GelatoSpots

Research edition

Denmark

Copenhagen

Danish softice is a national institution that no global list has ever ranked. Should they?

Copenhagen carries two ice-cream lines that rarely meet. One is the vernacular of softice, guf and flødebolle sold from waffle houses and kiosks since the 1950s, a genuinely national form no global index has ever ranked. The other is newer: food-science-trained makers building on Denmark's dairy strength with university-level method, among them Cathrine Østerberg, who took her ice cream thesis to study under a leading ice-cream researcher in Canada before opening Østerberg Cph, and Jeppe Villadsen's Isoteket, which makes organic gelato from scratch across six shops in the city. Istid pushes the same appetite for technique into liquid nitrogen, in a country with no native gelato tradition to draw on. The open question, and the reason this record exists, is whether the softice line belongs in a global comparison at all, given that the word itself is a 1955 Danish coinage built to sound English, the way hotdog was, tied more to a topping culture than to any production method a global index could compare.

Last checked 2026-08-21

The selected spots

3 selected

  1. 01
    A portrait of the maker in a white T-shirt, laughing, against a pale wallFrom Østerberg Ice Cream

    Østerberg Cph

    ice cream · Cathrine Østerberg, founder, with a background in food science (Fødevarevidenskab) from the University of Copenhagen and further study of ice-cream structure under a researcher in Canada

    A food scientist's answer to what Danish ice cream could be: not an import of Italian gelato and not commodity flødeis, but a recipe built from a university thesis on ice structure, with nearly every component — nuts, fruit reductions, baked inclusions — made in-house. The founder is on record rejecting a rival's ice cream for being over-stabilised, a specific, checkable standard rather than a marketing claim.

  2. 02
    People queueing on the pavement outside the shop under striped awningsFrom Isoteket

    Isoteket

    gelato · Jeppe Villadsen, owner and founder

    A from-scratch organic gelato maker that has grown from one shop to six across the city since 2017 without changing its stated production standard — no preservatives, concentrates or added colour. The strongest open question is whether its two headline endorsements (the Guardian and Politiken) can be verified at source rather than through the business's own retelling.

  3. 03
    Two branded cups of soft serve, one dipped in chocolate, one with caramel and nutsFrom Istid

    Istid

    ice cream · Nina and Anniken, co-founders (surnames not given in sources opened)

    The clearest case of imported technique meeting Copenhagen's appetite for a scientific approach to food: two founders who had never made ice cream before 2015 built a liquid-nitrogen shop from a Kickstarter and consultation with university chemists, rather than a recipe brought over from Italy or Denmark's own dairy tradition.

Research notes

City boundary

Copenhagen Municipality together with Frederiksberg, which it encloses.