No doubt the quality’s gone down since they were acquired by Unilever. For all I know they put the same ingredients in Cherry Garcia fro-yo that they do in Dove soap and Vaseline.
Still, it’s hard for me not to love Ben & Jerry’s.
Vermont-made. Hippy-dippy old lefties. And, of course, Cherry Garcia, one of the all time great ice cream and/or frozen yogurt flavors. Okay, it’s not as good as that place in Truro, but I can pretty much get Ben & Jerry’s anywhere. Wish I had some right now…
So I really got a kick out of an article in last week’s Globe on a factory tour the company ran for a bunch of local folks who had written B&J’s a complaint letter.
They rented a luxury bus and ferried a group up to HQ in Waterbury, Vermont, to get an up close and personal tour of the factory, and an up close and personal response to the concerns they had raised.
My late Aunt Margaret wrote completely charming notes when there was something wrong with the Dromedary dates (or whatever.
Among other things my aunt managed to snag were the payback dates, which she needed for her famous (and famously wonderful) date-nut bread. (Wish I had some now.) She also wrote to the Yankee Drummer Inn to complain that, when my grandmother, aunts, and uncle were on from Chicago for my father’s dead-of-winter funeral, there was no heat in the inn. The now out-of-business Yankee Drummer Inn sent her an invitation for dinner on the house, which Margaret, my mother, and the Rogers kids took them up on – the Chicago relatives long since having returned to their nice warm homes in Chicago.
For a while, following in Margaret’s footsteps (handwriting?), I, too, wrote (what I thought were) completely charming notes when I had a problem with some consumer good or another.
I wrote to Cracker Jack to let them know there were too-few peanuts in the mix. In return, I got a carton of Cracker Jacks. (This was in the good old days when most companies followed up with product rather than coupons.)
Another time, I wrote the good folks at Tootsie Roll to inform them that I’d had a couple of Tootsie Pops that were virtually Tootsie-less. They, too, sent me a big box of Tootsie Pops.
More recently, a few years back, I wrote to L.L. Bean to let them know that, after I had washed some tee-shirts a couple of times, the hems fell out. L.L. has a completely wonderful returns policy, so they made good on the tee-shirts. (I think they changed suppliers, too, since I haven’t had that problem again.)
A few years ago, I was gearing up to write a letter to some Whole Food-ish cracker company when I found a tiny piece of rock baked into one of their crackers. When I spit the rock out, however, I saw that it looked quite a bit like a piece of tooth. At which point, my tongue detected that there was a very good reason why that little white thing looked like a piece of tooth. So I rescinded that complaint even before I could make it.
But I have not had any reason to write to Ben & Jerry’s. So I, alas, was not invited on the road trip.
Not so Scott White.
“I complained about a pint of Half Baked,” said Scott White, 24, a carpenter from Framingham. Six months ago, he dipped a spoon into a pint of the stuff — chocolate and vanilla ice cream studded with fudge brownies and chocolate chip cookie dough — and found the brownies “hard and powdery.” (Source: Boston.com)
White had e-mailed B&J’s, and they, in turn, had sent him a coupon and a refund check. A few months later, the magical not-so-mystery tour invite arrived.
“It’s like a Willy Wonka-type journey into a factory and I’ve got a golden ticket,” said White.
Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t bring everybody who writes a complaint letter to Waterbury. They do get about 7,500 such billets doux each year. But Boston is close. And it’s a major market.
The journey and visit were an “attempt to say, ‘We heard you and you are right,’ ” said Kelly Mohr, a Ben & Jerry’s spokesman. “We didn’t want to just take the complaint; we wanted to move it further.
The customers got to go behind the scenes, even meeting with the quality manager, who told the folks what had happened with their specific complaints.
Those stale pistachios in Pistachio Pistachio that had pistachioed a woman from Waltham off? They were “were roasted a little too long; they were a little stale.” Problem: no fixed.
As part of the tour, the complainants:
…were given lab coats, hairnets, and safety vests so they could go on the manufacturing floor during production... The group peered into blend tanks, saw homogenizers, and even tossed in a few ingredients.
Sure, this is a far cry from the days when Jerry himself would personally answer every complaint letter.
Ben & Jerry’s has no plans to run these trips regularly. (Too bad, I was kind of hoping I’d find a pit in my next pint of Cherry Garcia.)
Still, if I needed another reason to (still) love Ben & Jerry’s, this would be it.
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