USA/VT: Ben & Jerry Ice Cream Factory
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is famous all over the USA and the world and its main factory and the place where it all began is located in Vermont. Its story is even more fascinating than all the hundreds of its ice cream flavors – it’s probably studied in business schools nowadays! Ben Coen and Jerry Greenfield were two high school friends from Brooklyn In New York City. Both didn’t do well in school and dropped out multiple times from the few no name non-prestigious colleges and vocational schools they attempted to attend. Eventually, they moved to upstate New York, thinking about opening a bagel shop, but didn’t have money to buy bagel making equipment. So they enrolled into a $5 ice-cream making course from a crappy online university and then opened an ice cream shop in the abandoned gas station in Vermont. Ben was born with severe anosmia (lack of sense of smell and taste), so the only way he could distinguish the ice creams they were making was by feeling it inside his mouth – hence they decided to put a lot of chunks of crunchy cookies and dough and other stuff into the ice cream. And so Ben & Jerry was born! There are hundreds of different flavor combinations with funky names that existed over the years or still exist, and the new ones keep coming out. At the Ben & Jerry factory near Burlington in Vermont there is a Flavor Graveyard, with gravestones for all the flavors that were retired for various reasons – Economic Crunch, Honey I’m Home, This Is Nuts, Fossil Fuel, Schweddy Balls to name a few.
