42 Totally Random Fun Facts to Celebrate Our 42nd Birthday
Happy birthday to us! May 5th marked Ben & Jerry's 42nd birthday, and while we'd like to celebrate by eating 42 pints of ice cream, our bellies would probably prefer that we find another way to show our excitement. So, we thought we'd dig up 42 weird, random, totally unnecessary fun facts about Ben & Jerry's to share. Maybe have a spoonful of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough for each one, in our honor:
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Item number 1
Ben & Jerry’s was originally going to be a bagel company, but Ben and Jerry found the bagel-making equipment to be too pricey. Their plan was to deliver bagels, lox, cream cheese, and the New York Times on Sunday mornings.
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Item number 2
Jerry was the first CEO of the company, so we made it up to Ben by putting his name first in “Ben & Jerry’s”.
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Item number 3
Each employee gets 3 pints of delicious Ben & Jerry’s goodness a day.
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Item number 4
Dastardly Mash (1979-1991) was the only flavor ever to contain raisins.
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Item number 5
We have a graveyard where we bury our discontinued flavors. There are over 300 flavors that have been sent to the graveyard.
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Item number 6
Founders Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield met in 7th grade gym class in Long Island in 1963. They were the two slowest kids in class.
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Item number 7
Ben and Jerry moved to Vermont and completed a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State University. They got a perfect score because the test was open book.
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Item number 8
The first flavor ever created by Ben and Jerry was Vanilla. Gasp!
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Item number 9
There is a tree house and a slide in the Ben & Jerry’s offices – both are used often.
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Item number 10
We created Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough after a fan anonymously suggested it at our first Scoop Shop. It’s since become an ice cream legend.
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Item number 11
All of the meeting rooms at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters are named after ice cream flavors.
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Item number 12
Ben & Jerry’s has two hot air balloons that they break out on special occasions. One is shaped like a Cherry Garcia ice cream cone and is almost 100 ft. high.
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Item number 13
The summer after their freshman year of college, Ben Cohen drove an ice cream truck, and Jerry parked cars at the local beach.
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Item number 14
The first Ben & Jerry’s location in Vermont was a renovated gas station, where they shared space with a local farmer who sold produce.
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Item number 15
Ben wanted to call the business “Josephine’s Flying Machine”, but Jerry didn’t like it.
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Item number 16
The first pints were Oreo Mint, French Vanilla, Chocolate Fudge, Wild Blueberry, Mocha Walnut, Maple Walnut, Honey Coffee and Honey Orange.
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Item number 17
Unfortunately, none of the original 8 flavors have survived.
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Item number 18
There’s a Scoop Shop that sits on stilts in Bannister’s Wharf, Newport, RI
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Item number 19
Canada was the first country outside the US to celebrate Free Cone Day
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Item number 20
Ben & Jerry’s headquarters are dog friendly, and many employees bring their pups to work.
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Item number 21
Worldwide, our most popular flavor is Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.
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Item number 22
Jerry used to drop boxes of toffee from the top of a ladder to break them up to use in Coffee Toffee Bar Crunch.
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Item number 23
In 1986, Ben and Jerry got into their “Cowmobile” and drove across the United States, handing out free Ben & Jerry's. Sadly, it burned to the ground on the way home. Ben said it looked like a giant Baked Alaska!
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Item number 24
Last year, PETA gave Ben & Jerry’s their annual Proggy award in recognition of the new vegan Non-Dairy line.
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Item number 25
Each waffle cone has an average of 259 little squares. Why so many? The textured surface holds more ice cream than a smooth surface.
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Item number 26
When Ben & Jerry’s first started, we sold soup, crepes, and pottery alongside the now-famous ice cream.
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Item number 27
Bourbon Pecan Pie can only be found in the state of Texas. Road trip?
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Item number 28
The machinery we use to create our Cores flavors is based on a German sausage maker.
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Item number 29
Including ice cream, light ice cream, low fat ice cream, no sugar added ice cream, Carb Karma, Greek and regular frozen yogurt, there have been 43 flavors with ‘Vanilla’ in the name.
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Item number 30
We have Flavor Labs at our Waterbury, VT factory and at the Scoop Shop in Tokyo, Japan, where we create wild new flavors every week.
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Item number 31
Chocolate Therapy and Oatmeal Cookie Chunk are the only Limited Batches we’ve ever made into full-time flavors.
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Item number 32
Speaking of Oatmeal Cookie Chunk, we’re pretty sure it’s our most-missed flavor. Maybe.
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Item number 33
The first Free Cone Day was in 1979 and was the founders’ way of thanking their customers for helping them get through their first year.
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Item number 34
The cow you see on Ben & Jerry’s packages is named Woody, after Woody Jackson, the artist who designed her in 1983.
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Item number 35
We were the first ice cream company in the world to make Cores, pints of ice cream with a thick core of something euphorically awesome (like caramel or brownie batter) in the middle.
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Item number 36
Since the late 1980’s, we’ve gotten all our delicious, fudgy brownie chunks from Greyston Bakery, a social mission-led bakery in Yonkers, NY that employs folks who have faced barriers to employment.
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Item number 37
100% of the profits from Greyston Bakery benefit the Yonkers, NY community, and we are proud to be a part of it.
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Item number 38
These days we hand out around 1 million free scoops of ice cream each Free Cone Day. Whoa!
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Item number 39
In 2017, we launched our new US Scoop Shop cereal milk ice cream flavours by putting a giant cereal bowl in the middle of Grand Central Station in New York City! People were PUMPED.
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Item number 40
Co-founder Ben Cohen has no sense of smell, a condition called anosmia. This is the reason our flavours are so packed with flavor and CHUNKS! More chunkjs and swirls made it more satisfying for Ben.
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Item number 41
There is one ingredient you'll never find in our flavours: Bacon. While It's one of the most requested ingredients from our fans, our flavours are Kosher Certified.
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Item number 42
Our Dough Chunks line is created from the actual chunks in our flavours, which means if Dough Chunks are available near you, then you can skip digging them out of your favourite flavour.