor, 山丘藍, which looks interesting and I plan to try it later. Just wondering if anybody else has tried it or even heard of this local type of blueberry.
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We just had one today. It was good. Settles the earthquake jitters!
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So far, I’ve typically found the Family Mart soft serve ice cream fruit flavours to be more like “fruit” flavours—something just off. With these positive reviews, I’ll go ahead and see if this one changes my mind.
Guy
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So this turns out to be kind of interesting. The blueberries used in this product really are from Taiwan.
Twenty years ago, Taiwan imported just 4 tons of blueberries annually. That has increased to nearly 3,000 tons per year.
The people behind the shanqiulan brand we see here invested NT$500 million and leased 30 hectares of land from TaiSugar in the hills of Fanlu Township in Chiayi County. It took them six years to reach last year’s harvest of 30 tons. They worked with a team from NTU that provided the agricultural technology and expertise needed to overcome the difficulties of growing blueberries in a tropical climate.
They were recently accused of being a front for Chinese investment and having cut down primary forest for the farm. They strongly denied those allegations. I would guess this cam from a competitor or someone who wants the land.
Still, the power of those accusations provides some insight into the highly negative sentiments that anything associated with China can currently cause in Taiwan these days.
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I wonder, given the low quantity available of the governments push on taiwanese blueberries if this is real or not.
If so, why? The numbers don’t really seem to add up in my opinion, unless this government project was a flop and frozen left overs are being sold. But really curious why this can even be a thing…?
Locally produced fresh blueberries should be fucking gold right now!
I had one tonight. Either the clerk gave me the wrong stuff, or it was more like (artificial) grape flavor… Not impressed!
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I’m usually happy to buy locally produced fruits, but I haven’t bothered with the blueberries yet because they always seem to be at least double the price of the imported ones. More in the same price range as those small boxes of Japanese apples selling for thousands of dollars. Or maybe supermarkets aren’t the best place to get a good price? Anyway, this would suggest to me that if they are really using them in the ice cream, it should be more expensive than the usual flavours. Is this the case, or are their flavours always based on gourmet ingredients?
Could it not be that they’re using the local blueberries plus some other (/synthetic) flavorings? Or are they claiming to just be using the local blueberries exclusively?
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This is what I am assuming.
To be fair, taiwanese produce should normally be .ore expensive than most imported stuff because the scale here is so tiny and no where close to as automated/mechanized as the imported ones. So the cost of growing is no joke higher than the big producers.
Are those available now? Or did you buy them a while ago?
Guy
Now, did not see them before. (it could be my local FamilyMart is renovated with some better food, but still tiny and no seats)
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