No. It’s worse. Those specks are vanilla seeds. It is easy to imagine that vanilla ice cream with black specks in it has more flavor or that the seeds make the vanilla more ‘real’ or ‘natural’, but vanilla seeds contribute no flavor at all to vanilla ice cream. Putting vanilla seeds in ice cream is just a marketing gimmick. Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice. Saffron is the most expensive. Even the cheapest, lowest quality vanilla bean pods sell for over $100 a pound. In making vanilla extract, all of the flavor is extracted from the pods, including the seeds. Exhausted vanilla seeds have no flavor in them and are just kitchen trash. Top quality vanilla ice cream does not have black specks in it. It is only the lower quality brands of vanilla ice cream that resort to this marketing trick. So, who makes the best vanilla ice cream? In my opinion, among nationally sold brands, it’s Ben & Jerry’s.