Though some users had experimented with the Fruit Roll-Ups and ice cream combination back in 2021, the sweet frozen snack didn’t truly swell to virality until early March, a few days after TikTok user Golnar Ghavami, also known as @golisdream, posted a tutorial of the recipe. Her video, which has since received nearly 14 million views and 1.6 million likes, spawned hundreds of others featuring users trying the Fruit-Roll-Ups-wrapped ice cream for themselves, fueled both by curiosity and nostalgia for the fruity snack they had eaten as kids.
This rush of videos gave rise to hashtags such as #FruitRollUpIceCream and #FruitRollUpChallenge, which each quickly amassed millions of views.
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Fruit Roll-Ups officially joined TikTok on March 13—when the trend was hitting peak levels on the platform—with a video that cheekily acknowledged the brand’s involvement in the viral recipe. And, just a day later, the brand played on the same idea by stitching a video from user @strawberrymilkmob’s video, who asked, “Does Fruit Roll-Up[s] even know what’s been going on?”
One of the brand’s team members at social media agency The Social Lights responded to the user’s question by filming herself exasperatedly swiping through back-to-back message notifications, presumably from others asking the same thing.
