Breaking all the rules: employee-spawned innovations, plant expansions make Ben & Jerry's Springfield, Vt., facility a leader

Dairy Foods, Sept, 1992 by Paul Rogers

Employee-spawned innovations, plant expansions make Ben & Jerry's Springfield, Vt., facility a leader

"If you have paradigms, you really don't belong at Ben & Jerry's."

Doing things by the book has never been Ben & Jerry's cup of tea. One look at the Waterbury, Vt.-based company's well-publicized philanthropic activities reveals that fact. The company has carried over its nonconformist, yet highly successful business practices (20-plus percent sales gains each of the last three years) onto the production floor.

The processing facility in North Springfield, Vt., is clearly distinct from the typical ice cream plant-in how many plants can you walk onto the production floor and hear the 1970s sounds of Bad Company pounding out "Feel Like Making Love" or The Spin Doctors reeling off "Little Miss"?

But the differences don't end with loud rock music. "We do a lot of adapting on the equipment," says Stearman. The company's 20-percent overrun, 15.5-percent butter-fat, chunky-ingredient-filled ice cream requires special handling.

Even more distinct is the decentralized management style that encourages and implements floor-level production suggestions and grants the responsibility of quality assurance to all plant employees.

Humble roots

Like the whole of Ben & Jerry's, the Springfield facility rose from modest beginnings. The plant itself was a plastics extrusion company that relocated. "It was virtually a concrete floor, no drains, electric heat," says Stearman. Ben & Jerry's took over in January 1988 and has had four major expansion projects since.

* Phase I, 1988. Freezer built, flooring replaced, production area added, and boilers installed.

* Phase II, 1989. Compressor room and bulk filling line added.

* Phase III, 1991. Cooler and wet bay constructed, brownie line renovated and state-of-the-art mix-making system installed.

* Phase IV, January to July 1992. A second-floor added to the load-out area of the freezer and an automated hardening system built for bulk containers and pints.

The mix-making system, which consists of a liquifier, two blend tanks, a balance tank, a three-stage HTST pasteurizer, a homogenizer and automated controls, is specially designed to handle the highly viscous superpremium mixes (for more information, see story on p. 72).

The company makes mix four days a week, some of which it ships to a temporary production line at St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, 100 miles away.

The plant floor is divided into two distinct production areas: one for novelties (see sidebar on p. 64), and one for bulk and pint products. Mix travels to the flavor vats in one of the two areas and then either to a three-barrel, 450-gallon-per-hour frezer devoted to novelty production or to a two-stage 1,000-gallon-per-hour bulk/pint freezer.

Ben & Jerry's forms its own 2-1/2-gallon bulk cartons from three, coated, cardboard flats. The forming room is directly above the production floor. Cartons drop through the ceiling on a vertical conveyor. The company worked with the supplier to adapt a bulk filler to handle the cartons. The filler runs at half-speed--six per hour--because the ingredient feeder is run more slowly to accommodate the large chunks Ben & Jerry's is famous for.

Filled bulk cartons are automatically taped shut, weighed, ink-jet printed with the flavor and exact weight, sent through a metal detector and then into the hardener.

As for pints, Ben & Jerry's makes only Cookie Dough Ice Cream at North Springfield and was reluctant, to say the least, about just how it incorporates those balls of sticky dough into the frozen ice cream. Again, the pint filler could run up to 100 per minute, but due to the nature of the product averages only 45 pints per minute. As containers exit the unit, a proximity switch activates a machine that flips every other container upside down. Pints, in groups of eight, are handpacked in plastic bags that are then shrinkwrapped, sent through a checkweigher and a metal detector and into the hardener.

Product usually stays in the hardener about eight hours but sometimes remains for more than a day if it is the last batch of the shift.

Within the minus-40 [degrees] F hardening chamber, 30 racks, each eight shelves high, rotate in a rectangular direction. The racks, mounted on rails, move clockwise--14 on top, 14 on the bottom, one on either side.

A conveyor, angled up at about 60 degrees carries product from the plant floor through a small door near the ceiling. As it enters the hardener, the package passes an electric eye that activates an arm that pushes the package to another conveyor. A second electric eye triggers the conveyor to move for 0.55 seconds, hence regulating the space between each package.

The hardener is programmed at a computer panel from the warmth of the plant floor. The operator punches in air velocity, number of packages per tray and product spacing. "The bigger the container the bigger the needed gap," says Rick Jenkins, assistant production manager.

Once the programmed number of packages is loaded on the conveyor--13 is the standard--a bar pushes the packages onto one of the trays. A second bar simultaneously pushes product off the tray above. Frozen product travels down a spiral conveyor--dubbed the "Alpine Slide" by freezer workers--to the freezer where it is palletized.