Ben & Jerry’s Factory
On Friday after work, we drove to Waterbury, Vermont to tour the Ben & Jerry’s Factory. It was an excellent way to start the weekend!
Fans (like me) of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream love their delicious, chunky flavors with funny, punny names. My favorite flavor is Cherry Garcia; I can still remember being at my first job in Boston, calling my Deadhead friends with the news when it first came out. I also have fond memories of attending the Ben & Jerry’s One World One Heart festival - a free concert at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brings me back to the carefree days of my early 20’s.
The factory was on a hill not far from downtown Waterbury, with scenic views of the valley and the Green Mountains. We started with a visit to the Flavor Graveyard, where retired flavors - the “Dearly De-Pinted” - were immortalized with headstones, each with a funny and clever poetic epitaph. Some of the flavors had interesting backstories. White Russian was retired because the Kahlua flavoring became too expensive - likely due to the ice cream’s popularity.
Our tour started with a short film about Ben & Jerry’s. Some highlights:
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were childhood best friends - “the two slowest kids in the class.” In 1978, they took a $5 correspondence course in making ice cream, borrowed some money, and opened their first “scoop shop” in Burlington, Vermont.
Since Ben’s ability to smell and taste food was impaired, they put big flavorful chunks in their ice cream. This innovation transformed the industry: if you love ice cream with chunks of cookie dough, you can thank Ben and Jerry.
Despite having been bought by Unilever in 2000, the company has continued its social activism, thanks to its independent Board of Directors.
We then walked upstairs to a room with large windows overlooking the factory floor. No photos were permitted, but in consolation, they gave us frozen cookie dough chunks to taste. Yum! Ice cream production was underway. Workers poured cookie dough chunks into “chunk feeders.” Freshly filled pints of ice cream rode a conveyor belt single file to the “spiral hardener.” (The company’s website describes the whole process.) The factory produces about 350,000 pints of ice cream a day. Wow!
Our tour ended downstairs in the Flavor Lab. Our tour guide told us about some of the crazy April Fool’s flavors (e.g., Broccoli and Cheese) that have been served to tour guests over the years. Then we all received a scoop of their new Mango ice cream. Delicious! While we savored our ice cream, our guide entertained us with punny jokes and shared that employees are allowed to take home 3 pints of ice cream a day. We were envious.
The factory tour was short and sweet (pun intended), a lot of fun, and definitely worthwhile. Kudos to Ben & Jerry’s for continuing to innovate - they just launched a bunch of non-dairy flavors with an oat milk base - and stay true to their social mission. They are a Certified B Corporation that I am proud to support. It will be interesting to see what happens to Ben & Jerry’s now that Unilever has decided to spin off their ice cream business.
