Too Cool: Legendary Ice-Cream Makers Ben And Jerry’s Reward Customers’ Complaints With Something Special

Have you ever complained to a food company? Too embarrassed or are you one of those people who write off to the makers of each and every chocolate bar you eat looking for a freebie?

Complain to most food companies and that's what you'll get, or an apology or a food coupon at most.

But legendary ice-cream makers Ben & Jerry's decided to do a Willy Wonka on it and decided recently they wanted to meet face-to-face with some unhappy customers and bring them to their factory.

We'll repeat, to THEIR FACTORY. How cool is that?

The eight disgruntled (why are you still disgruntled?!) customers got to bring a friend along too. They only represent one per cent of the 7,500 complaints the company receives each year.

“It’s like a Willy Wonka-type journey into a factory and I’ve got a golden ticket,” one customer, who had complained about the brownies in his batch of Half Baked ice cream, told the Boston Globe.

He had already received a coupon and a refund check from Ben & Jerry’s, but then he got the invite to discuss his problem with the company’s “flavour gurus” in the Vermont factory.

“We didn’t want to just take the complaint,” a company rep explains about the field trip. “We wanted to move it further… We are the kind of company that takes what customers say seriously.

Another customer who got a pint of Pistachio Pistachio containing nuts that tasted stale, explained that she originally wrote the company to express her concern.

“If you are a lifelong fan of something, instead of saying, ‘I got bad pistachios; I will never have that again,’ I’m more inclined to voice my opinions,” she told the Globe. “It’s an opportunity to influence a company that I care about.”

“I’ve never seen a company do this type of thing,” she said after the trip. “It makes me even more inclined to buy their products.”

“From the day we started, we’ve always been concerned about the complaints we got. Whether they like us or hate us,” explains one longtime staffer.

But, wait, just before you start writing off complaints to the uber-cool ice-cream crew, they've stressed it was just a once-off deal.