Speaker A
I just flew in from Vermont yesterday morning, and I didn't sleep at all last night. But I've had three cups of coffee, so I'm going to be very high energy, although I may not be coherent.
Jerry Greenfield shares the story of Ben & Jerry's, its social mission, and innovative business philosophy behind their ice cream success.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Ben & Jerry's success is rooted in a unique blend of social responsibility and business innovation.
- Founders prioritized community and employee support over traditional profit-driven motives.
- Creative problem-solving helped the company survive early business challenges.
- The sale to Unilever changed ownership but not the company’s social mission.
- Ben & Jerry's demonstrates how businesses can advocate for social and environmental causes.
What the video covers
- Jerry Greenfield recounts the founding of Ben & Jerry's, starting from their youth and early struggles.
- The company was sold to Unilever 12 years prior, but founders remain involved without management roles.
- Ben & Jerry's began in 1978 in Burlington, Vermont, with homemade ice cream made from a correspondence course.
- They faced early challenges including harsh winters and low sales, leading to creative promotions like Popsid Biswi.
- The founders struggled with traditional business roles and sought to create a socially responsible company.
- Inspired by a restaurateur's advice, they committed to making a business supportive of employees and the community.
- They pioneered an in-state public stock offering to involve local investors and maintain community ties.
- Ben & Jerry's integrates social and environmental concerns into its marketing and business model.
- The company supports local suppliers and social programs, including job training for youth.
- Ben & Jerry's uses its platform to address broader social issues beyond profit-making.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and personal remarks
- 01:27Ben & Jerry's acquisition by Unilever
- 02:55Founders' current roles and reflections
- 04:04Ben's education and early life
- 05:28Starting the ice cream business
- 06:59Winter challenges and creative promotions
- 08:22Transition from makers to businessmen
- 09:54Commitment to social responsibility and community
- 11:24Innovative stock offering and community involvement
- 12:51Social and environmental advocacy in business
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So that'll be good. And yes, the good news is we did bring ice cream, so there'll be ice cream at the break. Yeah, you know, I could be a total washout, but you get ice cream, so that's not so bad.
Speaker A
I'm very, you know, I've been sitting in the back with Richard Reed from Innocent. Very excited to hear Richard. He's going to be much better than I am. He's going to, so it's nice to know
Speaker A
that you have something good to look forward to. You know, I was thinking just before I get into my real remarks, in terms of the recommended attire for today, they suggested smart casual. So this is a big
Speaker A
switch for me. My typical attire is what my wife describes as aggressively casual. So, kind of... All right, all right, so let's start. So I'm going to talk about Ben and Jerry's. I'll tell some stories about Ben because
Speaker A
he's not here. I think a good thing to understand from the start is that Ben and Jerry's is no longer an independent company. It got bought about 12 years ago by Unilever, which people in the UK know about. You know,
Speaker A
when I speak in the U.S., nobody knows who Unilever is. They actually have a very interesting sense of humor. On the same day they bought Ben and Jerry's, they also bought SlimFast. Selling the company was not
Speaker A
something we wanted to do, but Ben and Jerry's was a public company at the time, and Unilever offered so much money that we were not able to find an alternative that worked for our shareholders.
Speaker A
So, and it was nothing about Unilever. We just wanted to stay independent because of the mission of the company. So Ben and I both still work at the company, but we're not involved in management or operations,
Speaker A
which really begs the question: what is it that we do? You know, Ben and I have now reached places in our careers where we have jobs with no responsibility and also no authority. So this is
Speaker A
something you can all be aspiring to. So anyway, if you like what Ben and Jerry's is doing now, you don't get to thank us, but if you don't like what Ben and Jerry's is doing now, you don't get to blame us either.
Speaker A
All right, so Ben and I are old friends. We met when we were 13 years old, 48 years ago. We met in junior high school in gym class, running around the track because we were the two slowest, fattest
Speaker A
kids in the class. And there was a pack of kids up in the front, and there was Ben and me in the back. And the coach was yelling at us, "Gentlemen, you've got to run the mile in under seven minutes. If you don't,
Speaker A
you're gonna have to do it again." And Ben would yell back at the coach, "G coach, if I don't do it in under seven minutes the first time, I'm certainly not going to do it in under seven minutes
Speaker A
the second time." And that was when I realized that Ben was somebody I wanted to get to know. We went through school. Came time to go to college, Ben did not want to go to college, but his parents wanted him to go.
Speaker A
His father and his older sister filled out his applications for him. He went to college. He dropped out. He went to a couple more colleges. He dropped out. Then Ben signed up with one of these really progressive
Speaker A
college programs called University Without Walls. So at University Without Walls, you don't have to go to class because the world is your campus, and you don't have to take tests. You get credit for learning. And Ben dropped out of there too,
Speaker A
still a little too much structure for Ben. I, on the other hand, went to college. I did four years straight. I was pre-med. I applied to 20 medical schools and got rejected from 20 medical schools. Ben and I were essentially failing at
Speaker A
everything we were trying to do, and we thought, well, why don't we try to get together, do something fun, be our own bosses? And since we always liked to eat quite a bit, we thought we would do something
Speaker A
with food. We picked homemade ice cream. Didn't know anything about it. We learned how to make ice cream from a five-dollar correspondence course. We were really broke at the time, so we split one course between us. It was 250 apiece,
Speaker A
and then we raised some money from a local bank. Ben and I had each saved four thousand dollars. We wrote a business plan by copying a business plan from a pizza parlor in New York City,
Speaker A
except every place where it said slice of pizza, we crossed it out and we wrote in ice cream cone. So we raised four thousand dollars from a local bank, and we opened up in May of 1978 in Burlington, Vermont, in an abandoned
Speaker A
gas station, making ice cream in a five-gallon rock salt and ice ice cream freezer. We picked Burlington, Vermont, because we were looking for a place that didn't have any other ice cream parlors, and Burlington is about an hour south of
Speaker A
the Canadian border, and it was so cold all the time that there were no other ice cream parlors there. But that seemed fine with us. So we opened in 1978, and it was a beautiful summer. It was great. We were making ice cream. We
Speaker A
were scooping ice cream. On a good day, we could make about 10 batches of ice cream. And then the winter came. It was minus 20 degrees outside. Sure enough, people stopped buying ice cream cones. We came up with what I think
Speaker A
was the best promotion in the history of Ben and Jerry's. It was called Popsid Biswi, which stood for Penny Off Per Celsius Degree Below Zero Winter Extravaganza. So the way this worked was when the temperature got below freezing,
Speaker A
in the U.S., 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but zero degrees Celsius, we started taking money off the price of an ice cream cone, and the colder it got, the more money we took off the price of a cone. But not even that was enough to get people
Speaker A
in the door. So we got through the winter by selling ice cream to some of the local restaurants that had been asking for it. That got us through a couple of winters, and then that didn't work anymore. We
Speaker A
started packaging ice cream into pint containers to sell it to mom-and-pop grocery stores, and the business started getting some traction. And just at that time, Ben and I looked at each other one day
Speaker A
and said, "Boy, what the heck is going on here? We're not ice cream men anymore. We're becoming businessmen. We're not spending our time making ice cream and scooping it over the counter to our customers. We're spending our time hiring people
Speaker A
and firing people and writing memos and correspondence and talking with lawyers and accountants." And it wasn't exactly our idea of a good time. Plus, we had grown up in the '60s. You guys have all read about the '60s in
Speaker A
the U.S., you know, peace and love, that whole thing. Well, that was Ben and me. So to us, business had all these negative connotations, and we felt like our business was just becoming another cog in the economic
Speaker A
machine, and we didn't want any part of that. And so we decided to get out. And just then, Ben ran into this friend of his, Maurice Purpura. Maurice was this older, somewhat eccentric restaurateur from down in southern Vermont,
Speaker A
and Ben was telling Maurice that we were going to get out of the business. And Maurice said, "Well, Ben, the business is your baby. It's just starting to take off." And Ben said, "Well, Maurice, you know what business does? It
Speaker A
takes advantage of its employees, it spoils the environment, it exploits the community." And Maurice said, "Well, Ben, if there's something you don't like about the way business is done, why don't you just change it?" And as Ben says, that had never really
Speaker A
occurred to him before. So at that point, we decided to stay with the business and see if we could make it something that was supportive of employees, supportive of the community. And at that time, oh, Ben and Jerry's was
Speaker A
probably doing about two million dollars in sales. We were making ice cream using World War II vintage ice cream-making equipment in a 3,000 square foot facility. We couldn't meet our orders. We didn't have room for our ingredients or our...
Speaker A
or our finished goods we were really bursting at the seams and we were at the the stage of a business where it needed to take in some money to get uh to the next stage and the normal thing for a business to
Speaker A
do at that point would be to take in venture capital to take in money from a small number of well-to-do investors who invest in your business in the hopes that the business will grow and that they'll make a very good return on it and what we
Speaker A
we decided to do was to use this need for cash as an opportunity to make the community owners of the business so that as the business prospered the community as owners would automatically prosper and not be dependent upon the businesses
Speaker A
kindness or generosity and the way we found to do that was to hold what became the first ever in-state vermont public stock offering having a stock offering just within the state of vermont it was something that had never been
Speaker A
done before ben unearthed this obscure law that said you could do this so we talked to all our business advisors they said this is a terrible idea first of all it's never been done before second of all you should take the money
Speaker A
from the venture capitalists because when you need more there'll be more where that came from and also there's not very many people in vermont there's only 600 000 people in the whole state and those that are there don't have very much
Speaker A
money and we said we don't care if we're going to grow the business we want to do it in a way that's consistent with our values so we couldn't find anybody to underwrite the offering uh the company underwrote itself ben and
Speaker A
i registered as stockbrokers if you can believe that we went around the state doing road shows and we had a very low minimum purchase of 126 so that people of essentially any economic situation could participate normally public offerings are reserved for
Speaker A
so-called sophisticated investors people that have several thousand dollars but that's not who we were looking for we were looking for our neighbors people who had been supporting the business since it began uh we advertised it in the first section
Speaker A
of the newspaper right next to the clothing ads and the supermarket ads said get a scoop of the action uh and at the end of the offering which we sold out we raised seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars one out of every
Speaker A
hundred families in vermont had become owners in ben and jerry's so we were very excited uh we continued to operate the company about a year and a half later we needed more money at that point we decided to have a
Speaker A
national public offering and in conjunction with that we established the ben and jerry's foundation as the charitable arm and the foundation would receive seven and a half percent of the company's pre-tax profits which was the highest percentage of any
Speaker A
publicly held company in the united states the corporate average uh for charitable giving is around one and a half percent and the reason we chose such a high percentage was because our feeling at the time was that a business
Speaker A
is essentially a machine for making money so that if we wanted to be as of much benefit to the community as possible we should give away as much money as possible so we had the stock offering we set up the foundation the company starts
Speaker A
funding the foundation and in no time at all the foundation was overwhelmed with grant requests from non-profit organizations ngos doing incredibly worthwhile work issues like hunger housing education what have you and the foundation could fund only a minuscule percentage of the requests
Speaker A
that were coming in and as we thought about it we realized that all the foundations in the country are overwhelmed with grant requests and can only fund a tiny percentage of the need and we started to realize that the power
Speaker A
of our business was not in what tiny percentage of our profits of the gross sales of the company could be but the power of the business was in how we operated through all our day-to-day operations that all this
Speaker A
money that was flowing through ben and jerry's was really how we could affect change and so we decided to see if there were ways for us to integrate social and environmental concerns into our normal day-to-day business decisions and when we first started to try to do
Speaker A
it we had no idea what we were doing uh in that way it's it's really no different from any other process of innovation of trying to figure out how to do something that you don't know how to do
Speaker A
uh you know it's it's kind of like new flavors at ben and jerry's most new flavors don't make it uh they never get out of the lab they never see the light of day you know we have the expression many are
Speaker A
called few are chosen uh is that an expression here in this country you know at ben and jerry's we say many are cold few are frozen so it's really uh the field in which we labor so we started to say well what do we do
Speaker A
as an ice cream company and how should we try to do this we said okay well we do need to come up with new flavors and we became aware of a bakery outside of new york city the graystone bakery
Speaker A
that works with people who are out of the economic mainstream people that have problems with substance abuse legal problems homelessness and this bakery provides jobs and so we thought well i wonder if there are any baked goods that this bakery makes that we
Speaker A
could put into ice cream and make an ice cream flavor we discovered they made some great brownies so we came up with a flavor called chocolate fudge brownie simply by purchasing those brownies from the grayston bakery we support the work that they do and ben
Speaker A
and jerry's gets this incredibly popular and profitable flavor ben jerry's now uses those brownies in chocolate fudge brownie pints in chocolate fudge brownie frozen yogurt in single serve cups and even when ben jerry's manufactures ice cream in europe
Speaker A
we ship brownies over to holland from the graystone bakery to put in those and i think last year ben and jerry's bought over 8 million dollars worth of brownies from grayston a couple years ago ben and jerry's also made a commitment to
Speaker A
transition to 100 percent fair trade ingredients uh not just in europe not just in the us but globally and the company is well on its way to doing that we also thought well we're an ice cream company we need to sell ice cream
Speaker A
in the u.s we have about 250 franchised ice cream shops and 14 of those are what we call partner shops they're shops that are owned and operated by non-profit social service organizations working with at-risk youth for ben and jerry's we make the same
Speaker A
amount of money selling ice cream to those shops as to conventionally owned shops and for those shops any money they make goes into funding their programs and they provide job training and jobs for the young people that they work with
Speaker A
uh in uh in the area of finance ben and jerry's established a relationship with the south shore bank in chicago the south shore bank came up with the idea of green lining of investing money into decaying inner city neighborhoods
Speaker A
where other banks were redlining taking money outside of urban neighborhoods and investing it into the suburbs so those are just a few examples uh of how ben and jerry's has been able to do this you know i could give a lot of examples of things
Speaker A
that didn't work but those tend to be not nearly as motivating uh you know several years ago ben and i wrote a book called ben and jerry's double dip lead with your values and make money too and in the book we concluded with the
Speaker A
idea that the most powerful tool at a business's disposal is its voice when businesses talk people listen politicians listen the media listens and business is always using its voice and always talking typically what business is talking about and advocating about are
Speaker A
issues that are in the business's own self-interest making more money and ben and jerry's has decided that it is going to use its voice to talk about larger issues i think the first time the company did this was back in the
Speaker A
in the late 80s ben and jerry's came out with a chocolate covered ice cream bar on a stick and we decided to call it a peace pop this was during the height of the cold war when the united states and the soviet union
Speaker A
were on these massive weapons builds up buildups and each country was trying to build more weapons than the other ones and uh instead of using the packaging this of this product to talk about what a delicious and luxurious
Speaker A
and smooth and creamy and and whatever ice cream bar this was we talked about the u.s defense department budget which at that time was 300 billion dollars and advocating taking one percent of that defense department budget to uh
Speaker A
to be put towards peace through understanding activities the idea being that uh as people from different countries got to know each other they wouldn't be as interested in blowing each other up well this is an incredibly controversial idea within ben and jerry's
Speaker A
uh people felt like uh it was not appropriate for a business to talk about what was essentially a government program that the company was going to be seeing as unpatriotic that retailers and distributors were going to boycott ben and jerry's uh and
Speaker A
to ben's everlasting credit he essentially shoved it down the company's throat and nothing bad ever happened none of those horrible things uh even even people who disagreed with the company's position respected that it was uh willing to take a stand on an issue that
Speaker A
was not in its own self-interest and since that time ben and jerry's has taken positions about opposing military solutions to conflicts that oppose the the first gulf war that the u.s initiated ben and jerry's has been involved in supporting
Speaker A
marriage equality in the u.s and here in the uk ben and jerry's has spoken out in support of occupy wall street which nobody can believe that that the company did that uh you know it's kind of ironic several years ago that ben and jerry
Speaker A
started to get criticized in the media that we were cynically trying to manipulate our customers into buying more ice cream by doing good deeds our response is that our actions are based on deeply held values and in addition
Speaker A
we understand that true marketing is an integrated and holistic attempt to meet another set of our customers needs our customers needs to have business be addressing the increasing social and environmental problems in our societies what we find is that
Speaker A
this way of operating provides ben and jerry's with uh added value a unique selling proposition all these marketing terms these buzzwords that that people are searching for it helps with recruiting employees it helps with retaining employees and best of all it helps with customers
Speaker A
what we've been learning at ben and jerry's is that there's a spiritual aspect to business just as there is to the lives of individuals as you give you receive as you help others you are helped in return and just
Speaker A
because the idea that the good that you do comes back to you is written in the bible and not in some business textbook doesn't mean that it's any less valid for business and people it's all the same well thank you very much great to be
Speaker A
here and uh great to be part of loyalty world thank you
Topics:Ben & Jerry'sJerry Greenfieldsocial responsibilitybusiness philosophyice creamUnilevercommunity supportsustainable businesscorporate social responsibilityentrepreneurship
