Häagen-Dazs ( , ) is an American

ice cream Ice cream is a sweetened frozen food typically eaten as a snack or dessert. It may be made from milk or cream and is flavoured with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and a spice, such as cocoa or vanilla, or with fruit such as ...

brand, established by

Reuben and Rose Mattus Reuben and Rose Mattus were Polish-Jewish entrepreneurs who founded the Häagen-Dazs ice cream business in the United States. Biography Reuben Mattus Reuben Mattus (December 25, 1912 – January 27, 1994) was born in Poland of Jewish parents. He ...

The Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New ...

, New York, in 1960. Starting with only three flavors:

vanilla Vanilla is a spice derived from orchids of the genus '' Vanilla'', primarily obtained from pods of the Mexican species, flat-leaved vanilla ('' V. planifolia''). Pollination is required to make the plants produce the fruit from whic ...

chocolate Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods. Cacao has been consumed in some form since at least the Olmec ci ...

, and

coffee Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world. Seeds of ...

, the company opened its first

retail store Retail is the sale of goods and services to consumers, in contrast to wholesaling, which is sale to business or institutional customers. A retailer purchases goods in large quantities from manufacturers, directly or through a wholesaler, and t ...

Brooklyn, New York Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, on November 15, 1976. The company operates worldwide and also produces ice cream bars, ice cream cakes,

sorbet Sorbet (), also called "water ice", is a frozen dessert made using ice combined with fruit juice, fruit purée, wine, liqueur, honey, etc. Generally sorbets do not contain dairy ingredients, while sherbets do. Etymology The word "sorbet" en ...

frozen yogurt Frozen yogurt (also known as frogurt or by the tradename Froyo; ) is a frozen dessert made with yogurt and sometimes other dairy and non-dairy products. Frozen yogurt is a frozen product containing the same basic ingredients as ice cream, but c ...

, and

gelato Gelato (; ) is the common word in Italian for all kinds of ice cream. In English, it specifically refers to a frozen dessert of Italian origin. Artisanal gelato in Italy generally contains 6%–9% butterfat, which is lower than other styl ...

History

Häagen-Dazs's founder

Reuben Mattus Reuben and Rose Mattus were Polish-Jewish entrepreneurs who founded the Häagen-Dazs ice cream business in the United States. Biography Reuben Mattus Reuben Mattus (December 25, 1912 – January 27, 1994) was born in Poland of Jewish parents. He ...

was born in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

in 1912 to

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

ish parents. His father died during the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, and his widowed mother migrated to New York City with her two children in 1921. They joined an uncle who was in the Italian lemon-ice business in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

. By the late 1920s, the family began making ice pops, and by 1929, chocolate-covered ice cream bars and sandwiches under the name Senator Frozen Products on Southern Boulevard in the South

Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...

, delivering them with a horse-drawn wagon to neighborhood stores in the Bronx. The Senator Frozen Products company was profitable, but by the 1950s the large mass-producers of ice cream started a

price war A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, the price of production has a different name. If the product is a "good" in the ...

leading to his decision to make a heavy kind of high-end ice cream. In 1959, he decided to form a new ice cream company with what he thought to be a Danish-sounding name, Häagen-Dazs, as a tribute to Denmark's alleged exemplary treatment of

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

during World War II, a move known in the marketing industry as

foreign branding Foreign branding is an advertising and marketing term describing the use of foreign or foreign-sounding brand names for companies, products, and services to imply they are of foreign origin. This can also be used for foreign products if the countr ...

. Rose Mattus would dress up in fancy clothing to distribute free samples, giving the ice cream an air of sophistication and class. The

Pillsbury Company The Pillsbury Company is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company that was one of the world's largest producers of grain and other foodstuffs until it was bought by General Mills in 2001. General Mills brands consist of Annie's, Betty Crocker, Nat ...

bought Häagen-Dazs in 1983. In 1999, Pillsbury and

Nestlé Nestlé S.A. (; ; ) is a Switzerland, Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other me ...

merged their U.S. and Canadian ice cream operations into a joint venture called Ice Cream Partners.

General Mills General Mills, Inc., is an American multinational manufacturer and marketer of branded processed consumer foods sold through retail stores. Founded on the banks of the Mississippi River at Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, the company or ...

, in turn, bought Pillsbury in 2001 and succeeded to its interest in the joint venture. That same year, Nestlé exercised its contractual right to buy out General Mills' interest in Ice Cream Partners, which included the right to a 99-year license for the Häagen-Dazs brand, until 2100. Since then, pursuant to that license, the

Dreyer's Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Inc. ("Dreyer's"), is an American ice cream company, founded in 1928 in Oakland, California, where its present-day headquarters office remains. The company's two signature brands, ''Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream'' and ''Edy ...

subsidiary of Nestlé has produced and marketed Häagen-Dazs products in the United States and Canada. In December 2019, Nestlé sold Dreyer's along with its rights in the Häagen-Dazs brand to Froneri, a joint venture set up by Nestlé and PAI Partners in 2016.

Origin of brand name

Reuben Mattus invented the phrase "Häagen-Dazs" in a quest for a brand name that he claimed was Danish-sounding; however, the company's pronunciation of the name ignores the letters "ä" and "z" and letters like "ä" or digraphs like "zs" do not exist in Danish. According to Mattus, it was a tribute to

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...

's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. Mattus felt that Denmark was also known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the United States. His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the 1996 PBS documentary ''An Ice Cream Show'' that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.

Conflict with Frusen Glädjé

In 1980, Häagen-Dazs unsuccessfully sued Frusen Glädjé, an American ice cream maker founded that year, for using foreign branding strategies. The phrase ''frusen glädje''—without the

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ...

—is Swedish for "frozen delight". In 1985, Frusen Glädjé was sold to

Kraft General Foods The second incarnation of Kraft Foods is an American food manufacturing and processing conglomerate, split from Kraft Foods Inc. in 2012 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. It became part of Kraft Heinz in 2015. A merger with Heinz, arra ...

. A Kraft spokeswoman stated that Kraft sold its Frusen Glädjé license to the

Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy dri ...

corporation in 1993, but a spokesman for Unilever claimed that Frusen Glädjé was not part of the deal. The brand has since been discontinued.

Nörgen Vaaz

A similar brand of premium ice cream named Nörgen Vaaz has been marketed, principally in southeast Australia, since at latest the 1980s. Häagen-Dazs does not appear to have challenged the Nörgen Vaaz brand name, perhaps due to their lack of success against Frusen Glädjé.

Products

Häagen-Dazs ice cream comes in several traditional flavors as well as several esoteric flavors that are specific to the brand, such as Vanilla Swiss Almond and Bananas Foster. It is marketed as a "super-premium" brand: it is quite dense (very little air is mixed in during manufacture), uses no emulsifiers or stabilizers other than egg yolks, and has a high

butterfat Butterfat or milkfat is the fatty portion of milk. Milk and cream are often sold according to the amount of butterfat they contain. Composition Butterfat is mainly composed of triglycerides. Each triglyceride contains three fatty acids. But ...

content. It is sold both in

grocery store A grocery store ( AE), grocery shop ( BE) or simply grocery is a store that primarily retails a general range of food products, which may be fresh or packaged. In everyday U.S. usage, however, "grocery store" is a synonym for supermarket, a ...

s and in dedicated retail outlets serving ice cream cones,

sundae A sundae () is an ice cream dessert of American origin that typically consists of one or more scoops of ice cream topped with sauce or syrup and in some cases other toppings such as: sprinkles, whipped cream, marshmallows, peanuts, maraschi ...

s, and so on. Since 1992, most of the world's Häagen-Dazs products have been manufactured at a plant in

Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines () is a commune in the Pas-de-Calais department in the Hauts-de-France region of France. Geography Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines lies on the south-eastern side of Arras, at the junction of the N39, D34 and D60 roads. Populatio ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

that is now controlled by General Mills. In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

and

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

, Häagen-Dazs is licensed to and produced by Froneri. Häagen-Dazs entered the Japanese market in 1984 by forming a joint venture with

Suntory (commonly referred to as simply Suntory) is a Japanese multinational brewing and distilling company group. Established in 1899, it is one of the oldest companies in the distribution of alcoholic beverages in Japan, and makes Japanese whisky. I ...

and Takanashi Milk, which has produced their products there ever since. To offset increasing ingredient and delivery costs, Häagen-Dazs downsized their pint ice cream cartons () in the US to in January 2009. In March 2009, they announced that they would be downsizing their quart cartons () to .

Notes

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Haagen-Dazs Companies based in Oakland, California Froneri General Mills brands Ice cream brands Ice cream parlors Products introduced in 1960 Restaurants established in 1976 Food and drink companies established in 1960 1960 establishments in New York City