Ben & Jerry’s opened its first shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded the company after completing a five-dollar ice-cream-making correspondence course. They opened their first store on May 5, 1978, in a converted gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets in Burlington.
The company’s early identity combined locally rooted entrepreneurship with unusually named, chunky ice-cream flavours. Its Vermont base remained central to the brand’s public image, even as distribution expanded nationally and internationally.
The company is sometimes confused with Häagen-Dazs, which was founded earlier, in 1961, or with Baskin-Robbins, founded in 1945. Ben & Jerry’s later became part of Unilever in 2000, but its first shop was a small Burlington business launched by two local entrepreneurs.