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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 in the South Bronx when he was a small boy, and he has continued to follow the ice-cream business. Competition from big manufacturers forced him up the quality ladder. He raised his butterfat content to 12%, from the customary U.S.-regulated minimum of 10% for vanilla, and was successful for a while. The opposition caught on and, he says, began to undercut him with illegal discounts and credit deals. So he decided to go where the chains could not follow, to 16% butterfat and, never mind the cost, the very best ingredients. The new ice cream had no stabilizers to minimize the effects of melting during handling, no preservatives, no powdered milk, no corn syrup.
His 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 the star. Unwary buyers of this costly marvel (which sells now for $1.65 a pint and up) could have been forgiven for assuming that they were getting Prince Hamlet's own recipe from the court at Elsinore.
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.