Late-night snackers, your dreams may have just come true.

Eating ice cream before you go to bed is no longer as bad as you think, says Nightfood, which has developed what it says is sleep-friendly ice cream. The frozen sweet treat hit store shelves three weeks ago. The suggested retail price is $4.99 per pint.

Launched in 2010, Nightfood initially sold nutrition bars for midnight noshers but then realized people didn't want to eat nutrition bars at night and switched to cracking the ice cream puzzle, according to founder and CEO Sean Folkson.

Here's what you need to know before you get your spoon:

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Will the ice cream put me to sleep?

No. Count sheep for that. Nightfood ice cream doesn't knock you out and contains no sleep aid; there's no Melatonin Mint flavor. Instead, it claims to help you sleep by not causing the digestive disruption. Traditional ice cream's sugar, fat and calories can cause what sleep experts call micro-awakenings, which fragment sleep, Folkson said.

"The insidious part is most people won't even realize it," he said. "It's not conscious tossing and turning. It's just their sleep quality is poor, and they're not making the connection... (Nightfood) lowers the glycemic index, so there's no insulin roller coaster."

Nightfood, which consulted with sleep experts, uses low-caffeine cocoa powder and adds fiber along with sleep-friendly ingredients, like magnesium and calcium.

But Dr. Andrew Varga, a sleep expert at New York City's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is hesitant.

"Eating food, period, sends a signal to the body that it's time to be awake," he said. "People who are pre-bedtime ice cream eaters are probably going to do it, and it's probably hard to change their behaviors, so it's marketed toward people to feel better about that. How much better it is than standard ice cream, it’s hard to assess."

Folkson quoted research that says people's nutritional choices get less healthy as the day progresses, plus there are emotional and psychological components. And at night, we crave fat, sweet and salty.

"We’re biologically hardwired to stock up on energy when we get tired, like a bear," he said. "It’s the perfect storm of people reaching for the most unhealthy stuff of the day."

That "stuff," by the way, is big business all day long. Total ice cream sales in the U.S. for the 52 weeks ending Jan. 26 were more than $6.77 billion, up from $6.31 billion three years earlier, according to the consumer data company Nielsen.

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Is tryptophan one of the flavors?

No. The eight nocturnally-named offerings are Full Moon Vanilla, Midnight Chocolate, After Dinner Mint Chip, Cold Brew Decaf, Cookies 'n Dreams, Milk & Cookie Dough, Cherry Eclipse and Bed and Breakfast. That last one is maple ice cream with waffle chunks.

To Folkson, these flavors are a way to solve an existing problem, not create a new one: "We don’t need one more person in the U.S. to start eating ice cream because of us. For the millions of people who are eating it, this is a better choice," he said.

Nightfood is based in Tarrytown, N.Y. Is that a joke?

It's as true as pistachio is green. Tarrytown is the hometown of Washington Irving who wrote the most famous piece of sleep-related literature, Rip Van Winkle, but the location of the company headquarters was simply by chance. Folkson happened to be living in the Westchester County village when he founded the company.

Follow USA TODAY reporter Zlati Meyer on Twitter: @ZlatiMeyer