DQ's New Caramel Apple Cheesecake Blizzard Leaves Customers Asking the Spoon-or-Fork Question

MILWAUKEE, WIS. — Dairy Queen unveiled its Caramel Apple Cheesecake Blizzard Tuesday — cheesecake pieces and a caramel apple topping blended with the chain’s soft serve, serving as August’s “Blizzard of the Month” and the kickoff of a fall treat menu due August 31 — and within hours the chain’s most urgent question was no longer “is it good?” but “what do I eat this with?”

The product, by the company’s own description, is a Blizzard. It is also, technically, a cheesecake. The chain calls the category a “dessert hybrid.” A DQ spokesperson, asked whether customers should use a spoon or a fork, said, “It’s a Blizzard first. It’s a cheesecake second. We call it a dessert hybrid — like a kayak-canoe, except you can eat it. The spoon is the default, but we respect the fork.”

The first customers have already formed teams.

“I ordered it and it came out looking like a dessert that had been asked to be two things at once,” said one patron outside a DQ in Milwaukee, spoon in hand, with visible determination. “I ate the first bite with the spoon. I ate the second bite with the fork. I ate the third bite with my hand. I have no regrets and some regret.”

“My friend said it’s a crime against the spoon,” said a high schooler waiting in line. “I said the spoon is fine. The spoon is always fine.”

The move follows a few years in which the fast-food industry discovered that the most powerful marketing tool is not a jingle or a mascot — it is the product itself, reshaped. Burger King released a burger shaped like its “B.” Wendy’s launched a square nugget to complement its square burgers. Dairy Queen’s answer is a dessert that is two desserts, which is, industry observers note, the only logical endpoint.

A gastroenterologist, asked for a clinical assessment, said, “The caramel apple topping is the star of the show. The cheesecake pieces are the supporting actors. The soft serve is the stage. It’s an ecosystem.” A food critic who has reviewed four hundred desserts said, “I have never once had to consult a fork mid-spoon. I am changing my mind, slowly, in public.”

The fall treat menu, the rest of it, arrives August 31, and the company has promised “more seasonal treats,” a phrase that the flavor lab, in an internal memo obtained by a very patient teenager, translated as “we are working on a Blizzard made of Blizzards.” The lab described the concept as “a Blizzard that blizzards,” and the memo’s final line, circled twice, read: “the spoon is fine.”

At press time, DQ was reportedly fielding questions from at least three fork manufacturers about a possible licensing deal, and the company’s answer, through the same spokesperson, was a single word: “Respect.”