With Greenland suddenly in the news, I thought it might be useful to wade in with my business experience there 43 years ago. I may be one of the few who has actually done business in Greenland other than for fishing or social needs.
My project there was importing to the US a unique gourmet product—glacial ice. Specifically, 100,000-year-old ice one can put into their expensive drinks to make them even more dramatic and wonderful. The ice is believed to be the purist edible substance on earth. When you drink your beverage, the ice give off bubbles of air trapped in the ice which is likely thousands of years old. A very cool thing indeed!
We named our ice GLAZONICE after my business partner in Cleveland, named Alan Glazen.
The idea was not unique, In fact, it was copied from the early Polar explorers who scraped ice from icebergs and put it in their whiskey to celebrate major occasions. The ice makes your 18-year-old Scotch suddenly seem a couple of thousand years old!
In my younger years, I was a genuine Polar Explorer. I was one of the very first television journalists to film at the South Pole (Dec 11, 1974) and later mounted my own expedition to the North Pole (April 15, 1983). When I came back from the North Pole I figured I wanted to do something that celebrated that accomplishment. It’s possible I was the eighth person in history to have attained both Poles.Born was the idea of getting ice down to New York and sharing the adventure with others on a good Scotch.
We sold the idea to the Gourmet Department at Bloomingdales, and they said they’d take the ice if we could get it. Now the hard part: How could we get it? I knew I needed resources in the high North. I had made my trek to the Pole via Canada and Ellesmere Island. I used bush pilots and snowmobiles. For this I needed bigger resources. Greenland seemed like the place to go. But how could I communicate with them and get them to cooperate? I appeared on a New York TV show with a young, very smart sociologist who was working on her Ph.D. and studying in Greenland to see how their humane prison system worked. She had learned Danish (the business language spoken in Greenland) and a language of the native people. She was all in on trying to help and connect us with the best people.
We used a big fishing company that snagged a very Northern iceberg, sprayed them off and dropped the ice in a freezer ship hold. It was not cheap or easy. But we had the product (three tons of it).
Next, we had it shipped to the US. It landed in the port of Boston. I was called with good news and bad news. The good news is we had our polar ice. The bad news is that it was sitting in the sun on the dock while US Customs was trying to figure out the duty. After arguing for hours, they finally released it with no duty to be paid for imported water. About a third had melted.
We shipped it to Bloomingdales, and they called saying, “Are you crazy? What are we going to do with four pallets of ice?” Then I had to find a huge freezer warehouse in New Jersey that could store it. That was a cost I hadn’t expected. It was interesting nonetheless to see where all the frozen food goes in New York, huge warehouses with fork lifts zooming around in sub zero temperatures in the middle of summer in New York.
Next was to get the ice in small bags custom made by our friends. The silver Ziplock bags said:
“Glazonice is absolutely pure glacial ice from Greenland chipped from a huge glacier near the small port of Jacobshavn. Glazonice was formed up to 100,000 years ago when New York and Chicago were buried under a one-mile-thick icecap. There was no pollution and little habitation of any kind. The water is purer than that distilled in a laboratory.
Intense pressure over thousands of years caused air to be encapsulated in high-pressure bubbles within the ice. The air, possibly so pure that it had never been breathed, is released through small explosions as the Glazonice melts in your glass and in your mouth.
Put our ear close to the glass and listen to the whispering of the past.
Glazonice should be served only with the finest beverages.”
The next step was to get these tons of ice into our little bags. My wife and I tried to talk our two teenage daughters into putting on their winter coats in July and lend a hand. They did not like the idea. So my wife, a nurse practitioner, and I did the job in the warehouse. Not fun.
The payoff was huge in press and attention. Every network and major global news organization covered the story. I got a bit nervous, because my employer, Westinghouse, didn’t know what I was up to. I was president of their television business, and most people thought I was crazy. Worse, we lost money on the project. But it was certainly a unique business story and a great way to break Greenland into the gourmet food business.
Do you suppose Trump’s interest in acquiring the island nation is that he wants the US to expand into the ice business and add tariffs to imported ice?
