Ben & Jerry’s Find Solution To Ice Cream Waste Problem - Pigs

STOWE, Vt. (AP) _ Pretty soon, some 250 pigs here will be in hog heaven.

Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., the makers of the premium ice cream, has recently been scrambling to dispose of over 2,000 gallons of ice cream waste generated each day at its plant.

Some municipalities didn’t want the milky refuse because of its stink and because of capacity problems at sewage treatment plants.

So ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield signed a contract with Stowe farmer Earl Mayo Jr., in which the ice cream makers will equip the farmer with 250 piglets.

Every day, the piglets are to eat hundreds of gallons of waste Heath Bar Crunch, Cherry Garcia and the like.

Mayo will pay the ice cream makers back over a period of time, or as the contract states, ″after they (the pigs) are fat.″

Fred ″Chico″ Lager, the ice cream company’s general manager, says the pigs will be treated to the premium waste: actual ice cream that is lost from production and milky rinse water.

He says the pigs love the ice cream - with the exception of Mint Oreo Cookie. It’s the mint they turn up their snouts at, according to Lager.

Ben & Jerry’s has doubled its sales in each of the past three years and now ranks third nationally among manufacturers of premium ice creams, behind Haagen Dazs and Frusen Gladje. However, it retains a 1960s attitude to capitalism, and its owners are far more at home in jeans than in ties.

There’s one footnote to the pig story. Under the contract, at least one pig must be named Ben, a second named Jerry, and a third named Ed Stanak.

Stanak is the district coordinator for Act 250, the state’s land use and development law, with whom Ben & Jerry’s has worked for over seven months to find a solution to their waste dilemma.