You might know Ben & Jerry's for our chunks and swirls, but you might not know everything that goes in to how we make our ice cream. Relive our ice cream’s out-of-pint experiences and how our euphoric flavours travel from the cow on the farm to the cone in one of our ice cream shops or a pint in your freezer.
It all starts, of course, with the cow. Not just one, but tens of thousands of them – from the hundreds of local farms that sell their raw milk to the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery in St. Albans, Vermont. At the Co-op , the milk is separated into heavy cream and condensed skim milk, then shipped by tanker truck to our St. Albans and Waterbury Vermont factories. Learn more about Caring Dairy!
Favourite Flavour:
"Cherry Garcia. My job was to mix the chocolate and cherries and put them in the ice cream for a good six months when I started with the company. I guess it kinda rubbed off on me."
– Roy Cook
Safety, Health, & Environmental Supervisor
Favourite Flavour:
"Anything with peanut butter. I love peanut butter."
Pint Confession:
"My team has a ritual. We'll all go out a grab the new flavours we come out with off the line and eat them on break. Nothing tastes better then a fresh pint of soft ice cream right off the line."
– Renee Corey
2nd Shift Shipping & Receiving Coordinator
In the overall ice cream production scheme of things, making the mix – and making it most excellent – is perhaps the most important part of the whole process. A very skilled and experienced person known as the Mix Master performs mix-making procedures at the Blend Tank, our 1000-gallon stainless steel mega-blender.
A batch of ice cream mix starts with heavy cream, condensed skim milk, and liquid cane sugar. To these ingredients the Mix Master also adds egg yolks, cocoa powder for our chocolate flavours, and natural stabilizers which help prevent heat shock and formation of ice crystals.
All of the ingredients are blenderized for 6 to 8 minutes, resulting in either a white "sweet cream" mix, or a chocolate mix.
The completed batch of mix is then transferred through one of two strainers into the Surge Tank. The Surge Tank is where the mix is stored until it is ready to begin the pasteurization process.
Favourite Flavour:
"Vanilla Caramel Fudge"
Greatest Moment at Ben & Jerry's:
"Being chosen to go to Hellendoorn, Holland for the startup of Ben & Jerry’s production line there."
– Corey Pelkey
Mix Coordinator
After ice cream mix is blended, it’s ready to be pasteurised and homogenised. Pasteurisation is the process of heating the mix in order to kill harmful bacteria. The Pasteuriser is made up of a series of very thin stainless steel plates. Hot water (182 degrees) flows on one side of the plates, and as cold mix (36 degrees) is pumped through on the other side of the plates, heat from the hot water is transferred to the mix, heating it to 180 degrees.
Before the mix has a chance to cool down, it enters the Homogeniser. There, the mix is forced under high pressure (about 2000 lbs. per square inch) through a very small opening so that the fat particles from the cream are so finely divided and emulsified that they do not separate from the rest of the mix. The Homogeniser works like a piston pump: mix is drawn into the cylinder on the downstroke, and on the upstroke, it's forced out at a very high pressure.
The cooled mix is then pumped over to the Tank Room (a 36-degree room with six 5000-gallon mix storage tanks), where it’s held for 4 to 8 hours to allow the ingredients to intermingle (it's kinda like simmering a sauce or allowing a fine wine to breathe - we just don't want to rush it!).
Favourite Flavour:
"Rainforest Crunch. I'm forced to live without it since it's in the Flavour Graveyard."
Ben & Jerry's Team Player:
"I joined Hazmat because I thought it would be a good way to learn more about how the plant operated. I am on the Community Action Team because it's an opportunity for me to direct funds to worthwhile organizations. I recently joined the Green team because that team works to raise awareness of environmental issues, and offer ways to protect our resources."
– Charlie Sayah
Receiving Team Member
Favourite Flavour:
"Triple Caramel Chunk"
Pet Peeves:
"People who only give a little bit or enough to get by. Everybody should give 100%, no matter what you are doing."
– Marie Pelkey
3rd Shift Quality Assurance Senior Technician
Once the proper amount of flavouring is added, the mix is pumped to the Freezer. The freezers at our Waterbury plant use liquid ammonia as a freezing agent (40 degrees below zero), and can freeze over 700 gallons of mix per hour.
Here’s how it works: the mix is pumped through a long, freezing cold cylinder known as the barrel. As the mix freezes to the wall of the barrel it is scraped away by revolving blades. When it gets to the front of the barrel it’s no longer mix – it’s ice cream!
The mix enters the freezer at 36 degrees and exits at 22 degrees, which is the same temperature and consistency as a soft-serve ice cream, or as we call it in Vermont, a “creemee.”
Favourite Flavour:
"Strawberry, which is only in Scoop Shops."
Safety First:
"I go Skydiving, and we have more safety moments than you could ever dream of! Maybe I should fly a canopy with the Ben and Jerry’s logo on it. They’re up there in spirit anyway. Okay so it’s not really Ben and Jerry’s, but safety is always first like when we do Community Action Team projects. I like doing them because it gives us all an opportunity to help out and contribute."
Pet Peeves:
"People who don’t care and worse, people who don’t care with leaf blowers before 10:00am in the morning. Clouds below 12,000 feet AGL."
– Ken Moore
Shipping & Receiving
Favourite Flavour:
"Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough"
Best Part About Ben & Jerry's:
"I work with great people who care enough to do their best and we make the world’s best ice cream."
Pint Confessions:
"I mostly just dig out the chunks and swirls and leave the ice cream behind."
– Kathy Jochim
2nd / 3rd Shift Maintenance Supervisor
Did you ever wonder how we get those thick, rich swirls of stuff so neatly swirled all through a pint of ice cream? The fancy word for "swirl" is "variegate," and whether it’s fudge, caramel, peanut butter, marshmallow, or fruit, we always use the finest & fanciest variegates we can find. But those great variegates would never find their way into a pint of our ice cream if it weren’t for a great variegate-guidance system.
Luckily we just happen to have the greatest variegate-guidance system there is!
Here’s how it works:
• Variegates must first pass through the Contherm, which lowers their temperature just enough to prevent them from pooling (which is not a good thing)
• Properly cooled variegates pass through the Variegator, which essentially injects them into the ice cream stream (which is a really good thing when it works right, and a really messy thing when it doesn't).
Favourite Flavour:
"Triple Caramel Chunk"
Sticky Situation:
"When I first started in Production, we were pumping fudge into the surge tank. A screen was put in backwards. We were waiting for the fudge to pump into the tank and it wasn’t coming. All of a sudden the hose blew a hole from the pressure, and the fudge went all up the side of me and hit almost everyone that was on the floor. Fudge swirls, indeed."
– Vicki Keel
Production
After the chunks and the swirls are added, the ice cream’s ready for dispensing into pint containers. This is done with a most amazing piece of machinery called the Automatic Filler.
Not only does the Automatic Filler fill about 120 pints a minute, but it also performs pre-filling tasks, like dropping pint-cups two-by-two into perfect position so the filler-head can fill them.
In addition, after the cups are filled, the filler further facilitates them towards the lidder, which properly positions & pushes pint lids snugly on the cups.
Finally, a nifty pint-cup lifter frees the pints from the lidder, where a little lever waits to push them out and away on a conveyor belt to the next step in the process.
Favourite Flavour:
"Chubby Hubby. I'm a big fan of peanut butter, and the PB swirl mixed with the PB filled pretzels is just awesome...the fudge doesn’t hurt either."
Best Part About Ben & Jerry's:
"I like the fact that B&J is not just about making the biggest profit possible. As a company, they spend a lot of money helping others through community projects, fair trade ingredient sourcing, the Ben & Jerry's foundation, company match of employee donations, and the list goes on and on. The people I work with are also one of the biggest reasons I like working at B&J. They are caring good hearted people that would give you the shirt off their back if you need it."
– Neil Jones
1st Shift Warehouse Supervisor
Before the packaged ice cream can be stored or shipped, it needs to be frozen further – from its semi-frozen temperature of 22 degrees above zero, to a fully-frozen-solid state of at least 10 degrees below zero. The process is called “hardening,” and it happens in the Spiral Hardener.
The pints travel by conveyor out of our production room and into the Spiral Hardening Tunnel, a two story, corkscrew-shaped mega-conveyor that’s quite literally the coolest thing in the whole factory.
The actual temperature in the Spiral Hardening Tunnel is 30 degrees below zero, but huge fans blowing in the tunnel create a wind-chill temperature measuring 60 degrees below zero. In this totally polar environment, the pints travel up the slowly spiraling conveyor for three hours, and when they reach the top, their temperature has dropped from 22 degrees above zero (soft-serve consistency) to 10 degrees below zero (fully-frozen-solid consistency!)
Favourite Flavour:
"Milk & Cookies. It's the perfect blend of vanilla and cookie madness. I am a cookie monster!"
Best Part About Ben & Jerry's
"Being able to wake up every morning and think about the opportunity to accomplish great things, how I will be harnessed, and who I will be able to positively effect in my day at work. It's a pretty awesome feeling."
– Luke Desmond
2nd Shift Logistics Supervisor
After the pints are frozen solid we wrap them for shipment. First, an invertor flips every other pint upside down, and a freezer worker ensures that 8 pints (2 parallel rows of 4 pints, with every other pint inverted) are properly assembled to enter the Bundler. The Bundler is a heat-tunnel which shrink-wraps plastic around the bundle of 8 pints. The bundled 8-pack is called a “sleeve,” and each sleeve equals a gallon of ice cream. Freezer workers stack the sleeves on shipping pallets which are then stored in our 20-below-zero warehouse to await shipment.
Favourite Flavour:
"Peanut Butter Jam Session"
Linked Prosperity:
"I went to NYC to promote a new flavour, and volunteer for a community service project. I did it to better myself within the company. I'm glad I went; I had a blast!"
– Jesse Ploof
Shipping & Receiving
Meanwhile, back in the Quality Assurance Lab, our QA folks are absolute fanatics when it comes to ensuring every flavour of Ben & Jerry's ice cream meets our strict standards of product excellence.
Every thumbs-up they bestow on a Ben & Jerry’s production run gives our ice cream traffic controllers the critical clearances they need to speed Ben & Jerry’s products to their final destinations everywhere….
Favourite Flavour:
"Coconut Seven Layer Bar. It's a Scoop Shop flavour; I love the coconut flakes and the butterscotch swirl."
Best Part About Ben & Jerry's:
"I love being able to give back to the community. The Community Action Team program has been a huge part of why I love working here. I have been a member for 20 years!!"
– Pamela Hakey
Quality Assurance Coordinator
Our definition of "everywhere" keeps growing more and more everywhere every year!
Ben & Jerry's products are distributed nationwide and around-the-globe in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants, cinemas and other ice-cream-friendly venues. And when it comes to ice-cream-friendly venues, of course, we think Ben & Jerry's scoop shops are by far the ice-cream-friendliest!
Favourite Flavour:
"Spumoni. It was a limited batch flavour in 2012. This amazing flavor was a cherry ice cream with cherries and pistachios swirled with chocolate ice cream with fudge chips. It was the best ever."
Pet Peeves:
"Socks with sandals, drivers who don't use a turn signal, bad customer service, ice cream with freezer burn, holding the scoop wrong, cat haters (how could you hate cats!?), people who are late, and hearing a fork scrape around a plate."
– Marla Hogan
Scoop U Professor
