Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard: discover sweetest graveyard in the world filled with headstones for dearly deceased ice cream flavors.

When the iconic, happy ice cream makers at Ben & Jerry’s decide to retire your favorite flavor, there are two things you can do: crying, or pay tribute to it directly at the company’s Flavor Graveyard.
Although Ben & Jerry remain a popular couple of ice cream tycoons, they’ve remained true to their roots, and an example is the deliciously macabre cemetery located on the grounds of their factory in Waterbury, Vermont.

What began as an online-only ode to the company’s dearly departed pints (the so-called “depinted”), in 1995 has become a real, live tourist attraction.
Opened in 1997, it was originally an online-only affair, until a handful of resin headstones were planted on a hill behind the factory and, like an actual cemetery but in which “rest” ice cream recipes, each grave marker was given a clever epitaph that summed up the life and death of the flavor.
Surrounded by a white picket fence on a grassy knoll, lie the headstones of especially beloved flavours or particularly despised flavours, some that were introduced as early as the late 1970s when the company was founded, but sadly met their untimely fate.
Its first official residents came during a mass burial of four flavors: Dastardly Mash (1979-1991), Economic Crunch (1987-1987), Ethan Almond (1988-1988), and Tuskegee Chunk (1989-1990).
Interestingly, The day after the stock market crash of November 6, 1987, Ben & Jerry’s sent a truck to Wall Street and began handing out free scoops of Economic Crunch ice cream to brokers and investment bankers. The truck, parked illegally, didn’t please the NYPD, but the company was determined to finish the job and, each time the driver was asked to move, he’d drive around the block, park in the same space again, and continue scooping!

When it comes to short-lived flavors, Ethan Almond has its fellow residents beat. The flavor, vanilla ice cream with chocolate-covered almonds, was never even sold as a pint but It was a bulk flavor, created specifically for the opening of Burlington, Vermont’s Ethan Allen Homestead Museum in 1987.
Although Chocolate Comfort in 1999 and Peanuts! Popcorn! in 2000 did make it to grocery store shelves, both were laid to rest less than a year after their release.

Either way, the folks at Ben & Jerry’s are pretty good at word play and each flavour has its own poetic epitaph.
Dearly de-pinted flavors, a their term, include fan favorites like Turtle Soup, Fossil Fuel, and of course, Wavy Gravy and Rainforest Crunch.
It’s the job of one of Ben & Jerry’s in-house copywriters to pay tribute to the growing list of retired flavors with a few poetic lines on the flavor’s passing. Sugar Plum, for example: “It swirled in our heads, it danced in our dreams, it proved not to be though, the best of ice creams.”

Some of the flavors ended up buried due to bad sales, while others met stranger fates but, in any case, each of the headstones also bears the birth and death dates of the flavors.
According to Ben & Jerry’s site, there are 34 flavors interred in the graveyard.
Visitors can either take a factory tour which includes a visit to the cemetery, or they can come and pay their respects individually.
Today, it’s estimated that as many as 300,000 people visit the Flavor Graveyard each year and, luckily, sometimes flavors are resurrected, but don’t bother trying to dig up what might be the last known pint of your favorite flavor, as there’s nothing actually buried at the site itself.
Unless, according to a company spokesperson, you count “warm memories and cold reality.”
Turtle Soup, Crème Brulee, and Fossil Fuel are its most recently interred flavors.

Images from web – Google Research