Ben & Jerry’s is a Burlington, Vermont-based corporation, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Unilever. The company produces a wide variety of super-premium ice cream and ice cream novelties, using high-quality ingredients including milk and cream from family farmers who do not treat their cows with the synthetic hormone rBGH, eggs from hens on Certified Humane cage-free farms, and brownies from Greyston Bakery, a social enterprise in Yonkers, New York.
Founded in 1978 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the company now has just over 500 employees and nearly 700 Scoop Shops worldwide, with manufacturing operations at facilities in Waterbury, VT, and St. Albans, VT, as well as some production lines at the Unilever plant in Henderson, Nevada. Offering beloved flavours such as Phish Food, Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, and more, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream products are distributed in over 35 countries in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, franchise Ben & Jerry’s Scoop Shops, restaurants, and other venues.
The challenge
Ben & Jerry’s maintains the strictest standards of product quality to ensure its customers get the full flavor experience each time they enjoy a pint or cone of Vermont’s finest ice cream. This attention to detail can be seen from “cow to cone,” as the company says, meaning that each step of its supply chain – from suppliers and distributors to manufacturing operations – must comply with the company’s three-part mission statement, which emphasizes product quality, economic reward, and a commitment to the community.
Focusing on its manufacturing operations, Ben & Jerry’s maintains quality procedures for key performance indicators (KPIs) that ensure consistent product quality for every pint produced.
“By utilizing InfinityQS
® ProFicient™ to implement SPC and Six Sigma best practices across our manufacturing processes, Ben & Jerry’s will continue to identify opportunities for cost savings and ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction. The result is the perfect pint for our customers.”
Nina King, Quality SupervisorBen & Jerry’s
To track quantitative data, the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream manufacturing team had previously been using a paper-based system, which was proving to be cumbersome for operators and data administrators alike. Operators would take individual readings and calculate an average of those readings to plot on a paper chart. Quality assurance personnel would then perform manual calculations to compute trends and create reports.
This system was not only slow and inflexible, but also costly in terms of man hours required for calculation and analysis. Ben & Jerry’s needed a fast and reliable way to collect and analyze the vital quality data of its super-premium ice cream products.
“What sets Ben & Jerry’s apart from our competitors is not only our insistence on high-quality ingredients, but also the extra and unique flavours we use to create a euphoric customer experience. Ensuring the final product reflects the passion and quality that we put into each pint required a quality solution that emphasized the same attention to details that we do.”
Melissa Corcia, Quality ManagerBen & Jerry’s
The solution
Ben & Jerry’s decided to deploy the InfinityQS ProFicient enterprise quality hub to streamline its quality control procedures. Powered by a Statistical Process Control (SPC) analysis engine, the system easily automates data collection and integration from terminals on the shop floor, while its real-time monitoring and analysis functions enable the quality department to acquire Manufacturing Intelligence by tracking variability across each production line.
Because each line has a different run capability, Ben & Jerry’s created run charts within ProFicient based on Six Sigma data collected on the plant floor to determine variations specific to each individual line. By measuring, monitoring, and controlling four main product attributes—weight, volume, air addition, and inclusion amounts—as the pints come off the production lines, quality teams can work with production to quickly make adjustments in real time as products or processes approach specification limits.
Quality teams can also compare the data acquired through visual cut-ups—a process where a pint is cut into quadrants to ensure the proper amount of inclusions appear in each serving—to the run capability data in ProFicient to identify the source of any variability in inclusion or variegate distribution and volume as identified during the cut-up.
- Manufacturing Intelligence identified opportunities for improvement in run capabilities and raw material usage.
- Decreased raw materials variation created cost savings.
- Ability to tighten specification limits resulted in even higher quality products.
- Advance reporting capabilities generated time savings and improved efficiency.
The results
Since implementing InfinityQS ProFicient, Ben & Jerry’s has used Manufacturing Intelligence to identify instances to improve run capability and raw material usage. Because high-quality ingredients are typically high priced (up to $800 for a single barrel of swirl), the ability to fine tune processes with more precise specification limits results in less raw material variation, increased cost savings, and a higher quality product for the consumer.
Furthermore, with ProFicient’s advanced reporting suite, the ice cream manufacturer is saving a significant amount of time by eliminating manual calculations and time-consuming report creation. Reports now run in seconds as opposed to the eight to 10 hours that quality assurance personnel previously spent calculating data. Operators have dramatically reduced paper usage and can better focus on improving production processes and efficiency.