Ben & Jerry's Factory Tour

Ice cream, the munchies, hippies. Where else could a place like Ben & Jerry's be except in Vermont? The Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Factory is one of the few tourist attractions in Vermont that stays open after 5 pm. It offers a tour, a gift shop stacked high with everything from tie-dye t-shirts to moose-turd chocolate patties, and the "Flavor Graveyard."

The tour begins with a video in the "Cow Over The Moon Theater," which tells the story of Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield: how they met in 7th grade gym class, took a $5 dollar correspondence course about ice-cream making, renovated an old gas station in Burlington for their first store and, most importantly, sold stock to Vermonters in 1984 to pay for their factory.

Eventually one in every 100 Vermont families owned shares, ensuring that the ice cream factory would remain a popular vacation stop for decades to come. The tour itself is brief, giving visitors an elevated view of the factory floor and ending with a "taste test" of samples from whatever ice cream flavors the plant produced that day.

Along the way tourists are bombarded with an odd mix of Ben & Jerry's manufacturing statistics and hippie propaganda: The plant churns out 110 pints a minute, 190,000 pints a day; all of the milk and cream comes from Vermont family farm cows with no rBGH growth hormones; the Spiral Hardener conveyor chills every pint for two hours at -40 degrees (-70 with the wind chill); the ice cream is packed in unbleached paperboard containers to spare the environment from "nasty toxic dioxins;" and each Ben & Jerry's employee gets three pints of free ice cream a day. Three pints a day?

Why is an ice cream company so popular in a state as frigid as Vermont? Sure, it keeps 40,000 Vermont dairy cows employed, but Vermonters don't just support the industry of ice cream. They LOVE ice cream.

The company was scooped up by a giant corporation and is no longer publicly traded.

Ben & Jerry's Factory Tour and Flavor Graveyard
Address: Rte 100, Waterbury, VT
Directions: I-89 exit 10, north on Hwy 100 about 1 mile.
Admission: Not free.
Hours: Daily, 9-9 summer, 10-6 otherwise. (Call to verify)
Phone: 802-882-1240