I didn’t know much about Halo Top ice cream until this year, when Eric Webb impressed me with a ranking of every flavor of what I only knew to be a low calorie ice cream.

Halo Top is the bestselling pint of ice cream in the country. Téo is a popular Austin brand sold at H-E-B stores throughout Texas. How do they compare? Addie Broyles / American-Statesman
This high-protein dessert isn’t just a diet product. It’s a national phenomenon, now the bestselling pint of ice cream in the country, besting Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen Dazs.
Pretty impressive for a company that only started in 2012.
I picked up a pint of Halo Top’s sea salt caramel ice cream, which was just a few doors down from another product I’d been wanting to try: Téo Gelato’s pumpkin pie flavor.
Téo is the Central Austin gelato shop that entered the grocery market a few years ago in partnership with H-E-B. (They won the grocer’s 2015 Quest for Texas Best competition.)
Téo’s pints have also been flying off shelves, and even though these two products don’t claim to compete, this ice cream lover wanted to know if the stevia-sweetened Halo Top was even in the same universe as Téo, which is made with cane sugar and locally sourced milk and isn’t marketed as healthy enough to be consumed in one sitting.
I tasted both in my Facebook livestream this week. As you can see — around the 6 minute mark — I was quite surprised when I tasted them side by side.
I’d love to hear what you think about Halo Top and Téo, if you’ve tried them. From what I’ve heard on social media so far, the Halo Top is one of the more divisive foods in the market today.
