Today the mail person delivered The National Dipper and The Ice Cream Reporter.  Talk about planetary convergence, which no one does any longer.

The Ice Cream Reporter has a story about Unilever quitting the Smart Choice Program, which attempt to standardize nutrition labelling on packaged food products.  This means that every person who purchases a
popsicle will be on his own.  I’m old enough to remember Gabby Hayes’ television commercials so I have yet another generational advantage. Unilever also owns Breyers.  Nestle’s own almost everything else.

The Ice Cream Reporter often writes about Haagen-Dazs, and its parent company, Dreyer’s.  In fact the Ice Cream Reporter has hired typographers from an imaginary Scandinavian country just to print the
Haagen-Dazs name, which means nothing in any language spoken by blonde people.   Haagen Dazs has announced a plan to expand its small number of dipping stores.  At one point Haagen Dazs was going to include soft serve custard in the stores but that didn’t happen.  And years ago they had the good idea to combine ice cream with coffee.  We loved that idea more than the combination of ice cream and pretzels that you can find in food courts all over Pennsylvania.  You don’t need an mba to figure out that the problem with Haagen-Dazs stores is they have to sell smaller portions of ice cream that people can buy in pints for less at any 7-11 or gas station in North America.  I once visited a Haagn-Dazs in a beautiful part of Paris.  The store had a maitre d’ which underlined the problem that however good Haagen-Dazs ice cream used to be, in the US it was an affordable middle class luxury, available everywhere.  And you didn’t have to deal with a supercilious graduate of a grand’ ecole before you got the ice cream.

Haagen-Dazs has those extra “a’s in its name but also has a nice promotion to help bees.  Honey bees of course.  From No 5 to 11 Haagen-Dazs will run a twitter campaign that benefits the University
of California at Davis and its noisy, dangerous, sticky programs to preserve bees.  This will cause  a lot of buzz.

The National Dipper focuses on the feisty independent ice cream stores.  Good news is the new DecoPac program to help cake decorators utilize Marvel comic characters.  Call 1-800-DECOPAC or 1-800-893-3063 en espanol.  There is no number for non-existent Scandinavian languages.

The Dipper’s Calender includes the Penn State Ice Cream Short Course, Ja 10-16.  This is the course that launched Ben and Jerry’s.  Write csco@psu.edu  I took a comprable course at Rutgers and we were allowed
more time with the equipment.