Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/talenti-investigation/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199190 Points: 27 # Comments: 18

Annemarie Conte will stab you with a spoon if you try to bogart her Sea Salt Caramel. I used to be a Talenti evangelist. I would not shut up about the creamy gelato that came in a fancy plastic tub when it hit my local grocery store in the early 2010s. “You couldn’t believe we’d never heard of it,” my friend Katie said of the time in 2012 when I triumphantly showed up at her house bearing a plastic pint of Mediterranean Mint. In my early 30s, buying Talenti was a mark of adulthood. Spending $5 on a pint of super-fancy gelato instead of a standard half-gallon of ice cream felt outrageous but worth it. The flavors were special. Talenti said it used high-quality ingredients. The texture was soft and dense, closer to that of soft serve than traditional American hard-pack ice cream. And it came in reusable plastic jars that I collected to store snacks and bring lunch to work. In a grocery aisle filled with boring Breyers, impossible-to-spell Häagen-Dazs, and the hippie darling Ben & Jerry’s, Talenti seemed new, different, grown-up. “I felt like that the jar really screamed luxury or higher-end, and it was visually appealing. And then, of course, if you don’t deliver once they eat it, it’s over.” — Talenti founder Josh Hochschuler The Wall Street Journal elevated the idea that Talenti fans could eat it right out of the container, with the packaging and contents justifying the price tag. “Talenti’s clear plastic pint package with a screw-on lid is more upscale than the traditional cardboard pint. And with flavors like Sea Salt Caramel, Blood Orange and Sicilian Pistachio, gelato commands a price roughly 25% to 50% higher than premium ice creams,” the WSJ wrote in November 2013. A brand strategist told Bloomberg in June 2013 that the unique plastic jar that Talenti gelato came in “has a totally different, more confident posture that grabs your attention by saying less.”