Häagen-Dazs sits in nearly every American grocery store, its name printed with an umlaut that suggests some distant Scandinavian origin. The brand has been a fixture for so long that almost no one stops to question where it actually came from. The truth is that the name means nothing at all, in any language. It was invented by a man in New York named Reuben Mattus nearly seventy years ago, and the story of how he built it begins long before the first carton was ever sold.
Reuben Mattus was born in Poland, and his father was killed during World War I. At seven years old, he emigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, settling in the Bronx. His mother began a small lemon ice business that eventually grew into an ice cream operation. In those early years, the family delivered their product by horse-drawn wagon to local restaurants, soda shops, and candy stores.
Reuben dropped out of high school in the 1920s to work in the business, and in the 1930s he married Rose, who became just as central to the operation as he was. Reuben focused on making and selling the ice cream while Rose handled the business side. By the 1940s, refrigerators had become common in American homes, and ice cream moved from soda fountains into grocery stores. Demand surged, but so did competition.
Large companies found ways to mass produce ice cream at scale, aggressively cutting ingredient costs so they could undercut everyone else on price. The low prices became impossible for the Mattus family to match. They could not win a price war against corporate giants, so they chose to go the opposite direction entirely. At the time, the International Dairy Foods Association recognized four quality levels of ice cream, with the top tier called super premium.
That category is defined by very low overrun, meaning very little air whipped into the product, along with high fat content and premium ingredients. Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs would eventually become the most popular brands in this space, but Häagen-Dazs essentially created the category before it had a name. While other manufacturers were stretching their recipes to cut costs, Reuben decided to make ice cream that was denser, richer, and made with better ingredients, including real milk, sugar, egg yolks, Belgian chocolate, and vanilla from Madagascan beans. As he later put it, “When I came out with Häagen-Dazs, the quality of ice cream had deteriorated to the point where it was just sweet and cold.
Ice cream had become cheaper and cheaper, so I just went the opposite way. ”
The product itself was only part of the challenge. People needed to understand why they should pay more for it, which brings the story to the brand’s unusual name. Reuben wanted the product to feel foreign and imported, because at the time consumers associated imported goods with something special and desirable.
He invented the name Häagen-Dazs specifically so people might take a second look and wonder if it came from overseas. He went so far as to print a map of Denmark on the carton. The words carried no actual meaning, but they suggested old-world craftsmanship and European quality. Rose also did her part by going into grocery stores and handing out free samples, letting customers taste the difference rather than simply telling them about it.
The strategy worked, and the brand built a reputation for quality through a subtle, classy image that has changed very little in the decades since. The Mattus family grew Häagen-Dazs over the course of twenty-three years into a widely known brand with more than one hundred million dollars in annual sales. They started with only three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and coffee. Strawberry did not appear until six years later because it took time to find the right berries and a recipe that met their standards.
In 1976, Reuben and Rose’s daughter Doris opened the first Häagen-Dazs shop and later served as head of the company’s franchising operations. By the time the company was sold, there were nearly 250 of these shops, and today there are over 900 Häagen-Dazs ice cream shops across 43 countries, ranging from small kiosks to full table-service locations. In 1983, the Mattus family sold Häagen-Dazs to Pillsbury. Pillsbury was a far larger company than most people realized, with over three billion dollars in sales and a portfolio that included Totino’s, Green Giant, and Burger King.
The head of Pillsbury said the company had considered 8,000 possible targets in the food business before deciding on Häagen-Dazs. At the time of the deal, he stated plainly, “Our plans for the company are to grow it. ” That is exactly what happened, as Pillsbury had the resources to turn a national brand into an international one. A curious twist followed.
Ben & Jerry’s, still a much smaller emerging competitor, sued Pillsbury twice in the 1980s, alleging that Pillsbury was pressuring distributors to drop Ben & Jerry’s if they continued to carry the competing brand. Ben & Jerry’s launched a campaign that printed the words “What’s the Doughboy afraid of? ” on cartons, signs, and bumper stickers, positioning Häagen-Dazs as the big corporate bully and itself as the scrappy underdog. The irony was not lost on anyone who knew the company’s origins, because Häagen-Dazs had once been exactly that kind of small challenger taking on much larger competitors.
In the end, the legal fight appeared to have little lasting impact on Häagen-Dazs, but the dynamic was a clear sign of how far the brand had come. In 1999, Pillsbury teamed up with Nestlé, then the largest food company in the world, to form Ice Cream Partners USA, a joint venture that combined Häagen-Dazs with several Nestlé brands, including Drumstick. Shortly after, Pillsbury was acquired by General Mills, and Nestlé paid for the rights to sell Häagen-Dazs products in the United States. From that point, Nestlé managed the brand domestically while General Mills handled it internationally.
In 2019, the US operations were sold to a joint venture half-owned by Nestlé and half-owned by a private equity firm. Ben & Jerry’s followed a similar path of consolidation when it was acquired by Unilever in 2000, meaning both of the most famous super premium ice cream brands ended up under the control of massive global conglomerates. The final piece of the story is the shops themselves. Doris Mattus opened the first one in 1976, and the concept proved so successful that nearly 250 existed before the Pillsbury sale.
The shops offered sundaes, milkshakes, and a rotating menu of twenty to thirty flavors alongside limited-time and seasonal offerings. They were almost all franchised, which allowed the brand to expand without the risk and expense of owning every location. The shops helped promote the product, gave customers more places to find it, and built an association between Häagen-Dazs and a special outing rather than just a routine grocery purchase.
Fifty years after the first shop opened, that association remains strong, and customers still line up at mall kiosks to pay a premium for ice cream that began as one family’s refusal to compete on price alone.