Page Updated: January 26, 2024
Ben & Jerry’s Waterbury Factory
Ben & Jerry’s Welcome Wall - Waterbury VT
If you ever wanted to see how ice cream is created and packaged, Ben & Jerry’s Waterbury Factory Vermont offers factory tours to do just that! The factory is the site of the clever duo’s beginnings, and tour offers fans a glimpse of history and the manufacturing of up to 350K pints per day.
Wooo, this place is popular. Or, at least it is in the throes of autumn when the state is saturated with leaf peepers . We tried to visit on a whim, but tickets were sold. We had to get tickets on-line and return several days later.
The tour consists of a quick film on the company’s origin followed by short walk to an enclosed catwalk overlooking the factory floor. Photography is forbidden in the mezzanine, but the space is much smaller than I imagined it would be. The tour guide tells us this factory only produces a few flavors on rotation.
At the end of the 30-minute tour, there are a dairy and a non-dairy sample for tasting. I had to pass due to an egg allergy and all Ben & Jerry’s ice cream - both dairy and non-dairy - are created with eggs. Our guide took note and offered a vegan sorbet sample of Berry Berry Extraordinary. It was indeed extraordinary and the guide mentioned it’s Ben’s (or Jerry’s - I can’t remember) favorite flavor. He also immediately dashed my hopes relaying they only make the sorbet for the Waterbury location. They do not sell sorbet in stores.
On the hill outside of the factory sits the Ben & Jerry’s Graveyard. The space is hilarious and designed for ice-cream flavors that are no longer being sold. Reasons for their demise could be as simple as lack of public interest to sometimes a particular ingredient makes the flavor too costly to mass produce.
-b&b
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