It’s still summer, still ice-cream season in most of Canada, and you’d better get your licks in because as a country, we seem to be running low.

A chilling decline: Statistics Canada subtly drew attention to the situation in July, when it tweeted that in 2021, there were 4.87 litres of ice cream available for every person in Canada. That’s much less than we used to have. StatCan publishes this data from as far back as 1960, when there were 10.47 litres of the cold treat per person.

Ice cream availability peaked 10 years later, at 12.79 litres per person, and stayed fairly steady until the late 1980s, when it dipped below 12 litres for good. In 2000, the figure fell below 10 litres, and in 2012 it hit a mere five litres.

How could this happen? Maybe newfangled food. “The ice cream/frozen dessert category as a whole has seen significant product innovation in the last 30 years,” explained Amélie Baillargeon of the Dairy Processors Association of Canada, in an email. “If the Statistics Canada data set is only capturing a specific type of ice cream, then this may explain why their data is showing that ice cream availability in Canada has trended downwards over the last 30 years.”

Innovation in ice cream: Canada’s food regulations set out precise standards for ice cream. It has to be at least 36 per cent solids and 10 per cent milk fat (or eight per cent if the product contains “cocoa or chocolate syrup, fruit, nuts or confections”), among other things.

There are similar standards for sherbet and ice milk. If a product doesn’t meet any of these, the maker has to label it something else, like “frozen dessert.”

Has frozen dessert taken over? The Logic asked Statistics Canada whether it has figures for anything that would be indicative of frozen-dessert production but even given a week, the agency couldn’t say.

It does track sherbet and ice milk. We had 0.12 litres of sherbet per person in 1962, and exactly the same amount in 2019. In the last two years, availability has fallen below the reporting threshold.

Ice milk supply has increased from 0.2 litres per person in 1962 to a record 1.72 litres per person in 2021. That doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in ice cream, but it is something.

The morals of this story: One, our national data-gathering does not always keep up with changes in the world.

And two, if you like ice cream—actual ice cream—get some while you can.