Frusen Gladje

Frusen Gladje was a company that made Frusen Gladje ice cream for the U.S. market. It was founded in 1980 by Richard Smith. Although the ice cream was made in the United States of America, some people say the quasi-Swedish name and packaging of Frusen Glädjé (Frusen glädje – without the acute accent – means "frozen joy" in Swedish) intentionally misled people that it was imported. Another ice cream producer, Haagen-Dazs, sued unsuccessfully in 1980 to stop them from using a "Scandinavian marketing theme". Haagen-Dazs’s complaints included Frusen Glädjé's "prominently displayed list of the product's natural ingredients, a list of artificial ingredients not found in the ice cream, directions for serving and eating the ice cream (essentially that it was best served soft), and a map of Scandinavia."

In 1985, Smith sold Frusen Glädjé to the Kraft General Foods. The fate of this brand is unclear from then on. A Kraft spokeswoman had states that Kraft sold its Frusen Glädjé license to the Unilever Corporation in 1993. A spokesman for the Unilever claims that Frusen Glädjé was not part of the deal. The brand has all essentially disappeared.

Ice cream is actually a tough business. As Kraus puts it, "The landscape is littered with corpses." He rattles them off: Alaska Ice Cream, Frusen Gladje, Steve's.A new generation is all dawning in the top-of-the-line ice cream segment. One-by-one, the best leaders who defined the category in the year '80s is being replaced by more conservative strategists. For the next era, super premium ice cream was getting serious.

Once upon a time, virtually anyone can make money selling high-quality ice cream. The potential for the market seemed limitless, because of the consumers' appetites for the product seemed limitless.

So, many self-styled, wacky entrepreneurs set out the find fame and fortune in that many innocent and childlike of treats, the ice cream. They made products with the best ingredients, the highest and butterfat, and the lowest overrun. And they invented a word that described how extra-special their ice cream were, a cartoon-like and hyperbolic tag: super premium.