The Lite Choice Taste Tour [New York]

By: Finance Foodie

As many of you know, my favorite dessert is and has always been ice cream. Unfortunately, the only love I get back from ice cream is around my hips and stomach – great if I was a bear trying to hibernate for the winter, but bad if I’m trying to get in shape for swimsuit season. Luckily, for those days when I’m hankering for something sweet but have already indulged, I can turn to my lower calorie friend – the soft serve.

Soft serve is a frozen dessert very similar to but much lighter than ice cream, since it’s lower in milk fat and contains up to 60% air by volume. I had always enjoyed McDonald’s original vanilla soft serve in high school (sweet, cheap, and only 150 calories a cone!), but soon abandoned that in favor of Tasti D-Lite when I moved to NYC (a bit pricier but loads more flavors!). Although I liked the wide variety of flavors, I always thought Tasti D-Lite tasted a bit artificial and well…obviously “lite”.

Enter The Lite Choice.

The Lite Choice (TLC) is a chain of soft serve shops in New York and New Jersey that is similar in concept to Tasti D-Lite (the owners were former Tasti D’Lite licensees) but unlike Tasti D- all flavors are natural, kosher, and 100% organic. After meeting TLC’s team at the International Restaurant Show, I, along with Team Finance Foodie’s photographer Jen “Q” Chen, stopped by The Lite Choice store on Broadway and 96th for a taste tour of all their products.

The first item up for sampling was TLC’s all natural peanut butter and almond butter- which is actually made on site in their nut grinding machines. The peanut and almond butter are then added to plain vanilla soft serve to create…you got it – peanut butter and almond butter flavored soft serve! I especially liked the almond butter flavor, as you could actually taste bits of the almond crunchies in the soft serve.

We then got to make our own flavor soft serve using the wide variety of different syrups lined up against the wall (which are all USDA certified organic, natch). In addition to the 4-5 pre-made flavors, customers can create their own custom blend with over 70 flavor combinations to choose from (I recommend the coconut!)

Here I am sampling the cookies n’ cream, which was one of the pre made flavors of the day. NOM NOM!

TLC also makes a variety of desserts using soft serve, including:

Special occasion cakes

Soft serve bars

And my favorite item during the tour – the soft serve fudge sundae (can you believe that this is only 300 calories?!?)

All and all, I was incredibly impressed with The Lite Choice – healthy, all natural, and tasty. Now I won’t ever abandon my beloved full fat ice cream (don’t worry Ben and Jerry’s – you guys still have my heart and sales dollars), but The Lite Choice is definitely the next best thing!

[photos: Jen "Q" Chen]

****Giveaway****

Congrats to - Chris, Maren, mverno, 

ktgonyea, anonymous, and Karla!!

The Lite Choice has generously agreed to give coupons for FREE TLC soft serve at their stores to THREE lucky financefoodie.com each week for the next TWO weeks! Store locations

You can enter up to FIVE times:
1. In my comments section, go to the TLC website and tell me what TLC flavor you want to try
2. Follow Finance Foodie on Twitter (leave separate comment telling me this)
3. Follow TLC on Twitter (leave separate comment telling me this)
4. Fan TLC on Facebook (leave separate comment telling me this)
4. Reblog / Retweet this giveaway (leave separate comment telling me this)

Contest ends June 16, 2010 at 5pm EST. Remember, winners will be chosen via random integer generator on random.org and announced on the financefoodie.com site each week!