Cream of the crop; Edy's Grand Ice Cream plant picked one of the country's 10 best by Industry Week.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Inc.

We've got great workers here in Indiana, but our cows leave something to be desired.

That seems to be the feeling of the folks at Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Pick up a package and it boasts that the delicacy is homemade from Vermont milk. What it doesn't say is that there's a good chance the ice cream is made not in Vermont but in Indiana. Nearly half of all Ben & Jerry's, in fact, is Hoosier-made. Apparently our laborers are good enough for the ice-cream kings, even if the milk from our dairy farms is not.

Who could blame Ben and Jerry for wanting to make their treat at the Fort Wayne plant run by Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Co.? It's a top-notch place, recently named by Industry Week magazine as one of the country's 10 best manufacturing plants. It's the only Indiana plant ever to receive the honor. Because this year's winners make everything from oil to electronics, not just ice cream, Industry-Week probably intended no pun when it saluted the plants as the "cream of the crop."

The management magazine was impressed that the Fort Wayne ice-cream makers had boosted productivity 57 percent over five years. The plant, it says, has attained "a unique balance between the short- and long-term focus held by its self-managed team members."

More than 130 people spend their days making frozen treats at the Fort Wayne plant, which once was a Borden facility. While Dreyer's is the chief distributor for hippies-turned-moguls Ben and Jerry, it is even better known as the creator of Edy's Grand Ice Cream. The premium ice cream is called Dreyer's out West, but because connoisseurs in the Midwest and East also have competitor Breyer's upscale ice cream in the coolers, Dreyer's calls its product Edy's here.

What has made the Fort Wayne plant so successful? In a word, "Grooves." That's what California-based Dreyer's calls its management philosophy. More formally, it's the "I Can Make a Difference" philosophy, but as a company pamphlet explains, "we express our philosophy...