What Exactly Is Cool Whip?

In Mad Men’s “Lady Lazarus” (season 5, episode 8), Don Draper and his team tackle a campaign for a new product from General Foods: Cool Whip.

“I read a 30-page dossier that fails to use the words fake whipped cream,” Stan quips.

“Because,” Don says, “it’s a nondairy whipped topping that comes frozen and then melts into this miracle.”

Cue a play-acted commercial in which a husband (Don) grills his wife (Megan) about the substance she’s trying to serve him—“What is it?” “Is it a topping?” “So it’s a dessert?” “Is it sweet?”—and she counters with a tagline: “Just taste it.”

Cool Whip has become such a familiar fixture in the freezer aisle that Don’s character wouldn’t work as a stand-in for the average consumer today. You know what Cool Whip is. But do you know what it really is?

Yum’s the Word
Cool Whip Ingredients: Dairy or Not?

Yum’s the Word

Cool Whip was the brainchild of William A. Mitchell, the General Foods chemist also behind Pop Rocks, Tang, and a version of quick-set Jell-O. It debuted in 1966 under General Foods’ Birds Eye subsidiary. Early marketing was just as evasive as Mad Men’s fictional commercial, albeit less direct about what it was evading.

“Yum. That good-old-fashioned taste … and it comes all whipped!” proclaimed a full-page newspaper ad with text set against a backdrop of fluffy white peaks. “New Cool Whip—the first modern topping with that good-old-fashioned taste!” it reiterated. “Birds Eye freezes the flavor in, right in its own little bowl. Keeps weeks in the refrigerator, ready to serve. You do nothing but dip it out.” The TV commercial augmented the copy with a jingle stressing that “Cool Whip—yum, yum, yum, yum, yum—comes whipped!”

The campaign evokes Kieran Scarlett’s classic 2018 tweet poking fun at Little Caesars’ “Hot-N-Ready” branding:

Little Caesars: It’s hot and it’s ready.
Me: Is it good?
Little Caesars: It’s HOT. And it’s READY.

But unlike the Little Caesars in Scarlett’s exchange, Cool Whip advertisers weren’t pushing convenience to mask a lack of quality. They clearly knew the product was delicious, as evidenced by all the yums. Instead, the emphasis on flavor and convenience distracted from potential confusion about its identity.

In other words:

Cool Whip: It’s whipped and it’s yummy.
You: Is it whipped cream?
Cool Whip: It’s WHIPPED. And it’s YUMMY.

The onus was on consumers to intuit that the “good-old-fashioned taste” referred to whipped cream; ads didn’t even so much as call Cool Whip “creamy.” Because Cool Whip didn’t involve cream—this, as the packaging said, was a “non-dairy whipped topping.”

But Cool Whip was never quite as nondairy as it claimed to be.

Cool Whip Ingredients: Dairy or Not?

Ingredients listed on old containers of Cool Whip include “water, hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oils, corn syrup, sugar, sodium caseinate (a protein), dextrose (corn sugar), natural and artificial flavors, polysorbate 60 and sorbitan monostearate (for uniform dispersion of oil), xanthan gum and guar gum (thickeners), and artificial color.”

Broadly speaking, that’s a combination of fats, sugars, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and flavor agents—along with a little dairy hidden in the mix. Sodium caseinate is a liquid-soluble compound derived from casein, the primary protein in milk. The FDA allows manufacturers to label products “nondairy” even if they contain caseinate; these days, though, the label must mention that it came from milk.

“For example, if the manufacturer uses the term ‘nondairy’ on a creamer that contains sodium caseinate, it shall include a parenthetical term such as ‘a milk derivative’ after the listing of sodium caseinate in the ingredients list,” the FDA explains in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Though pure casein isn’t typically an issue for people with a lactose intolerance, people with a casein allergy should obviously avoid it. It can also be a problem for people who keep kosher if items that contain casein aren’t prepared correctly or labeled as dairy.

All of this was much more relevant in the context of the original Cool Whip—because today’s version features dairy beyond mere casein. In 2010, Kraft Foods (which had subsumed General Foods a couple of decades prior) announced that it was adding actual milk products to its formula.

It wasn’t the first time manufacturers had experimented with more dairy in Cool Whip; they rolled out an “Extra Creamy Dairy Recipe” in the early 1980s. This time, though, it wasn’t a side project: Original Cool Whip dropped the “non-dairy” from its label and became a regular old “whipped topping.”

Its current ingredients, according to Kraft’s website, include “water, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil (coconut and palm kernel oils), [and] skim milk,” plus less than 2 percent of “light cream, sodium caseinate (from milk), natural and artificial flavor, xanthan and guar gums, modified food starch, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monostearate, sodium polyphosphate, [and] beta carotene (color).”

According to the FDA, light cream contains at least 18 percent but less than 30 percent milkfat, while light whipping cream has anywhere from 30 percent to less than 36. In order for a product to be labeled “whipped cream,” it must contain either light or heavy whipping cream—so, no, Cool Whip still isn’t whipped cream.

Learn More About Food: