Ben and Jerry's ice cream got started in a renovated gas station in 1978, and distributed locally with a VW squareback

They delivered a couple of gallons of ice cream to restaurants and shops in a VW Type 2 station wagon, until 1980

https://www.benjerry.com/about-us

The two hippies, who were born four days apart, had become fast friends when they were forced to take a gym class designed for overweight students at the Merrick Avenue Middle School in Nassau County in 1963.

By the time they moved to Vermont in 1977, and settled on ice cream as a livelihood, they were both 27 and college dropouts.

https://nypost.com/2021/07/31/how-ben-jerry-rose-from-vermont-hippies-selling-ice-cream-to-palestinian-activists/

Years after they graduated high school in 1969, Greenfield found himself sharing an apartment in the East Village with Cohen, who had dropped out of several colleges that he had enrolled in to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Greenfield had twice failed to get into medical schools. The two eventually drifted to Vermont, where Cohen got a job teaching pottery to emotionally troubled children near Lake Champlain.

Cohen and Greenfield initially weren’t planning to become major leaders in superpremium ice cream. But Cohen wasn’t having much luck selling his pottery and Greenfield had been rejected by medical schools, so they agreed to open some kind of store together. They incorporated their business in 1977, initially thinking of opening a bagel shop. When the machinery costs for bagels were too high, they instead invested in a $5 course in ice cream making at Penn State (famously attended by ice cream makers of all sizes). With $4,000 from each — including help from Cohen’s father, who paid half his share — and another $4,000 from a bank loan, they got to work converting a gas station in Burlington to suit their needs.

https://time.com/5252406/ben-jerry-ice-cream-40/

Settling in Burlington, a college town, where they could afford the rent and count on a steady supply of customers, the two friends started Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream and created a revolution. Not only were they producing high-quality ice cream — their first flavor was chocolate chip cookie dough — and buying their supplies exclusively from local dairy farmers, but their counter-culture quirkiness and commitment to grassroots social justice initiatives made them local heroes.

When Pillsbury, the corporate parent of ice cream rival Haagen Dazs, tried to scuttle their first distribution deal, fearing it could hurt sales of their own brand, the friends got national exposure with one of their public relations campaigns: “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?”

After three years in business, they were on the cover of Time magazine, which hailed their ice cream, with iconic flavors such as “Cherry Garcia,” as the best in the world.

https://nypost.com/2021/07/31/how-ben-jerry-rose-from-vermont-hippies-selling-ice-cream-to-palestinian-activists/

Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream that has the pseudo-Scandinavian name but is made in America by Pillsbury, pioneered the superpremium field and spawned such imitators as Frusen Glädjé from Dart & Kraft and Alpen Zauber, which is produced by a small Brooklyn company.