A butter tart you can eat with a spoon has just been crowned the planet's finest frozen dessert. Chapman's, the Ontario-based Canadian ice cream maker, took home the Best Ice Cream award at the International Ice Cream Conference 2026 for its Pecan Butter Tart Premium Ice Cream.
The flavour is a straight-up homage to the butter tart, the gooey, syrupy pastry that's arguably Canada's signature dessert. Chapman's version pairs a butter tart-flavoured ice cream base with subtle maple notes, folds in praline pecans, and adds chunks of buttery sugar cookie for texture. The company celebrated the win on Instagram, saying a true Canadian favourite had won over taste buds around the globe.
This is becoming a habit for Chapman's. The brand was named Ice Cream Maker of the Year at the same conference in 2025, and the year before it picked up the Most Innovative Ice Cream Flavour award for a sweetgrass ice cream developed with chef Zach Keeshig. Three major international nods in three years is a serious run for a brand that many Canadians know as the affordable tub in the grocery freezer aisle rather than a competition heavyweight.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to build a butter tart crawl into a Canadian trip. The butter tart is a genuinely regional thing — Ontario especially claims it, with towns like Midland and Peterborough hosting butter tart festivals and bakeries fiercely debating the raisin question (in or out). Now you can get the whole experience in ice cream form at supermarkets across the country for a few dollars a tub, which is about the cheapest iconic food souvenir you'll find anywhere.
If you're visiting in summer, keep an eye out for Chapman's seasonal parlours and farm locations around Owen Sound in Grey County, Ontario, where the company has been based since it started in 1973. Pairing a scoop with a drive through the Bruce Peninsula or a stop at Georgian Bay makes for a very Ontario day out. And if you want the pastry original too, bakeries across the province sell them by the dozen — most will happily box some for the road.
Why it matters: food awards like this shape where curious eaters point their itineraries. Canada's dessert scene doesn't get the international attention its savoury food does, so a world's-best title for something this distinctly Canadian is a small but real reason to put a food stop on your next trip north.
Story via Curiocity.
