About Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard
Most discontinued products disappear quietly from store shelves. Ben & Jerry’s sends its failed and retired ice cream flavors to a cemetery.
The Flavor Graveyard sits on a hillside behind the company’s Waterbury factory. Granite headstones mark flavors that have been removed from production, complete with names, dates, and deliberately ridiculous epitaphs. The physical graveyard opened in 1997 after the company had already experimented with the idea online.
The collection has grown to dozens of markers. Flavors that once occupied freezer cases now appear as names carved into stone, giving discontinued ice cream the kind of memorial treatment normally reserved for subjects considerably more important than frozen dessert. The company occasionally brings old flavors back, creating the unusual possibility that something represented by a headstone might return to store shelves.
Visitors can reach the Flavor Graveyard as part of a stop at the Waterbury factory, although access may vary with weather and seasonal conditions. It is hard to think of another food company that turned product failure into a landscaped attraction people intentionally climb a hill to see.