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WATERBURY, Vt.--Every day, more than 250,000 pints of ice cream come streaming off the production line of the Ben & Jerry's plant in this tiny town in the middle of seemingly endless forest. If this isn't ground-zero for ice cream fans, it's hard to imagine what is.
CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman made a point, when planning Road Trip 2010, of ensuring that he would stop through this dessert mecca, and on Tuesday, he made it.
At this plant--which is open to the public for daily tours--Ben & Jerry's produces 20 flavors, all of which come off the line in pints. The company has another plant in St. Albans, Vt., that produces other flavors and different size containers.
Unfortunately, due to competitive concerns, the company doesn't allow photographs of its production process because it is worried that other ice cream makers may figure out the secrets of some of its machinery. But it did provide CNET with three archival images of pints coming off the line. Pictured is organic vanilla, a flavor the company no longer makes.
On one side of the production room, all the ingredients--sugar, cream, milk and eggs--are mixed together. Then flavors are added while the base mix is still at a temperature of 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Then it is pumped into freezers where it is brought down to 22 degrees. At that point, flavors that have chunks in them will have those additional ingredients mixed in, and then the finished mix is pumped into "cups," the pint containers. Finally, the pints are sped off on a conveyor belt into a deep freezer where they are stored at minus 40 degrees until they are shipped out.
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A view of the production room at the Ben & Jerry's factory. On the left side of the room is where the base ingredients are mixed. On the right side, toward the front is where chunks and swirls are added. And the pumping of the final mix into the pint containers happens in the middle.
Outside the plant, these tanks store huge amounts of liquified sugar, milk, and cream. The ingredients are pumped into the tanks directly from trucks and stored in the tanks until needed in the plant. The tanks are about two stories high.
Two pints at a time come off the production line. They are then funneled into a single pint column. Again, this archival image shows the production of organic vanilla, a flavor Ben & Jerry's no longer makes.
Inside the quality assurance lab, which is constantly running, the company conducts random tests and scheduled tests, and looks for things like milk quality, whether new ingredients can go in the ice cream, chunk distribution, and more.
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