Haagen Dazs
Starting with only three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and coffee, the company opened its first retail store in Brooklyn NY in 1976 and then offered franchises throughout the United States and 54 other countries around the world. Häagen-Dazs produces ice cream, ice cream bars, ice cream cakes, sorbet, and frozen yogurt.
Overview
The ice cream comes in many different flavors and is a "super-premium" brand, meaning it uses high quality ingredients, 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 content.
Häagen-Dazs is also meant to be kept at a temperature that is substantially lower than most ice creams in order to keep its intended firmness. It is sold both in grocery stores and in dedicated retail outlets serving ice cream cones, sundaes, and so on.
A majority of the permanent flavors offered by the company include chocolate in one form or another, though there are vanilla-based blends as well.
The Häagen-Dazs brand is owned by General Mills. However, in the United States and Canada, Häagen-Dazs products are produced by Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, Inc., a Nestlé subsidiary, under a pre-existing license.
Name
Contrary to appearances, the name is not North Germanic languages; it is simply two made-up words meant to look Scandinavian to American eyes (in fact, the digraphs "äa" and "zs" are a not part of any native words in any of the Scandinavian languages).
Mattus included an outline map of Scandinavia on early labels, as well as the names of Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, to reinforce the Scandinavian theme. A name was created by reversing the name of Duncan Hines ("Huncan-Dines"), an original potential marketer of the product.
When that deal didn't materialize the name was manipulated to sound Scandinavian.
Häagen-Dazs locations worldwide
The playful spelling devices in the name invoke the spelling systems used in several European countries. "ä" (an 'a' with an umlaut mark) is used in the spelling of the German, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak and Swedish languages, doubled vowel letters spell long vowels in Estonian, Finnish, Dutch, and occasionally German; and zs corresponds to /ʒ/ (as in vision) in Hungarian.