Inside the Wacky History of Häagen-Dazs and Its Made Up Name

If you head to the grocery store looking for luxurious ice cream, there’s a good chance you’ll reach for Häagen-Dazs. But the brand isn’t all that it seems.

There’s the name, of course. Häagen-Dazs makes the ice cream sound vaguely European, but the truth is the name doesn’t mean anything in any language. Rose Mattus, who founded the ice cream company with her husband Reuben, came up with it. 

“We wanted people to take a second look and say, ‘Is this imported?’ ” Reuben told PEOPLE in 1981. “We made a name and created a meaning for it. It means ‘the best.’ ”

Reuben’s ice cream journey by that point was 60 years in the making. He came to the U.S. from Poland with his mother, Lea, and sister when he was 7 years old; his father died in World War I. The family landed in New York City and began their frozen treat experiments in the Bronx.

During the summer, Reuben delivered homemade lemon ices, made by his mother, around the borough using a horse-drawn cart. They added ice cream to their lineup, but the business could only start operating year-round when refrigerators became widely available in the 1940s. Lea registered the business as Senator Frozen Products, Inc.

Rose, meanwhile, born Riva Rochel Vesel, was raised by a Polish family in Ireland. They moved to New York when she was 5 years old.

Reuben and Rose met in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. She got a job as a bookkeeper at the Senator plant in 1934, and the couple married two years later.

By the 1950s, larger ice cream companies were able to drive down the cost of the iconic perfection, and the Mattus family’s company couldn’t compete. “I realized I couldn’t keep up and maintain any kind of quality,” Reuben told PEOPLE. They decided to go in the other direction, and make more delicious, but more expensive, ice cream. “I thought maybe if I made the very best ice cream, people would be willing to pay for it,” he explained.

They formed their new company, Häagen-Dazs, in 1959. They even put a map of Denmark on the ice cream pints to increase how foreign-seeming the brand was (even though Danish does not use umlauts). 

The key to their product, Reuben told PEOPLE, was its low “over-run,” the amount of air pumped in. Häagen-Dazs’ was at 20%, compared to less expensive brands whose over-run ranged from 75 to 92%. At the time, supermarket ice cream was made primarily with artificial flavoring and nonfat dry milk. Häagen-Dazs used egg yolks, real cream and luxurious flavorings. 

They began with just three flavors: chocolate, vanilla and coffee. The original pints cost 75 cents (about $8 today). Rose promoted the ice cream in grocery stores and bodegas by personally going to the stores to give out free samples. She also made sure the ice cream was stocked around New York’s Greenwich Village, where it could become a favorite of students at NYU. 

“Reuben was a true dairy expert, a bug about quality. Rose basically ran the business, holding the company together and making it possible for a dreamer like Reuben to be successful,” Roy Sloane, the company’s advertising manager until 1987, told The New York Times in 2006.

It took six years to launch their fourth flavor, strawberry, but by 1981, they had 19 (though vanilla was still their most popular).

Rose and Reuben’s daughter Doris opened Häagen-Dazs’s first retail store at 120 Montague Street in Brooklyn; it’s still there today. Doris also ran the company’s franchising business, spreading the stores across America.

The couple sold Häagen-Dazs to the Pillsbury Company in 1983 for $70 million. It’s now owned by Froneri. 

Reuben died in 1994, at 82 years old. Rose died at age 90 in 2006. In 2023, General Mills put a spotlight on Rose as the “unsung co-founder” of the iconic brand, launching The Rose Project and releasing limited edition vanilla pints (her favorite flavor) to celebrate her role. “Reuben made the ice cream, but Rose truly made Häagen-Dazs,” they wrote.

In 1995, writing for The New York Times, food writer Ruth Reichl noted the irony of selling American ice cream to Americans by giving it a fake European origin. “In those days, America truly was the empire of ice cream. What passed as ice cream in Europe was a sweet, hard, grainy substance that came in crumbling cones best suited for use as packing material,” she wrote. “Americans didn’t care; they honestly believed that any food from across the ocean had to be better than the home-grown sort. And once they tried the ice cream with the silly name, they were hooked.”