Ben and Jerrys Double Dip: Lead With Your Values and Make Money, Too

Two entrepreneurs whose ice cream shop started in an abandoned gas station and ballooned into a $160 million-dollar business share how they became profitable while remaining true to their human and community values. 100,000 first printing. Tour.

BEN COHEN Bennett Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951. He met Jerry Greenfield,in junior high school in Merrick, Long Island.

Ben's memories of his childhood include watching his father put away an entire half-gallon of ice cream at the dinner table; eating directly from the carton with a soup spoon. Ben also recalls creating his own ice cream concoctions by mushing up his favorite cookies and candies into his ice cream.

Ben's first professional contact with ice cream came in his senior year of high school, when he worked as an "ice cream man," driving a truck, ringing bells, and selling ice cream pops to kids.

In 1974, after several stints at various colleges, Ben moved to Paradox in the Adirondack Mountain region of New York State in 1974 to become a craft teacher at the Highland Community School, a small residential school for emotionally disturbed adolescents on a 600 acre working farm. Ben was there for approximately three years, building his own house and working as the school cook in addition to teaching pottery, stained glass, photography, film making, and the yearbook. It was there that Ben also started experimenting with ice cream-making with the school's students.

Ben left the school in 1977 and decided to go into the food business with his childhood pal, Jerry. The two settled on ice cream and started performing research. They chose Burlington, Vermont as the second-best place to start their ice cream venture, mostly due to the fact that it was a great college town in desperate need of an ice cream parlor, and because their first choice -- Saratoga Springs, New York -- already had an ice cream parlor.

Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream Parlor opened for business in May, 1978 in a renovated gas station on a busy street comer in Burlington, Vermont. As the business has grown Ben's jobs have included scooper and taste-tester, truck driver, marketing director, salesperson, president, CEO, not-CEO, and Chairperson of the Board. He's also had to learn all sorts of new and critically-needed skills on demand over the years, like plumbing, roof repair, bellybouncing, dangerous carnival acts, and the art of samurai pint-slicing. In 1987 he even wrote a book with Jerry called Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book.

Ben and Jerry have been recognized for fostering their company's commitment to social responsibility by the Council on Economic Priorities, which awarded them the Corporate Giving award in 1988 for donating 7.5 percent of their pre tax profits to nonprofit organizations through the Ben & Jerry's Foundation, and by the US Small Business Administration, which named them US Small Business Persons of the Year in 1988 in a White House ceremony hosted by President Reagan.