Cedar Crest Ice Cream, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and Wisconsin 4-H are excited to announce the winner and finalists of the 2026 Cedar Crest Ice Cream Flavor Creation Contest.
The finalists will receive a Cedar Crest Ice Cream party, and the Grand Prize winner will have an ice cream party and will be awarded $500. They are:
Grand Prize Winner
Pesobic Pathfinders 4-H Club, Lincoln County (Merrill, WI)
Flavor: Hold Your Horses
Leader: Ann Jaroski
Finalists
Sunrisers 4-H Club, Green Lake County (Berlin, WI)
Flavor: Jump Around
Leader: Tammy Goettl
Roy Creek Ramblers 4-H Club, Green Lake County (Markesan, WI)
Flavor: Woofin’ Good
Leaders: Kim Drews & Emily Strahota
Catfish River 4-H Club, Dane County (East Madison, WI)
Flavor: Piña Cowlada
Leader: Shaili Pfeiffer
Jolly H’s 4-H Club, Burnett County (Grantsburg, WI)
Flavor: Wisconsin Northwoods
Leader: Amanda Weigman
The Pesobic Pathfinders’ winning flavor, Hold Your Horses,features espresso-flavored ice cream with chocolate covered toffee pieces and caramel ribbon. Hold Your Horses will be produced by Cedar Crest for the 2026 summer season as a Feature Flavor for the month of July. The flavor will be available in ice cream parlors and scoops shops across the state of Wisconsin and beyond.
Some past winning flavors were so popular among ice cream lovers that they became a part of Cedar Crest’s scoop shop flavor line up! This includes Pesobic Pathfinders’ (Merrill, WI) 2024 winning flavor: Paul Bunyan, Springbrook’s (New Richmond, WI) Wisconsin Campfire S’mores from 2019, The Sunnyside Climber’s (Plover, WI) Demo Derby from 2025.
Says Cedar Crest Ice Cream President, Ken Kohlwey, “We are proud to support the Wisconsin 4-H organization through our annual flavor contest. The project requires collaboration, teamwork, and creativity to create the next best ice cream flavor. Every year we look forward to reading the entries that come in and sharing the winning flavor with our customers.”
Entries were judged by a panel of ice cream experts chosen by Cedar Crest. The family-owned company based in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, manufactures more than 80 flavors of ice cream, along with frozen custard, sherbet, and sorbet at its Manitowoc, Wisconsin, plant. Cedar Crest distributes products in several Midwest states and beyond.
