Mystery of Moon Mist, the ice cream flavor taking over Toronto

HALIFAX—Even the most devoted fans of Moon Mist, the ice cream that has been one of Nova Scotia’s best-kept secrets for at least half a century, admit it’s an odd flavor combination. Banana, grape and chewing gum? It sounds like a mash-up made by a hanging three-year-old after a long day in the sun.

“It’s hard to explain Moon Mist to people who didn’t grow up on the East Coast,” says Carrie Macmillan, who lives in Toronto but grew up with Moon Mist in Nova Scotia.

“It’s just so fruitful and flavorful and flamboyant.”

On their own, the flavors are nothing special, but swirled together in a pastel rainbow of yellow, blue, and purple, they make a dreamy mix. The smell is candy sweet. You won’t taste the color, but it’s part of the fun.

For decades, part of Moon Mist’s allure and magic was that it was only available on the East Coast. Expats from Atlantic Canada returning to the eastern provinces on vacation stopped for a scoop at their hometown ice cream barn, an annual tradition to share with their children, spouses and friends.

A few weeks ago, Macmillan, 39, walked into an East York ice cream parlor with her three kids and did a double take when she saw the signature light yellow, sky blue and soft purple swirl in the freezer.

Moon Mist had come to Toronto.

Popular with Children of the ’80s and ’90s, Moon Mist has experienced a recent wave of acclaim, in part due to its Instagrammable colors, its widespread availability in new supermarket-sized tubs across the Atlantic provinces, and companies marketing merchandise to nostalgic millennials. You can now buy Moon Mist hoodies, Moon Mist candles, Moon Mist yarn, Moon Mist donuts and Moon Mist vodka. At a Halifax hair salon you can have your hair dyed in Moon Mist colors.

While many people celebrated Moon Mist’s arrival in Ontario, some with East Coast roots, including Macmillan, found it disorienting. “Part of what has become so special about it to me is that you can only get it at home,” said Macmillan.

The feeling of magic that comes with having something of “home” can be hard to explain. But for those of us whose identity is tied to a place we no longer live, it can turn an ice cream cone into something more important.

Kawartha Dairy, based in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, launched its new Moon Mist flavor earlier this year, marketing it as “an East Coast favorite.” This was the ice cream Macmillan found at her local scoop shop. It is the first time that Moon Mist is widely available outside the Atlantic provinces. (Smaller regional ice cream shops, such as Lois ‘N’ Frima’s in Ottawa and The Big Scoop in Duncan, BC, sell Moon Mist-inspired flavors by the scoop.)

Kawartha began working on its product last year after an East Coast-connected customer suggested the flavor, said Dana Somerville, vice president of marketing.

“It’s generated a lot of excitement,” Somerville said. “It’s definitely a favorite in my house.”

Tammy Wiseberg, owner of Carter’s Ice Cream in Danforth East, had never heard of the flavor before receiving her first tub this spring, but said it’s now one of her bestsellers.

“It’s going to be gangbusters.”

Many customers with East Coast roots were excited to see it, while others felt a little confused, Wiseberg said. “Some people are surprised to see it here. They feel like it’s their own little hidden treasure from the east,’ she said. And they want to keep it that way.

I thought of this this week when I shared a Moon Mist cone with my daughter on a trip to Halifax. I haven’t told my kids that the ice cream they enjoy on trips to my home province is now available in Ontario. I’m sure I will, or they’ll see for themselves, but I’m holding on.

To better understand the complicated feelings a simple dairy treat evoked, I set out to investigate its mysterious history.

Kids who grew up eating Moon Mist in Atlantic Canada in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s got it from ice cream parlors supplied by one of Nova Scotia’s two major dairies: Farmers of Scotsburn.

Farmers was the first to launch the flavor, in 1973, according to Agropur Cooperative, a Quebec-based dairy giant that now owns both Farmers and Scotsburn ice cream products.

There’s hardly anyone left to tell the 50-year-old origin story, but a retired farmer tipped me off: “The person you want to talk to,” he said, “is Kelly Kale.”

Kelly Kale, a Halifax nutrition scientist and college instructor, was head of research and development at Farmers for four decades. It took me a while to find him, partly because Kelly Kale isn’t his first name.

Chandarrao Kale (pronounced KAH-lay) became Kelly Kale (pronounced the leafy green) in the early 1970s while studying nutritional science at the University of Utah, where locals renamed him instead of learning his real name to pronounce.

Kale is now 79 and lives in a quiet suburb on the west side of Halifax. As a child growing up in Pune, near Mumbai, Kale used to beg his mother for money whenever the ice cream van came by. “I was very fond of ice cream,” he said. He developed 196 flavors before retiring in 2016.

Kale isn’t the only ice cream expert with a Moon Mist origin story, but we’ll start with him.

In the early 1970s, Kale traveled to Nova Scotia to visit a friend. He loved Halifax and thought it seemed like a good place to raise children. “Are there dairies here?” he asked his friend.

Kale visited Farmers Dairy and impressed the owner by solving a production problem that saved a $60,000 batch of cottage cheese. He was hired on the spot.

Moon Mist was the first ice cream flavor Kale worked on, he said as we sat in his living room this week. He shared what he knows with the caveat that it happened a long time ago.

Kale told me something I’d never heard before: Moon Mist, he said, is named after the Misty Moon Show Bar, a legendary music club that opened on Gottigen Street in 1969, similar to Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. This was a delightful detail. A celebrated children’s ice cream treat is named after an infamous rock venue linked to Halifax’s identity “as a ‘drinking town’ full of bars, music and vice,” wrote Charlene Boyce, a graduate student at Saint Mary’s University, in a master’s thesis on the Misty Moon, which closed in 1994.

Kale recalled that Farmers worked with an American company that produced and sold natural and artificial flavors for use in dairy products. Farmers made the ice cream and then added the liquid flavors, testing different concentrations before settling on a mix. Kale believed, but wasn’t sure, that the American company was introducing the three flavors that would become Moon Mist, but he wasn’t sure who suggested combining them.

What Kale definitely remembered was that everyone loved the color combination. Someone on the development team suggested calling it Rainbow, Kale said, but the colors were more reminiscent of the subtle shades of light around the moon after sunset. Kale didn’t come up with the name — he never set foot in the Misty Moon — but he had a personal connection: His name, Chandarrao, means moon.

It’s possible that another Halifax ice cream maker created the Moon Mist flavor combination before Farmers. Peter O’Brien, a classical professor at Dalhousie University, said it was a family lore that his grandfather, Bruce Hart, invented Moon Mist sometime before or after World War II while studying in America at a school that his grandfather jokingly called “Ice Cream University’. ”

“I’m not claiming ironclad memory or evidence of this stuff,” O’Brien said. “This was the talk around the table when I was a kid.”

O’Brien, 54, said his grandfather’s original Moon Mist recipe, which was sold under the family’s Polar Ice Cream brand, was different from the combination used today, using blue raspberry instead of bubble gum.

When I first heard these two stories – the story about the Misty Moon Show Bar and the story about Bruce Hart inventing Moon Mist at Ice Cream University – I thought they contradicted each other. But it turns out they can match to form the flavor’s true origin story.

When I told Kelly Kale the Bruce Hart story, Kale said it’s possible that the original Moon Mist recipe came from Hart and Kale didn’t know about it. “I was new to Canada,” Kale said. He wouldn’t have known about existing flavors local dairies had made in the past. It’s possible the Farmers recipe came from Bruce Hart and not a seasoning, he said.

When I spoke to Peter O’Brien about the Misty Moon, he found Kale’s story plausible. His grandfather, he said, “was definitely not the Misty Moon type.” At some point, probably in the 1960s, the Hart family sold their ice cream business to a company that would become Farmers Dairy, O’Brien said.

It is possible that Hart created the infamous flavor combination, and that after acquiring the ice cream business from the Hart family, Farmers began selling and branding the ice cream under the name Moon Mist in the early 1970s.

Another clue supports this theory. Farmers’ original recipe, according to Agropur, was made with blue raspberries, not gum. Just like Bruce Hart’s.

Scotsburn introduced its own competing Moon Mist flavor after Farmers, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with blue gum. Agropur phased out the Farmers Moon Mist recipe in 2017 and now only sells the bubblegum version.

Moon Mist is Agropur’s second most popular flavor, next to vanilla, in the four provinces where it is sold: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

If the origin is hazy, one thing is clear: Moon Mist belongs to Nova Scotia.

Which brings us back to Carrie Macmillan and her mixed feelings about finding Moon Mist at her local ice cream parlor in Toronto this summer. She couldn’t bear to try it right away.

“Raising kids in a city, and Canada’s largest city, is so different from how I grew up in so many ways, and it feels really strange to me at times,” says Macmillan. “It’s really nice to be with them when they get to experience those little nuggets from my own childhood.”

She laughed and said it sucks to get emotional over an ice cream cone. But I get it.

Moon Mist has become a tradition I share with my kids on our fleeting annual trips to Nova Scotia, packing in as many East Coast experiences as possible—beach walks, violin music, lobster sweats—both for myself and them, to immerse them in my childhood experiences, knowing that my city kids may never fully understand, but hoping something sticks.

This is a lot to pin on an ice cream cone, Macmillan said, and I agree. After all, ice cream is supposed to be fun.

Macmillan tried a scoop of Moon Mist in Toronto this week with her kids.

“It was good,” she said, “but not quite the same.”

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