New product Wednesday, in Dallas stores: Haagen Dazs is on a honey kick

by Teresa Gubbins

There's a weird thing going on right now with Haagen Dazs and honey. The company has gone bonkers for honey-flavored ice cream products at a time when there's a huge crisis with the bee population in this country.

1. First came its "artisan" flavor, Hawaiian Lehua honey and sweet cream, part of its Reserve line introduced last year. This tastes like butter. It has butter in the ingredient list, and that's what it tastes like. Butter.

2. Then came a frozen yogurt called Vanilla Honey & Granola, in development for some time (I suspect this was before they realized that having a honey-flavored ice cream might seem politically incorrect). The yogurt tastes like vanilla, while the "granola" is like cookie-dough pellets with a mild cinnamon flavor. Needs more pellets.

At this point, the company came out swinging for the bees by, counter-intuitively, adding a third honey flavor to its regular line:

3. Honey Vanilla Bee. Tastes just like the Honey flavor Haagen Dazs discontinued in the '90s: sweet, sortof honey-ish, subtle, possibly dull. HD claims that a portion of the proceeds from this product will "help the honey bees through university research."

Meanwhile, the company launched a media campaign announcing its donation to two universities for bee research. If you measure a media campaign by Google hits, then this campaign has succeeded. Thanks to the lethal combination of press releases and lazy journalists, you'll find thousands of sites and media outlets spouting identical words from the press release, with the message being: "Support the Haagen-Dazs loves Honey Bees program!" -- by buying their ice cream, of course.

Funding bee research is in Haagen Dazs' own best interest, since it says that 40% of its flavors rely on honey. The total donation is $250,000, and it's split into two: $150,000 to Penn State and $100,000 to UC Davis.

What does $100,000 get you on the research front? According to salary.com, the average salary for a "Researcher II - Academic" is $62,117. This story says UC Davis will use approximately half of that $100K gift to hire ONE researcher who will do a ONE-YEAR stint, "conducting problem-solving research in honey bee biology, health, and pollination issues."

How diligent is Haagen Dazs' marketing campaign? When I wrote previously about the Reserve line, I stumbled across the company's profile on Wikipedia, and was surprised to find a paragraph stating that Haagen Dazs had begun to inject more air into its ice cream in 2007. It read as follows:

On March 17, I called HD's media department and asked a staffer named Crystal Hubbard if HD was increasing the amount of air in its ice cream. She'd never heard of Wikipedia, but when she hit the site, she said, THAT'S NOT TRUE. She expressed her intent to have the passage deleted, and said she'd have someone from the product line call me back; no one ever did. Within a few days, that paragraph had been deleted and replaced with this:

I think if Haagen Dazs really wanted to help the bees, it would do as "RKO" suggests on this Planet Green.com entry:

• Staff
• Verified User
• Anonymous