Frusen Glädjé

by Frusen Glädjé

1980 – 1993 GONE FOREVER

Never formally discontinued — orphaned. Kraft bought the brand in 1985, then said it passed to Unilever in a 1993 deal; Unilever said it never got it. Either way the pints vanished in the early '90s and nobody claimed the body. A 2016 trademark purchase has yet to produce a single scoop.

The other fake-Scandinavian superpremium ice cream: 16% butterfat, no stabilizers, pints so dense they pushed a pound, and a name that's slightly broken Swedish for 'frozen happiness.' The New York Times crowned it a 'Rolls-Royce of ice cream' in 1980; by the early '90s it had melted out of freezers entirely.

🧾 One more thingHäagen-Dazs sued it in 1980 for stealing the faux-Scandinavian mystique — and lost, with the court noting Häagen-Dazs was itself an American invention trading on a made-up Danish image. It remains one of the great pot-calling-the-kettle-black cases in food law.

Filed under: Frozen & Dairy · the ’80s

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