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The 32-year marketing and sales history of the Häagen-Dazs ice cream joint venture in Japan is full of twists and turns, especially for anyone familiar with the brand sold in the US, a product introduced in 1961 in New York that is now made and marketed by Nestlé. In Japan, General Mills acquired its 50-percent stake in the Häagen-Dazs joint venture from the British conglomerate Grand Metropolitan P.L.C. which had acquired the Pillsbury Company, the original venture partner, in 1988. General Mill's Japanese distribution partner is Suntory Ltd.[1]
Häagen-Dazs Japan was established in 1984, first selling its premium ice cream sales in department stores and high-end supermarkets. Later that year the first Häagen-Dazs shop opened in the hip and affluent Aoyama neighborhood of Tokyo. Soon The New York Times reported, "In the swank neighborhoods of Harajuku and Aoyama, where teen-agers flock on weekends to parade their designer clothes, lines stretch outside the red-and-white ice cream shops... . While Suntory Ltd., Häagen-Dazs's joint-venture partner, will not disclose the company's sales, it estimates that each of its three shops serves about 4,000 people a day, 5,000 on weekends."
At the time it was introduced in Japan, surveys showed that few Japanese could name a premium brand US product, but customers quickly accepted Häagen-Dazs ice cream as a status symbol and happily paid more for it than for ice cream sold by mass-market stores. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Häagen-Dazs Japan operated more than 90 ice cream shops, but its success drew a wide variety of competitors and consumers were lured away. The last of the franchise scoop shops were closed in the spring of 2013. But today Häagen-Dazs products can be found in thousands of convenience stores and supermarkets across the entire country, still premium-priced and almost ubiquitously accessible.
The Häagen-Dazs product story has its share of surprises. Since its introduction, one of its selling points was that all of Häagen-Dazs Japan's ice cream is made from rich milk produced in Hokkaido, the northern farming area where cows graze in mountainside pastures rather than being confined to tiny feedlots as they are on most Japanese dairy farms. While Häagen-Dazs marketers were able to milk the most out of this bucolic story, it was actually a matter...