GB Glace
Encyclopedia
Ice cream
Ice cream is a frozen dessert usually made from dairy products, such as milk and cream, and often combined with fruits or other ingredients and flavours. Most varieties contain sugar, although some are made with other sweeteners...
company in Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
. It was founded in 1942, and was purchased by the Anglo
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
-Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
company Unilever
Unilever
Unilever is a British-Dutch multinational corporation that owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products....
in 1996. Besides its own traditional brands, it now produces many of the same products as other Unilever Heartbrand subsidiaries, such as Langnese
Langnese
right|thumb|300px|Langnese billboard advertisement as seen in Berlin, Germany.Langnese is the German Heartbrand subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever...
in Germany.
The company was formed when Mjölkcentralen (which later became Arla
Arla Foods
Arla Foods is a Swedish-Danish cooperative based in Århus, Denmark, and the largest producer of dairy products in Scandinavia. Arla Foods was formed as the result of a merger between the Swedish dairy cooperative Arla and the Danish dairy company MD Foods on 17 April 2000.Arla Foods is the seventh...
) and Choklad-Thule (Stockholm's first ice-cream company) purchased Alaska Glace, creating a new company called Glace bolaget.
Nogger Black controversy
In 2005, the Swedish company was criticized by the Centre against Racism and Related Intolerance after launching an advertising campaign introducing their new line of ice cream bars, the Nogger Black, which is an addition to their existing "Nogger" ice cream product. The original Nogger is a vanilla ice cream bar with a nougatNougat
Nougat is a variety of similar traditional confectioneries made with sugar and/or honey, roasted nuts , and sometimes chopped candied fruit. The consistency of nougat can range from soft and chewy to hard and crunchy depending on its composition, and it is used in a variety of candy bars and...
filling and chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate is a raw or processed food produced from the seed of the tropical Theobroma cacao tree. Cacao has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America. Its earliest documented use is around 1100 BC...
shell, whereas the Nogger Black substitutes toffee
Toffee
Toffee is a confection made by caramelizing sugar or molasses along with butter, and occasionally flour. The mixture is heated until its temperature reaches the hard crack stage of 300 to 310 °F...
in lieu of the nougat center and encases the bar in a salty, black liquorice outer shell rather than chocolate; hence the name Nogger Black. Petronella Warg, GB Glace's information officer, reported that the first Nogger ice cream bar had been marketed since 1979, its name derived from the nougat
Nougat
Nougat is a variety of similar traditional confectioneries made with sugar and/or honey, roasted nuts , and sometimes chopped candied fruit. The consistency of nougat can range from soft and chewy to hard and crunchy depending on its composition, and it is used in a variety of candy bars and...
filling.
The criticism was mainly aimed at an advert where the slogan "Nogger + liquorice = true" (a Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
equivalent to "Nogger ♥ liquorice") was written in white chalk on asphalt
Asphalt
Asphalt or , also known as bitumen, is a sticky, black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid that is present in most crude petroleums and in some natural deposits, it is a substance classed as a pitch...
. Stig Wallin - chairman of the centre - read the slogan as "Nigger + liquorice" and said "It's impossible not to see this as an allusion to racism." The centre urged for a boycott of the company if they did not withdraw the campaign. Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
writer Timothy Noah also criticized the product.
The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet
Aftonbladet
Aftonbladet is a Swedish tabloid founded by Lars Johan Hierta in 1830 during the modernization of Sweden. It is one of the larger daily newspapers in the Nordic countries. Aftonbladet is owned by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and Norwegian media group Schibsted, and its editorial page...
wrote an article about it in 2005, and also started a poll along with the article (on their website). The question was: 'Tycker du att glassreklamen är rasistisk?', which translates to 'Do you think that the ice-cream advert is racist?'. Over 150,000 people have voted, and 94.9% voted 'No'.
Also, the name of another GB ice cream, 88:an ("The 88-er"), is similar to 88
88 (number)
88 is the natural number following 87 and preceding 89.- In mathematics :Eighty-Eight is a refactorable number, a primitive semiperfect number and an untouchable number...
, a codename for "Heil Hitler" used in neo-nazi circles (HH, as "H" is the 8th letter of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
), but this is just a coinsidence. There was also a limited 88:an Black ice cream a few years prior to Nogger Black.
External links
- GB Glace official website (Swedish onlySwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
)