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Production Process of Ben & Jerry's

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Production process Ben & Jerry’s: from cow to cone Step 1: the milk The milk that is used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes from 10.000 cows from hundreds of local family farms. The milk from these farms goes to the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, based in St. Albans, Vermont. The Ben & Jerry’s factories based in the USA only work with the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery to provide the milk and cream. The two companies have a close relationship and interaction. Ben & Jerry’s pays a premium price for the milk and cream, and St. Albans Cooperative Creamery only delivers products with an excellent quality. Ben & Jerry’s also supports the dairy farmers that deliver their milk to St. Albans Coop. When prices for dairy …show more content…

Step 4: adding flavor to the basic ice mix Here, the basically unflavored ice cream mix gets flavored by a team of experts in the art of flavoring, that work the Flavor Vats. The Flavor Vats are a series of stainless steel vats that can each hold up to 500 gallons of ice cream mix. Ben & Jerry’s has an incredible range of flavorings, purees and extracts. Such as vanilla, pure peppermint, fruit extracts, banana puree and even special flavors from time to time. Developing a new flavor at Ben & Jerry’s is mostly a collaborate effort between Research & Development, Operations, Marketing and sometimes because of retail opportunities (feedback from the customers). There are a few ways in which a new flavor is born. Mostly, Research & Development creates a new flavor, and Marketing has to figure out an attractive name for it. Or once, Marketing have name to Research & Development, ‘Wavy Gravy’, who tried 159 times before they came up with the right flavor to go with the name ! Also consumers send in a lot of ideas for great names, like ‘Chunky Monkey’ and ‘Cherry Garcia’. It’s up to R&D to figure out the best flavor to go with those names. Step 5: freezing the mix to become actual ice cream Once the flavoring is added, the mix is pumped to the freezers. Ben & Jerry’s freezers use liquid ammonia as a freezing agent, at 40 degrees below zero. The freezers can freeze up to 700 gallons of ice cream mix per hour. The mix is pumped

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