Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the creators of the highly acclaimed, world famous Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company, spoke to a sold-out Asplundh Concert Hall on Friday, March 24, 2006. Attendees entered the hall to jazz music and a stage occupied by two chairs, a podium and a large, white wooden prop covered by a red sheet.Greenfield opened by explaining that Cohen and himself no longer owned the company. Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings, Inc. was purchased by the conglomerate Unilever on April 12, 2000 for $326 million dollars. Greenfield joked that the people at Unilever “were actually funny about it. The same day they purchased us, they also purchased Slimfast.”
The two ice cream guys met in seventh grade during gym class. Greenfield said, “We were the two slowest, fattest kids running the mile.” After graduating from high school in Merrick, N.Y., Greenfield went to Oberlin College in Ohio to study pre-med. Cohen didn’t want to go to school, but after his parents and siblings filled out his college applications for him, he chose Colgate University because he had heard that there were fireplaces in the dormitories.
Greenfield graduated in four years but Cohen dropped out of Colgate after one and a half years. After applying to 20 medical schools and subsequently being rejected from all of them, Greenfield began to work as a lab technician to build his resume. After re-applying to another 20 medical schools and again receiving rejection letters from all of them, Greenfield called his old buddy Ben Cohen.
Through a five-dollar correspondence course offered by Penn State, Ben and Jerry learned how to make ice cream. They had each saved $4,000 and with a $4,000 loan from a Vermont bank, the duo opened shop in an abandoned gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
The shop opened in May of 1978, producing about 50 gallons of ice cream a day. When the winter arrived and customers stopped coming in, Cohen and Greenfield devised an ingenious promotion: POPCDBZ – Penny Off Per Celsius Degree Below Zero. And the customers returned.
In 1984, Hagen-Dazs attempted to limit the distribution of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in Boston, Mass. This prompted Ben & Jerry’s to file suit against the parent company, Pillsbury, in its now famous “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign. The campaign was highly successful and full distribution of Ben & Jerry’s continued in Boston.
Cohen spoke about how Ben & Jerry’s was a business that was to stay in the community. When him and his partner needed funding for a manufacturing plant, instead of offering stock in the company to venture capitalists for thousands of dollars, the company offered stock only to Vermont residents and for a minimum buy in of $126. By the conclusion of this unusual initial public offering (IPO), one in every 100 Vermont families owned a part of Ben & Jerry’s.
Cohen also spoke about the power of business. He explained how it controls government legislation through campaign contributions, elections through lobbyists, the media through ownership, and our everyday lives through the way we interact as customers and retailers.
Cohen felt that it should be a business’s primary responsibility to help the community. He explained how Ben & Jerry’s gave back to the community through everyday business transactions. The company would buy baked goods from Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, N.Y. The bakery employs and empowers disadvantaged people from the local community. Today, three million dollars worth of brownies are purchased each year from Greyston Bakery for Ben & Jerry’s “Chocolate Fudge Brownie” ice cream.
Cohen’s shining moment was during his two demonstrations. The first, featuring a series of rather large yet faux Oreo cookies, demonstrated how the U.S. government could shift unneeded funds from the Pentagon’s budget to other socially repairable issues such as lack of education, world hunger, children’s healthcare, energy independence and job training. The second demonstration, and the one that made the audience first laugh with nervousness then gasp with awe, was what Cohen deemed “an audio demonstration.” He told the audience to listen as he dropped one BB into a large aluminum container. He explained how that one BB represented 15 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. The audience was told to listen again as he dropped six BB’s into the container. He said that this represented enough nuclear power to blow up all of Russia. The audience was asked to listen one more time as Ben lifted a bag and for thirty seconds, poured 10,000 BB’s into the container. The 10,000 BB’s represented the full U.S. arsenal of atomic and nuclear weapons, or 150,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.
The night concluded with Cohen telling a funny and symbolic joke. He told the audience how he was in the shower the other night, “lathering up, enjoying myself.” When he stepped out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror, he said he realized that he had used 80% of the shampoo where it was unneeded, on the top of his bald head. This symbolizes the mis-use of funds in our national budget. Attendees were given free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream following the show.