Word: creams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anyone who doubts that superpremium buyers are getting more than ice cream should consider the Häagen-Dazs success. Salty old Tom Carvel, head of the 47-year-old, 800-store Carvel chain, is derisive: "All they did was reduce the air pump and quadruple the price, and the fools buy it." He says the nation's only real superpremium is his own, which is made fresh daily in his stores. Almost everyone else is impressed, and with reason. Reuben Mattus, who is 68 and white-whiskered now, helped his widowed mother Leah sell her lemon ices...
...masterstroke, however, was to come up with a made-up jumble of supposedly Danish syllables that proved to be astonishingly catchy. Häagen-Dazs, as he called his new ice cream in 1960, is meaningless in Danish, and, as Mattus observes somewhat impishly, the Danish language does not even use the umlaut, but he "thought it gave more pizazz." In fact, Mattus had no connection with Denmark; his own family had emigrated from Poland. But on the tops of his ice-cream cartons he printed a map of Scandinavia, with a star marking Copenhagen and an arrow swooping toward...
Last year Häagen-Dazs sold 40 million pt.-its largest retail size-made in a new, computerized plant in Woodbridge, N.J., and this year's sales are running about 50% better. The firm has franchised 89 "scoop shops"-as hand-dip ice-cream parlors are called in the trade-and expects to open 19 more across the country by the end of the summer...
This comic opera of marketing has a sequel. In early 1980 two more superpremium ice creams with throat-curdling foreign names hit the eastern market. Frusen Glädjé actually means "frozen delight" in Swedish (with an un-Swedish accent over the final e added for class), and the American owners made the unusual move of incorporating their company in Sweden. Their nectar is manufactured in Utica. Mattus took the non-Swedes to court for what amounted to infringement of balderdash, and his case was thrown out. The other newcomer is Alpen Zauber (German for "alpine magic"), a Brooklyn...
...does Häagen-Dazs compete in a threatening way with Breyers, who claims that its Philadelphia plant produces more fine ice cream, with no preservatives, no artificial flavors and no stabilizers, than any other creamery in the country. Breyers is the top-of-the-line ice cream made by Dart & Kraft. Robert Zogby, a vice president of the company, boasted recently that "last week in New York City alone we sold more Breyers than Häagen-Dazs sold across the country in a year...