The Waterbury factory that made Ben & Jerry’s a Vermont tourist stop
Photo: Ɱ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield opened their first scoop shop in May 1978 in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets in Burlington. They had taken a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State, and they had about $12,000 between them.
The chunky flavors and the founders’ playful marketing caught on fast. By the mid-1980s the company had outgrown its early plants, and in 1985 it opened a factory on Route 100 in Waterbury, just off Interstate 89.
A factory people visit
The Waterbury plant became a destination almost by accident. The company began offering short factory tours with a free sample at the end, and the tours drew hundreds of thousands of visitors a year at their peak. On the hill behind the plant, the Flavor Graveyard, with headstones for discontinued flavors, became its own photo stop.
For Waterbury, the tours fed a cluster of food businesses along Route 100, including Cold Hollow Cider Mill, Cabot’s annex store and others, that turned the stretch toward Stowe into one of the busiest tourist corridors in Vermont.
Changes in ownership
Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s in 2000 for about $326 million. The sale agreement created an independent board meant to protect the brand’s social mission, an arrangement that has led to public disputes with its corporate parent over the years.
Much of the production now happens at the company’s plant in St. Albans, which processes milk from Vermont dairy farms, and at facilities outside the state. Waterbury remains the face of the brand. Tour schedules and hours vary by season, so check before making the drive.
