If you thought that the cottage cheese trend was starting to wane, think again. The high-protein dairy product that went viral in 2023 is still highly relevant, with US sales of cottage cheese up 18% in the year ended February 2025. Social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram are full of creative ways to incorporate cottage cheese into your life and now one of them, cottage cheese ice cream, has been turned into a packaged product.
Sold under the brand Smearcase, which is what cottage cheese used to be called in the US in the 19th century, the product is referred to as FroCo and is the first cottage cheese-based ice cream on the US market. The product name is a play on words with the established American term froyo, which stands for frozen yogurt, with “froco” standing for “frozen cottage cheese”.
Smearcase was founded in 2023 when founder Joe Rotondo was training for a marathon and failed to find an ice cream that was truly high in protein yet wasn’t full of sweeteners and additives. Together with his sister Gianna and his friend Drew DiSpirito, Rotondo started to experiment with using cottage cheese as the basis of ice cream and after three failed attempts Smearcase was born.
Made from a base of cottage cheese, milk, cane sugar, milk protein and pectin, Smearcase delivers around 40 grams of protein per pint (473ml) which is 30-100% more than other high-protein ice creams on the market. Realising that taste and texture are the two most important factors – especially in ice cream – the company stays away from sweeteners and uses collagen in place of gums and emulsifiers to achieve a creamy texture where many other better-for-you brands are icy.
The ’staying away from sweeteners’ approach does however mean that Smearcase’s FroCo contains a fair amount of sugar – around 50g per pint, in fact – which may put some consumers off. However, this doesn’t stop the brand from leaning into a permission to indulge’ positioning with marketing messages like “You can finally have ice cream for breakfast”, “nutrition with no BS” and “7 times the protein, half the fat”.
With the frozen nature of the product providing too big a logistical challenge for DTC, Smearcase has targeted retailers from the beginning. Being a category-first means that it will have to work very hard for this, but it had a significant breakthrough in securing listings in Whole Foods stores across New York in April, and a partnership with DoorDash (the largest food delivery platform in the United States) in New York earlier this month.
