They All Scream for It

(6 of 10)

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 outfit that claims to be "inspired by the Swiss commitment to excellence ... Its select natural ingredients are a heritage of the lush valleys of farm lands where the finest dairy products are still made by hand." Alpen Zauber has brought legal action against Häagen-Dazs for threatening to withhold its ice cream from distributors who sold Alpen Zauber. Mattus says that he is not worried by the other phony foreigners: they may eventually learn to play the violin, he says, but that will not enable them to compete with a virtuoso.

Nor 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."

Zogby talked freely about the problems of using natural flavors. Real vanilla beans add flecks to the mix, and some customers used to the cheaper artificial flavor vanillin complain of dirty ice cream. Real mint flavor is as clear as gin, not green. A blend of pumpkin and squash tastes more like pumpkin than pumpkin alone does, but squash ice cream sounds dreadful, so the firm's flavorers had to work harder and stick with pumpkin. Most cherry ice cream contains bright red bits of cherries that have been embalmed, as maraschinos are—bleached white with formaldehyde and then dyed. Breyers and other producers of the natural article make do with the real thing—dark red to black, imperfect and not dyed. At the other end of the frozen rainbow from Breyers are Marty Rex and Marcel Arsenault. They were writing their doctoral dissertations in molecular biology ten years ago at the University of Colorado at Boulder, when Arsenault's homemade ice cream turned out to be so popular at parties they tried selling a few gallons to stores during the summer break. They now own Mountain High, a wildly popular superpremium freezery in Colorado that sells 20,000 gal. of natural ice cream a month.