[K]ILLARNEY, Ireland — A Vermonter traveling to an Emerald Isle supermarket for ice cream finds the trip full of familiar sights: green mountains, blue skies, grazing black-and-white cow after black-and-white cow, just like the ones on the Ben & Jerry’s cartons lining the freezer.
Then again, something’s off. Everyone is driving on the left rather than the right side of the road. Inside the store, you can’t buy pint servings but instead 500-milliliter cups. And perhaps most surprisingly, the iconic label is missing one seemingly imperative ingredient: the word “Vermont.”
Ben & Jerry’s, started by two friends in a dilapidated Burlington gas station in 1978, has ballooned into a worldwide powerhouse with annual sales topping $500 million. American tourists hungry for Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia now can buy some in 35 countries, from Australia, Brazil and the Czech Republic to Singapore, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
But scan the company’s cartons outside North America and you won’t see mention of its Waterbury factory — the hub of United States operations and the top tourist attraction in Vermont. That’s because as Ben & Jerry’s has grown globally since its 2000 sale to the multi-billion-dollar British/Dutch conglomerate Unilever, it has added plants in outposts ranging from Nevada to the Netherlands.
Here in Ireland, locals can buy metric equivalents of Ben & Jerry’s pints everywhere from four scoop shops in the bustling capital of Dublin to a tiny combination store and post office in the remote fishing village of Fenit (Irish for “wild place”), population 527.
Ben & Jerry’s packaging in Europe features Cornwall artist Woody Jackson’s trademark Holsteins. But tell Irish storekeepers you’re photographing the product because you’re from Vermont and they don’t grasp the connection. (Or where the state is, for that matter, until you note it’s northwest of Boston.)
Although Ben & Jerry’s Irish labels mirror those in the United States — same playful fonts, same smiling faces of its namesake founding fathers — they don’t include the word “Vermont” or list any other manufacturing location.
Why? The company didn’t reply to repeated requests for information other than to confirm the ice cream it sells outside of North America isn’t necessarily made in Waterbury.
Such reticence isn’t new: Reporters who’ve asked Ben & Jerry’s for facts and figures since its Unilever acquisition can attest that it frowns on revealing specifics so as not to feed the competition.
Then again, the company has a long history with the state. As its former chief marketing officer explained to this reporter a decade ago: “Ben & Jerry’s as a brand is the best ice cream money can buy, fun and irreverence, flavor you can’t get anywhere else; Vermont is what frames the picture. Vermont underscores our authenticity and product quality. It’s so much a part of who we are as a brand and a
business.”
Not that founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were always hungry for Vermont. The two friends, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951, met in seventh-grade gym class in Long Island and dropped in and out of colleges and careers before completing a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State.
The two wanted to set up shop in Saratoga Springs, New York. But because that city already had an ice cream parlor, they scraped together $12,000 and turned an abandoned Burlington gas station into their first storefront in 1978.
Hole in the roof aside, something about the location fueled sales. Ben & Jerry’s went on to set up headquarters in South Burlington in 1981, break ground on its Waterbury factory in 1985 and expand nationally and then internationally with the arrival of Unilever — the world’s largest ice cream maker of such brands as Breyers, Good-Humor, Popsicle and Klondike.
When Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s for $326 million in 2000, it said the homegrown company would retain its autonomy as part of an agreement toward “an even more dynamic, socially positive ice cream business with global reach.”
Fifteen years later, Cohen and Greenfield no longer run the enterprise but instead represent it as goodwill ambassadors. But the company remains based in South Burlington, still buys milk from family farmers who don’t give their cows growth hormones, and, as confirmed by a recent New York Times article, retains its annual Social and Environmental Assessment.
The latter document is one of the few places where Ben & Jerry’s pinpoints its operations. The assessment says the company produces ice cream for North America in Waterbury, St. Albans, a Unilever facility in Henderson, Nevada, and a “frozen novelties” plant in Sikeston, Missouri; for Canada in a Unilever facility in Simcoe, Ontario; for Europe in Unilever facilities in Hellendoorn, the Netherlands, and Caivano, Italy; and for Asia and Australia in Vermont and the Netherlands.
The Dutch plant may not draw tourists like its Waterbury counterpart, but it recently christened a “Chunkinator” biodigester that converts ice cream waste into enough energy to heat the entire building.
“We’ve taken it upon ourselves to understand our own carbon footprint through a lifecycle analysis of our products,” Ben & Jerry’s CEO Jostein Solheim writes in the latest Social and Environmental Assessment, “and we have started to design and implement a carbon reduction program to meet the targets that global experts say we need to meet by 2050.”
So why not reinforce that by reporting local manufacturing locations on its packaging, especially when the company is pushing for labeling of GMOs and has introduced a new flavor, “Save Our Swirled,” to raise awareness of climate change?
Again, Ben & Jerry’s has yet to say — and perhaps for good reason. Unilever, whose 27 percent share of the global ice cream market is twice that of its nearest competitor, is aiming to continue to grow the brand worldwide, having nearly tripled revenue since the 2000 acquisition.
“It is very exciting times for us as an ice cream company,” Kevin Havelock, president of Unilever’s refreshment division, was quoted by journalists in London earlier this summer. “It is a large market across the world so there are plenty of additional opportunities.”
Take Brazil. Ben & Jerry’s introduced itself there just this year, helping feed what has become Unilever’s second biggest ice cream market after the United States.
“The fastest trend I am seeing across all markets,” Havelock told reporters, “is pure, real and authentic.”
As a result, the best way for Ben & Jerry’s to branch out may be to stay true to its roots.
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
