If you find your family traveling through Vermont and you are near Waterbury, you’ll want to make a stop at the Ben & Jerry’s Factory for a tour and some free ice cream samples. On a recent excursion to Burlington, we made a pit stop to check out the ice cream making process and taste some Ben & Jerry flavors. Located about 5 minutes off of Route 89, the Ben & Jerry factory offers a 30 minute tour of the facility for $3.00 a person and kids under 12 are free. It is best to plan a visit during weekdays as they are usually not making ice cream on the weekends, but you can still take the tour.

The tour itself starts with a six minute informative short video detailing the history of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, how they started making ice cream in 1978, and how Ben & Jerry’s has become what it is today. The next stop on the tour is an enclosed walkway overlooking the production facility.  Large numbered signs make identifying the different parts of the plant easy while the tour guide explains the process of making ice cream. This is the part where it’s better to visit during the week to see workers doing their craft.

After the tour your group will visit the tasting room, where you’ll get to try a current flavor of ice cream and ask any questions you might have. Everyone gets to grab a small scoop of frozen goodness, and if there are still extras they allow you to take seconds. Our tour guide was friendly and knowledgeable and kept the tour moving at a reasonable pace. If the tasting was not enough to satisfy you, there is a counter at the front of the building to order as much ice cream as you can eat – just follow your nose toward the smell of fresh waffle cones!

During the warmer months you can also enjoy the Flavor Graveyard, as well as a picnic area with a playground and patio. Check their website for events – they run a Free Outdoor Movie Festival throughout the summer at dusk, and during the winter they offer snowshoe tours on the grounds of the factory.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 3:25 am and is filed under Places to Go. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feed , or if you would rather receive an e-mail, please subscribe to the e-mail in the lower right hand corner of this page. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.