The wideset candy googly eyes on my strawberry-mango ice cream cone at Many Bennies give it a deer-in-the-headlights look, as if it has no idea what it’s getting itself into. (Probably for the better.) The Fremont ice cream window’s Instagram feed emitted similar vibes after Many Bennies soft opened earlier this year, begging customers not to wait hours in line for its New Zealand–style ice cream.

Lots of factors played into the snaking lines: limited hours as staff trained up on the custom process for each serving, the convenient location, and the internet-sensation googly eyes that give every cone its own personality. Hand-in-sticky-hand with those reasons specific to Many Bennies is the recent rapid rise of New Zealand–style ice cream around Seattle—a trend that has moved at impressive speed given that most people still have no idea what New Zealand–style ice cream is.

Sometimes called “real fruit ice cream,” it has the swirly flourish of soft serve. But it is, in fact, standard hard-packed ice cream (usually sweet cream or a neutral vegan alternative) and small chunks of frozen fruit blended together in the inverted cone hopper of a purpose-built contraption. An oversize auger mashes them together, forcing the creamy results through the narrow opening at the bottom and into a spiralized twist, naturally vivid from the color of the strawberries, mango, blackberries, or other fruit.

“It tastes like summer,” says Jenny Hudak Klimenkoff, owner of the area’s next most recent arrival. Her Ice Cream Social opened on Bainbridge Island last year. She, like Many Bennies cofounder Ben Mawhinney (also of Wonderland Gear Exchange), learned of the style from Welly’s in Port Angeles.

Welly’s founder Lillie Phillips first tasted the treat when she spent a year in New Zealand. Among her many odd jobs throughout the year, she worked at an organic food store that served real fruit ice cream. After that, she noticed when she saw it at berry farms and in small towns. Five years later, after a year of remote work and in search of something new, it came to mind. “Ice cream is such a fun and happy thing,” she says, and the concept seemed ideal for the Pacific Northwest, which, like New Zealand, had plenty of berries and local farms from which to source them.

“It’s a simple thing, you just put in ice cream and berries,” she says. “But people love watching it being made.” Phillips blends her ice cream on a machine called a Little Jem, which she worked with brothers Dennis and Chris Little to individually import from New Zealand. When Meaghan Haas opened New Zealand–style Tip Top Ice Cream inside her West Seattle store, she followed suit.

Haas grew up in Seattle before attending university on the North Island, where the ice cream is rare. Only on subsequent visits, often with meandering road trips through the rural South Island, did she encounter the unique treat at roadside farm stands.

In 2021, Haas opened Highland Park Corner Store, installing a soft-serve ice cream machine. It died after a single season, with a prohibitive price tag to repair. Considering other ways to offer ice cream, she thought back to the South Island specialty. “You really get the fruit flavor first. It’s really fresh tasting and refreshing,” she says. With guidance from Phillips, she imported her own Little Jem, opening Tip Top in 2023.

Haas buys frozen fruit from local farms whenever possible, though certain fruits come in too large of chunks for the machine, disrupting the creaminess of the blended treat. Those—like strawberries—they prepare in-house. The fall Italian plum option comes from even closer to home: They pick from neighborhood trees, chop them up, and freeze right in the shop.

Her additional toppings—matcha dust, notably—brought a bit of heat on social media because they showed that Tip Top doesn’t stay true to New Zealand–style ice cream. “Which I think is totally obvious because we’re in Seattle,” says Haas. “What I wanted to do is also highlight local flavors.” Tip Top offers, among others, a mango habanero spice mix by Papa Tony’s Hot Sauce, a West Seattle–made hokey pokey (the candy also known as seafoam or honeycomb), and an excellent housemade salted caramel sauce.

It’s hardly an unreasonable take considering New Zealand itself can’t even decide if the ice cream is genuinely local. In January, New Zealand Herald writer Madeleine Crutchley dug into the treat’s roots to see if it was really something the country could take credit for—and traced it back to an American import in the mid-1990s. The Littles, she notes, engineered their model after being let down by an Australian ice cream blender. Dennis Little believes that New Zealand got credit for the treat because of how it flourished at those same roadside berry farm stands where Haas and Phillips encountered it.

Mawhinney’s Many Bennies partner Sean Bender, the cofounder of Leavenworth soaking spa The Springs, first tasted the treat at Squamish, BC’s Alice & Brohm. Seeing how Alice & Brohm functioned as a hub of the climbing community in Squamish and Welly’s as the same for Port Angeles, the pair had a vision for the service window at the Bouldering Project location in Fremont, Bender says. “Everyone loves ice cream.”

They imported their Little Jem through SeaTac’s cargo terminal, lugging it north in Bender’s van. They sourced fruit from a farm in Burlington, WA. Then they started practicing. Each serving of New Zealand–style ice cream is made individually, mixing the neutral scoop with the frozen fruit to order. Getting the right proportions took endless repetition, and even when they thought they were ready, the fast-building lines that greeted them each day proved them wrong. It turned out, everyone wanted New Zealand–style ice cream, and they really wanted swirly cones that come with candy googly eyes on them.

In searching for their unique twist on the treat, the Bennies had toyed with the idea of free sprinkles, then, in keeping with the (at least seemingly) more healthful nature of the ice cream, considered edible flowers. Eventually, Mawhinney remembered a shop near where he grew up in Maine that put candy eyes on treats. The eyes gave the cones a bit of personality, and as they landed on the name, the ice cream itself became another of the Bennies, taking on a life of its own through its expressive eyes.

Sometimes that personality was a little too weird—Bender ordered 20 kinds of candy eyes before landing on the right size and style. Too small and it was scary; too big was even worse. Then they found their Goldilocks. Just adorable enough to go viral on Instagram; still plenty kooky, as attested to by my stunned strawberry swirl, with one eye on each side of its pointy peak.

Though one of the major draws of real fruit ice cream is the freshness of the fruit flavor and its (plausible) healthfulness, another aspect of the appeal is that it makes those sorts of adult concerns feel as far away as New Zealand itself. “You’re holding an ice cream cone that has the chocolate drizzle running down it. It’s on your hands, it’s messy, and there are these eyeballs that make it look like a little monster,” Bender says. “It doesn’t matter where you came from, who you are, who you’re with. You are a kid again.”