Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour: A Vermont Ice Cream Dream

Maple syrup. Coffee. Mountains.

And Ben & Jerry’s.

The latter was what I was most looking forward to during our first stop in Vermont on our 50 state road trip (we’ll be going back for longer in the future).

So on an overcast spring morning, we took the quick drive from Montpelier to Waterbury to go on the Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour.

Tours run every half hour and cost $4 for adults and $3 for seniors, while kids aged 12 and under are free.

While waiting for your tour to start, you can take a look around the gift shop…

…and check out their historical ice cream scoop exhibit.

Our tour began a few minutes after we arrived – Will was our tour guide and he was fantastic. Anyone that knows me knows that I love puns and Will had all the ice cream puns. Funnily enough, we happened to see him again the following day in a store in downtown Montpelier.

The tour began in the Ben & Jerry’s Moovie Theater, with a 5-10 minute moovie about the company’s history.

The tour continued in a room overlooking the factory. No photos or videos were allowed during that part of the tour, but we did learn more about the manufacturing process.

Ben & Jerry’s has six factories worldwide – this one in Waterbury, along with others in St Albans VT, Nevada, Canada, Israel and the Netherlands. This Waterbury factory produces 250,000 pints a day; their St Albans factory has quadruple the number of number of lines, so makes about 1 million pints per day.

They tend to make one flavor for three days, then spend 8-12 hours cleaning everything to ensure that nuts, dairy and other allergens are removed.

After learning more about ice cream production, it was time for the most important room of the tour – the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Lab.

The Flavor Lab once served as their test kitchen and is now used both as part of the tour and to train new employees. The day we visited, the trainee was making Maple Walnut ice cream – a flavor you can only get at the Waterbury factory.

The Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour includes a free ice cream tasting – the flavor the day we visited was Broccoli Cheddar Chunk.

Thankfully Will was only messing with us, although this flavor was once made and offered to tour goers on April Fools Day. Instead, we got to try Sweet Cream & Cookies.

While in the Flavor Lab, take a look around as you might see some interesting mix-ins.

The Flavor Lab is also where the tour ends; as you walk out, there’s a display showing the top ten selling Ben & Jerry’s flavors.

Our fun didn’t end there though. The Ben & Jerry’s Factory in Waterbury has an ice cream shop outside where you can get whatever flavor your heart desires.

At the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury VT, you can order the Vermonster – a sundae eating challenge consisting of 20 scoops of ice cream, hot fudge, three chocolate chip cookies, a chocolate fudge brownie, four bananas, walnuts, two scoops of four different toppings and finished with whipped cream.

That’s just a little excessive, so I decided to get a Half Baked Sundae. That contains a brownie, small scoops of cookie dough, a scoop of ice cream and a topping. I went for a scoop of Phish Food and gummi bears.

In addition to the Vermonster, Ben & Jerry’s also offers the Mini Vermonster. This contains “only” four scoops of ice cream, a brownie, a couple of chocolate chip cookies, one scoop of four different toppings, hot fudge and whipped cream. Ice cream is one of Shae’s favorite foods, so she decided to give this mini challenge a go.

For the ice cream, she went for a few different chocolate varieties. For her toppings, she picked two scoops of chocolate chips and two scoops of M&Ms.

It took a lot of effort…

…but she managed to polish off every last drop.

After going on the Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour, there’s one further stop you need to make on the campus – the Flavor Graveyard.

The graveyard contains all the different flavors that have since been retired, with gravestones containing rhymes dedicated to the different flavors. This includes the tasty sounding Devil’s Food Chocolate Sorbet…

…and the not-so-tasty sounding Miz Jelena’s Sweet Potato Pie flavor.

Check out this post all about the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard to find out more about the 40 different flavors buried there.

Final Thoughts

The Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour was fairly short, but also definitely worth the $4 we paid. We learned some interesting history and information about Ben & Jerry’s, while seeing the Flavor Graveyard was fun as I’d never heard of most of the flavors.

The great thing is that Vermont is so small, you should be within a two hour drive of the Waterbury factory no matter where you are in the state.