Vermont: Waterbury – Ben & Jerry’s Factory

🍦 Ben & Jerry’s — Ice Cream, Cow Pats, and a Graveyard for Dead Flavours

We first visited the Ben & Jerry’s factory back in 2007, on what was supposed to be a proper family outing. I say family — it was very nearly the whole family. Karen had to fly back to the UK for her mother’s funeral, which put rather a dampener on things, as you might imagine. So, strictly speaking, it was more of a slightly-depleted-family outing. Still, the kids were thrilled, which at that age was really all that mattered.

Fourteen years later, in the summer of 2021, we finally made it back. This time without the children, who had long since grown up, left home, and presumably found better things to do than trail around ice cream factories in Vermont with their parents. Karen and I, however, have never quite managed to grow up, so it still felt entirely natural — some might say inevitable — that we’d make the pilgrimage back to Waterbury, Vermont, spiritual home of the world’s most cheerfully named ice cream company.

A quick bit of background, since we’re here. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield — yes, those are their actual names, remarkably — founded the company in 1978 after completing a correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State University. The course, famously, cost them twelve dollars each. They set up their first scoop shop in a converted petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, and the rest, as they say, is delicious history. By the late 1980s they’d gone national. By the 1990s, global. By 2000, the whole thing had been bought by Unilever for £326 million, which is either a triumph of capitalism or a betrayal of hippie idealism, depending on your point of view.

One thing had changed for us since 2007 — we’d gone vegan. I know, I know. A couple of ageing Londoners turning vegan in their fifties is precisely the sort of thing that Jeremy Clarkson would have opinions about, and not complimentary ones. But there we were. Fortunately, Ben & Jerry’s had rather thoughtfully launched their non-dairy range, so we weren’t completely out of luck. Their vegan flavours — made with sunflower butter or almond milk — are, against all reasonable expectation, genuinely good.

🏭 The Factory Tour That Wasn’t

On our 2007 visit, the factory tours were running, and they were great fun. There’s something endlessly satisfying about watching things being made — particularly things you’re about to eat. We trooped along the production line with a guide who clearly knew her stuff and managed to make the whole process sound exciting, which is no small feat when you’re essentially talking about cold dairy products in industrial quantities.

The highlight — and this is the sort of thing that only happens to you and you spend the rest of your life dining out on — came at the observation window overlooking the conveyor belt. We were all pressed up against the glass watching pots of ice cream gliding smoothly along towards the packing station, when something went spectacularly wrong. I’m not entirely sure what triggered it. A misaligned pot, perhaps. A momentary lapse in concentration from someone on the line. Whatever it was, the pots started tumbling off the end of the belt and crashing to the floor. One, then two, then — before anyone had the presence of mind to find the emergency stop button — at least two dozen pots lay scattered across the floor, their lids off, their contents splattered in a magnificent, multicoloured, sticky mess. The kids thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Frankly, so did we.

Sadly, when we returned in 2021, the pandemic had put paid to the tours entirely. No factory visits, no conveyor belts, no chance of a repeat ice cream catastrophe. Covid-19 had, among its many sins, deprived us of industrial ice cream tourism. Thanks for that.

🪦 The Flavour Graveyard — A Place of Great Solemnity and Terrible Puns

Instead, we headed up the hill — and I mean that literally, it’s on a slope behind the factory — to what is, genuinely, one of the more absurd and wonderful things we’ve ever come across: the Flavour Graveyard.

It is, as the name suggests, laid out exactly like a traditional graveyard, complete with individual plots, proper headstones, and the kind of hushed, slightly reverent atmosphere you’d normally associate with somewhere rather more sombre. Except that instead of departed loved ones, the headstones commemorate departed ice cream flavours — every variety that Ben & Jerry’s have ever discontinued, each one given its own epitaph.

The inscriptions are hilarious. Some are mournful, some are wry, and some are quite spectacularly awful puns. Wavy Gravy, a circus-themed flavour that lived from 1993 to 2001, gets a proper send-off. Economic Crunch, a product of the recession era, met its end after a brief but pointed run. There are dozens of them up there on that gentle Vermont hillside, quietly decomposing in the ice cream afterlife.

It’s been a proper attraction since the late 1990s, and it works because it perfectly captures what Ben & Jerry’s have always been rather good at: not taking themselves too seriously. The company was built on a sense of humour as much as on good ice cream, and the Flavour Graveyard is the physical embodiment of that. It’s silly, it’s clever, and it’s oddly moving if you happen to have a particularly fond memory of, say, Holy Cannoli or Turtle Soup.

We spent a good while wandering among the headstones, reading the epitaphs, and trying not to feel too melancholy about flavours we’d never even tasted. It is, all things considered, a very fine way to spend a morning in Vermont.