The Birthplace of Ben & Jerry's

Ben and Jerry's ice cream was founded in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont in 1978 by childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who had taken a $5 correspondence course on ice cream making from Penn State before launching the company. They chose Vermont largely because there was no ice cream competition in the area. Their early business model involved delivering ice cream to local restaurants, and they grew steadily by developing unusually large flavor chunks and creative names. They sold the company to Unilever in 2000 for $326 million while negotiating unusual social mission guarantees as a condition of the sale.

Source: Wikipedia