Häagen-Dazs: a Bronx ice cream with an invented Danish name

Reuben Mattus was born in Poland in 1912 and arrived in New York as a child, where his family made ice pops and ice cream bars in the Bronx. In the 1950s the big producers started a price war in supermarket ice cream, and Mattus decided to stop competing on price. With his wife Rose he developed a dense, rich ice cream with little air whipped into it, in three flavours (vanilla, chocolate and coffee), and in 1960 they launched it under a name he had made up: Häagen-Dazs. He wanted it to sound Danish, and later explained the choice as a tribute to Denmark’s protection of its Jewish citizens during the Second World War. The words mean nothing, and Danish uses neither the “ä” nor the “zs”. According to The New York Times, the early cartons carried a map of Denmark.

The ice cream sold at a premium in a market used to cheap tubs. Pints were shipped across the United States in the early 1970s, the first Häagen-Dazs shop opened in Brooklyn in 1976, and Pillsbury bought the company in 1983, taking it worldwide. Today General Mills owns the brand, which Froneri, a company set up by Nestlé and PAI Partners, sells in the United States and Canada.

A borrowed origin

The method calls one way of sourcing value bandwagoning: riding a value that already exists somewhere else and channelling it toward your offer. Mattus did not have centuries of European dairy tradition to sell. He had a recipe and a price. The name supplied the rest, borrowing a picture of old-world craft and northern purity that American shoppers already carried in their heads, and the map on the carton completed the impression.

Bandwagoning is fast, and it comes with a known cost: every wagon you ride adds someone else’s meaning to your brand, and the borrowed meaning can be taken away by anyone who notices where it came from. The books describe the healthy pattern as alternating the two moves, borrowing to get going and then building value of your own to make the borrowed part permanent.

The product paid the debt

Häagen-Dazs did the second part through the ice cream itself. The brand was built on density, a high butterfat content and a short list of ingredients, at a time when supermarket ice cream was cheap and full of air. A shopper attracted by the exotic name found a product that tasted expensive, and the name gradually came to stand for that experience more than for any place.

That may be why the truth about the Bronx now reads as trivia. When HuffPost told its readers in 2015 that Häagen-Dazs “comes from the Bronx”, the piece treated it as a surprising fact about a brand they already liked. By then the value had moved from the borrowed origin to the product the company actually made.

What a competitor could take for free

In 1980 another American company launched a premium ice cream called Frusen Glädjé, Swedish for “frozen joy”, in packaging that also suggested an import. Häagen-Dazs went to court over the imitation and lost. The episode shows the line our name test draws. Ask what a competitor could claim tomorrow, at no cost, and what it could claim only by rebuilding the asset underneath. A Scandinavian sound, an umlaut, a hint of import: all free, and taken. The specific name was a different matter. A name that means nothing in any language is a name nobody else can ever claim, and twenty years of dense ice cream had filled it with meaning.

For a company choosing a name today, the lesson is to separate the borrowed associations, which anyone can copy, from the word itself, which can be owned, and to put the product work into the second. If you want your team to make that distinction before a naming brief goes out, train your team in the method.