The Häagen-Dazs shop in downtown Bronxville, New York, which has been open for about 30 years, was recently remodelled and will host a formal grand opening this weekend.
It has digital menu boards, leather-booth seating and stools where customers can sit in front of a dessert bar and watch as an employee makes their sundae or milk shake.
Häagen-Dazs, which operates 210 ice cream parlours in the US, is upgrading its stores to keep customers in them for longer, said Dawn Uremovich, a president at the company. It took six weeks to renovate the Bronxville shop, which reopened just before Christmas. Since then, sales are up 37 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier, with store visits jumping 38 per cent, she said.
“If you can get that mom in one more time per week with her kids and that happens again and again it starts to make sense financially,” Uremovich said in an interview in Bronxville. “We wanted the experience to be on par with the product.”
Häagen-Dazs is following in the footsteps of Starbucks, which last month debuted the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room, a 15,000-square-foot (1,400-square-meter) facility in Seattle designed to showcase the coffee chain’s premium line of coffee.
Positive Experience
An internal study found that customers who felt positively about their experience at a Häagen-Dazs shop also bought more ice cream at the grocery store, Uremovich said. “There’s a million different things in the ice cream aisle -- this is a way to help it stand out,” she said.
The Häagen-Dazs brand is owned by General Mills, but Nestlé licenses it in the US and Canada. The Häagen-Dazs Shoppe Co. is a unit of Nestlé USA and contributed $22 million in profit to its parent in 2014, Uremovich said.
The original Häagen-Dazs shop, which is still in business, opened on Montague Street in downtown Brooklyn in 1976. Häagen-Dazs peaked at 250 US shops in 2008, but Uremovich has trimmed the store count in recent years by closing underperforming locations. Last year, Häagen-Dazs shut 20 stores and opened 11.
The plan for 2015 is to open 12 stores, all of them modelled after the Bronxville location, while another 10 will be closed. An additional 10 existing locations will be remodelled this year.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
