After leaving Burlington on the 10th of July, our next stop was Waterbury, for a visit to the Ben & Jerry’s factory. A small tour of this amazingly small facility (2 production lines, and one flavor per production day) showed us where this world famous ice cream comes from. I could appreciate the three fold mission of the company, as outlined on the wall. The pictures below show it in full, I’ll get back to this after my vacation – the triplet product mission,economical mission and social mission is inspiring and presented in a far more juicy way than large multinationals present theirs. In that respect, it’s been a perfect choice by B&J to sell the company to Unilever, but to include full brand independence in the deal. Without that, the brand, it’s image and the great product would’ve been dead by now.

The tour ended with the taste of the flavor of the day, which is typically not for sale. Today, it was Strawberry Bliss, with strawberries and white chocolate. Not bad, but it doesn’t beat chocolote chip cookie dough for me. I got fooled by a 10 year old boy during the tour, when I thought we came from furthest away – beating Tennessee by miles. The boy was from a small town in Vermont, but proudly told us he was born in Nepal. According to the guide, he had won us all a free ice cream 🙂

A nice example of the humor of Ben and Jerry is the flavor grave yard, where past well known flavors are buried. Some famous and infamous tastes can be found there – including weird experiments like Sweet Patato Pie…..

With a freezer load of ice cream(or rather, two pots) we steered the RV further east, to North Conway in New Hampshire. A scenic route, along Kancamagus Highway and (thanks to the awful Route 66) also a dirt road. At Kancamagus Pass, just below the 2855m top, I took some pictures. The White Mountain Forest is something we can only dream of in The Netherlands. Tomorrow it’s shopping time, in the VAT-less state of New Hampshire, before we head toward Maine and then, finally, back into Canada.