Spring Island Trusts Ben & Jerry

Explore the origins and growth of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, from humble beginnings in a gas station to a beloved American brand.

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 was built on passion, creativity, and a willingness to learn from scratch.
Starting small with limited resources can lead to significant growth with the right strategy and community support.
Innovative marketing like Free Cone Day helped build strong customer loyalty early on.
Understanding and carving out a niche market is crucial for standing out in a competitive industry.
Strong leadership and adapting to challenges are key factors in scaling a business.

What the video covers

The video recounts the early days of Ben & Jerry's, starting in a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
Founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield met in seventh grade and eventually decided to start an ice cream business in 1977.
They initially considered other food businesses but settled on ice cream after taking a $5 correspondence course on ice cream manufacturing.
The first store opened in 1978 with limited funds and a one-year lease, facing challenges like seasonal sales fluctuations.
Ben & Jerry's quickly gained popularity, leading to community events like Free Cone Day to celebrate their survival past the first year.
The video includes anecdotes about the founders' backgrounds, their early struggles, and the unique marketing and business strategies they employed.
It highlights the company's growth from tens of thousands in revenue to $90 million, emphasizing the importance of good management and innovation.
The founders' quirky and authentic approach to business and product development helped carve out a niche in the super-premium ice cream market.
The narrative also touches on the importance of community engagement and media relations in building the brand.
Overall, the video provides an inspiring story of entrepreneurship, creativity, and perseverance behind a beloved American dessert brand.

Chapters

How did Ben & Jerry decide to start an ice cream business?

Ben & Jerry initially considered other food-related businesses but settled on ice cream after pricing out ovens for a bagel business. They took a $5 correspondence course on ice cream manufacturing to learn how to make it.

Where was the first Ben & Jerry's store located?

The first store was opened in an abandoned Art Deco gas station in Burlington, Vermont, which was in poor condition but had a great location across from City Hall Park.

What is Free Cone Day and why was it started?

Free Cone Day was started as a community celebration to thank customers for supporting the business after surviving the first year. It allows customers to get free ice cream and even rejoin the line for more.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Applause] Spring Island Frost Ice Cream Social. Chico came back from graduate school in California. He started a nightclub in Burlington with some other guys, and it was extremely well situated because between him and the bank, we had to go every day

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to deposit receipts, his proceeds. There was a new gas station, well, old gas station reconverted, which we all know now is the first tenant, Jerry Scoop Shop. Now, important police to resign of when is a great barter arrangement he had been

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which he may talk about, but more importantly, over the course of a couple years, the guys in this and the shop realized they knew nothing about business and so needed the general manager. So Chico was the first general

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manager and then CEO and saw the company grow from several tens of thousands of revenue a year to ninety million. [Applause] Good evening. What an introduction. Is there anybody here? A rhetorical question, I hope. Anybody here who doesn't like ice

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cream? Of course not. That's why everybody's here. So there's a lot of different theories as to why we all love ice cream, why it's America's favorite dessert. The best theory I ever heard was one that Ben laid out for us back in 1983. We

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were invited to participate in an ice cream festival that was being held out in Chicago at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, this opulent hotel out by the airport. Now, in 1983, we were not selling our ice cream west of Albany, New York, so there

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was no reason at all for us to go out to Chicago and scoop ice cream, but then said, okay, this will be a good way to kill the weekend. So he, Jerry, and I got into a van on a Friday afternoon, drove

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non-stop out to Chicago, and the opening event of this festival was a panel discussion that then had been asked to participate in along with three other industry notables. And they had all been given the same homework assignment.

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They were supposed to explain why ice cream was America's favorite dessert and why we're so fascinated with it. And the first three speakers really didn't answer the question. They just crypt some stuff out of the introduction to an ice

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cream textbook. You know, they talked about how the first ice creams evolved from chilled wines, how Marco Polo had learned about ice cream from the Chinese in the 13th century, first ice cream cone at the St. Louis World's Fair, so they

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kind of just threw that out. And then it was Ben's turn, and you know, Ben, as typical, did not put a lot of forethought into what it was he was going to say. So he, you know, he

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gets up there with his napkin from breakfast and then proceeded to compare the aural sensations that an adult experiences licking an ice cream cone with the aural sensations that a baby experiences suckling on his or her mother's breasts. This, he concluded, this

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was the reason why America was fascinated. Nothing to do with Marco Polo. All right, now some of these fixtures are going to be fuzzy because in putting this together I kind of just sourced some stuff off the internet. It's amazing what you can find,

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but here, here are our guys. That's Ben on the left, that's Jerry on the right. These are their high school pictures from Calhoun High School on Long Island, and they met actually in seventh grade. The story that they tell is

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they met in gym class. They were out on the track, and they were tasked with running the mile, and they were the two slowest, fattest kids, so they're lagging way, way behind all the other runners. And the coach, Coach Felt, chills Adam Cohen

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Greenfield, if you can't run the mile in under seven minutes, you're gonna have to do it again. And then without missing a beat, says, but coach, if we couldn't do it in under seven minutes the first time, we're never gonna do it in seven under

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seven minutes the second time. And it was then Jerry says that he said, this is the guy I want to hang out with. So they, they went their separate ways after high school. Jerry went to Oberlin out in Ohio.

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Ben went to Colgate University upstate New York. He chose that school because they had fireplaces in the dorms, and he only lasted a year there. And then he was doing an assortment of odd jobs, you know, a night mopper, Pinkerton guard. They gave

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him a holster, they didn't give him a gun. Jerry graduated from Oberlin and then applied to med school and got rejected everywhere. So they, they were kind of lost in terms of what it was that they were going to do with their futures. And

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in 1977, they decided to go into business together. So they had a couple ideas. One was that they would become cross-country truck drivers, but they rejected that. And instead, since they liked to eat, they said we should do

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something with food. And their first idea was actually a business they were going to call UBS, United Bagel Services, but they priced the ovens out. The ovens were too expensive. So instead, they settled on ice cream. Now, they had eaten ice cream, but they

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knew nothing about how to make it, but there was a ready solution for that. This is the true story. Penn State University had a correspondence course in ice cream manufacturing, $5. So they, they split the tuition and they got A's on all the open

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book tests. So now they know how to make ice cream. The next thing they need to do is they got to figure out where's our homemade ice cream parlor going to be. Well, Ben had been hanging out in

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Saratoga Springs, New York. He said that's a nice place. So they're working on their business plan and thinking they're gonna open in Saratoga Springs, but while they're doing that, somebody beats them to the punch. Somebody opens a homemade

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ice cream parlor ahead of them, so they can't, they can't be the second one in. So they look at a map a little further north, little colder, Burlington, Vermont, college town, and that's where they decide to locate. And they find this

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great, great structure to open in. It's an abandoned gas station, Art Deco. It's got a metal skin, it's got a curved glass front, it's in a total state of disrepair. The roof leaks, the bathroom doesn't work, it's a total mess, but it's right across

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from City Hall Park. It's got a great location. So that's all for the good, but the downside of the gas station is they can only get a one-year lease. Now that becomes a challenge relative to their financing. Now, they were each gonna throw

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in $4,000. Jerry had his four thousand, Ben had, he had a borrower, the other two from his father, but their plan called for them to get his twenty thousand dollar SBA loan, but with a one-year lease, SBA said no go.

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We're not going to lend you $20,000. So instead, the local banker at the Merchants Bank, Fred Burgess, sized them up for everything they were worth and lent them $4,000 on their good name. So they started their venture with a

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grand total of twelve thousand dollars, and they opened in May of 1978. And that's not a picture of opening day, but that's the gas station, and it was an artistic success from day one. Lines out the door, very, very popular. It was so

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you know, they're making the ice cream on a rock salt and ice freezer, and you know, hard to keep up with the demand, and in fact, on many days, they had to shut down early because they'd run out of ice

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cream. They came up with the international no ice cream cone sign, which is, you know, ice cream cone with a circle and a red slash through it. So it was a great success right from the get-go. They had a very good summer

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course sales. In the winter, Vermont being Vermont, slowed right down, but somehow they survived. They got through that first winter, and they were so amazed that they were still in business one year later and so thankful that they decided to hold a community

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celebration called Free Cone Day, which is just what it sounds like. It's a day when you can line up and get free ice cream, and the great part is after you get your ice cream, you can get back on

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the end of the line. I believe this picture was actually taken on a Free Cone Day. So to promote Free Cone Day, they put flyers up all over town, and on each of the flyers, there was a quote

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from the two founders. Ben's quote was, business has a responsibility to give back to...

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define been injuries today were evident and how these guys were running the business from its earliest days long before they had made any money they were giving away free ice cream they were sponsoring community celebrations they were supporting nonprofits and that

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carried on very much through the history of the company now they weren't making any money which is the reason why they started a wholesale operation 1979 they started to sell two and a half gallon tubs to restaurants then literally had a

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Volkswagen Square back and he had a cooler in the back and he throw the ice cream in and he drive very fast which is a natural tendency for been he thought that tickets were you know a tax deductible I had to explain to him that

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they weren't anyway Ben's driving around the state of Vermont you know going you know from you know high-end restaurant to high-end restaurant and you know Vermont you know there aren't that many high-end restaurants so they're still not making any money and in 1980 they

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decided to put the ice cream in two pints and that's really the decision that that transformed the business so they're still not making any money they get through 1981 sales probably in total about $700,000 in 1982 and these guys

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are burnt out you know they're four years into their venture they've been working 70 80 90 100 hour weeks rarely taking a day off and Jerry in particular has put on a lot of weight and he's he's had it because

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Ben has nonstop coming up with new ideas and Jerry's on the receiving end and he said enough and as a further incentive Jerry's friend now his wife Elizabeth was enrolling in a doctoral program in Phoenix Arizona so Jerry wants to go to Phoenix and in

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1982 they put the business up for sale listed it with a business broker but at the last minute you know Ben as he was want to do changed his mind and says no I want to keep the business but he knew

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that if he was going to keep it he was going to have to bring in somebody who could help him run it ideally somebody who had a little business experience and he you know put the ad in the paper interviewed a bunch

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of suits you know and you know he was looking to replace Jerry you know his soul mate and so he rejected you know all the suits and then one day he approached me I had an MBA which as

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Charles referred I was putting to good use as a bartender in this nightclub that I own and as he says it was right around the corner from from the gas station and Ben Jerry and I had worked out a free-trade agreement it was a

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precursor of NAFTA we were ahead of our times I could go up there and get free ice cream they could come to my place and I slipped him a beer and I wouldn't charge him a cover to get in the doors

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so I joined in 1982 the end of 1982 so you know what was it like joining venta Jerry's at the end of 1982 well this is this is our world headquarters now you can see we're we don't have a lot of

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storage space that's why all of our our freezers are out front and what you don't see in this picture out of frame to the left this is a butler building sat on Shelburne Road where all the car dealerships are and right to the we have

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3,000 square feet of this 10,000 square foot building but right to our left just pass there is a truck garage six Bay truck garages where they they fixed international trucks one bathroom in the entire building for all of us

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this is our manufacturing operation that that woman Althea just retired from ven and Jerry after a 40 year career so she is filling the pints now you talk about hand filled pints so that's a frosted pipe that's coming down and there's ice

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cream coming out of that at 150 gallons per hour off-camera what you don't see that's hooked up to a cherry of Burrell v1z freezer which is affectionately known in the industry is the old commander circa World War two these are

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the freezers that nobody used but that's what we were using ice cream coming out 150 gallons an hour and the the filler you know would hold the pint under the pipe and you know swirl it around to get

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a full fill and then pull it away you know scraping it across the top of the paint across the pipe and then you know come up behind it with another one and slide the completed pipe down the road

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and down the road was the capper and the capper would be putting caps and you know trying to clean up the spills and stuff you know to make it a nice clean pint and then they would go you know

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through a shrink tunnel you know eight pints into a plastic bag through a shrink tunnel and then they would go into the freezer that's our freezer now this is a picture of Jerry probably after he got back from

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Phoenix in the summer he'd come back to the summers he had lost about 50 or 60 pounds and you can see he's smiling because he doesn't have to do any work but those are the two and a half gallon

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tubs and and those are the pints there's the hero of the story right there you can see I at one time did have hair but the trend line was evident so in my in my left hand I'm holding the

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general ledger this is 1982 there are no personal computers and the general ledger is about this thick and I got a calculator down there with a tape and that's how I would do the books it would take like three days to do the books

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depending on how many mistakes I made when I ran my trial balance you know before I got there Ben and Jerry we're using a mail-order accountant you know they had a slogan in those days Ben and Jerry only do the jobs that Ben and

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Jerry like to do and neither of them liked or knew how to do the book so ever and every month they just throw some papers in an envelope mail and off to this guy and he'd come back with a PL

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financial statement about you Korsak totally inaccurate because one of the other things that Ben and Jerry didn't like to do is they didn't like to open the mail so I spent my first year reconciling to reality and that that was

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what I would write when I do an adjusting entry I just wrote reconciled to reality to get and I did find in my in my going through all the drawers and stuff I found Ben's 1981 federal income tax refund check he

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was very appreciative and I found a couple I found a couple hundred bucks in cash and you know I was very appreciative to all right we get to the end of 1983 so this is the end of my

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first year this is the only graph in this presentation you can see our sales at the end of my first year they doubled from about a 900,000 to 1.8 million we had eked out our first profit that's the good news and looking ahead towards

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1984 you know based on where our distribution was we felt pretty good that we're gonna do about three and a half million maybe four million in 1984 so that's the good news the bad news is that last column we were running out of

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capacity we were landlocked we couldn't enlarge the plan anymore and we needed to build a new factory in order to keep up with demand otherwise we couldn't continue to grow and the new factory was estimated to cost 3.5 million the same

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way all of your houses were estimated to cost whatever it was and you know what that's like so we're gonna you know needless to say we didn't have three and a half million dollars in our checking account we typically played the float we

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had negative cash in our checking account so you know if we're gonna build a factory we're gonna have to raise some equity we're gonna have to borrow a whole bunch of money and we figured before we can do that we're gonna have

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to demonstrate that we can go into a major market and be successful because up to this point we're only selling in northern New England Vermont New Hampshire Maine a little bit in Albany New York so we set our sights on Boston

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and by going into Boston that means that we're going to be in direct head-to-head competition with haagen-dazs Haagen Dazs created the super premium category super premium ice creams are the ones that are highest in butterfat lowest and air content they are the healthiest ice

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creams you can eat the story of haagen-dazs it's a great story couple of immigrants from Poland Rubin and Rose mattes who were legends in the ice cream world created haagen-dazs you know up until this point the game with ice cream was pump as much air in

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as you can and put the cheapest ingredients in and sell it for the lowest price and Rubin came up with the idea of maybe if we made a really good product people would buy it and it was in pints whereas most ice cream was

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being sold in half gallons or gallons and it was very expensive so he he his other great genius idea was to make believe this product was imported he thought the upper-income people he was targeting would be attracted to a

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quote-unquote imported product so he put a map of Scandinavia on the lid who put a star where Copenhagen is and he came up with this name haagen-dazs which means absolutely nothing he even put a couple normal lot a couple of dots

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over the a there's no one lot in the Danish language and he was making the stuff in the Bronx so but the ice cream was phenomenal it tasted great and it and it became really really successful and as is typical and very typical in

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the ice cream business but also in most other industries you know once you do something there's other people who try and copy it so immediately after haagen-dazs had you know set the market off you started seeing brands like

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fusion glossier alkanes Elber the glass to curry hurshe know all these ice cream companies started coming out with ice creams that mimicked haagen-dazs they all took fake foreign sounding names and they all copied this you know very elegant bit of packaging now Benny

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Jerry's took a different approach we we put our founders on the lid and there's nothing worldly about them and we we used hand lettering well you know that was hand lettered and we have this this guy man the the man making ice

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cream which is part of the original logo and that's that's how we ended the market so what we did was instead of being another me to product we basically carved out a niche within the super-premium in a segment that

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differentiated us from haagen-dazs and all of the clones and we also differentiated ourselves with our flavors because hugging us and all the others you know they were selling Vanilla's and chocolates and our best sellers were heath bar crunch and

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dastardly mash and mint with Oreo cookies so we we had a segment of the super premium ice cream market that set us apart and which enabled us to be successful now we're getting ready to enter Boston right before we enter

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Boston Rubin and Rose sell haagen-dazs to the pillsbury corporation for billion dollar company at the time they owned you know beyond all their branded products they owned Burger King a whole host of other a whole host of other

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products and we entered the Boston Market and you know we're doing okay you know which this is March 1984 you know started to make some inroads getting a few independent convenience stores we get a few chain convenience stores

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demoulas Market Basket takes us in so you know we're feeling pretty good around March I'm in the office with Ben we're actually talking to an architect about the new plant that we're designing and he pulls me aside and says Chico I

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was just down to Boston yesterday and I got some news for you had him he had a meeting with Paul Tosi who was the owner all's I scream which was the independent ice-cream distributor that carried Ben and Jerry's ice cream and he said Paul

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told them that he'd been getting phone calls from a VP at haagen-dazs telling him that if they didn't drop in and Jerry's haagen-dazs was gonna stop selling them their product now Paul's was an independent distributor he carried us he carried haagen-dazs he

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carried about a hundred different ice cream brands but if he had to choose between haagen-dazs which was the market leader in Ben & Jerry's which had just ended the market and was an upstart there was no choice so Ben tells me this

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news and they starts laughing and I go what's so funny because what we should be flattered and yeah we should be flattered we were because you know we were noticed and we had gotten their attention but it was a real challenge

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for us because without access to Paul's and the other independent ice cream distributors we had no access to the marketplace and we had no way of getting our product to the retailers so you know we knew that in in a court room in a

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court of law we thought what they were doing was illegal we did a little research we thought in a court of law the advantage obviously was Pillsbury Pillsbury had 20 lawyers on staff they had more lawyers on staff than we had

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staff but we knew in the courtroom a public opinion the advantage was ours so first thing we did was it's a little blurry but that's Jerry that's that's Pillsbury's world headquarters and he's doing a one-person picket with the hand-lettered sign says what's the

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Doughboy afraid of that's our rallying cry that if there's that's going to be in the first paragraph of my obituary those those five words are my greatest contribution to been Jerry so you know we start getting a little attention you

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know we let Minnesota Public Radio know in it we let the Star Tribune know they wrote a story went on the AP wire start to get a little publicity that's pretty good and we follow that up we on every

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pint we put a sticker says what's the dope we're afraid of and it has an 800 number and people can call the 800 number which they do they get like a 30-second blurb of been telling what's going on and then they can leave their

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name and address and which they do and we're transcribing them and we send them a Doughboy write-in kit the phone number is the Doughboy hotline and if you call it you get a Doughboy writing tip which includes a bumper sticker and a brochure

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and a couple of form letters one to the FTC asking them to intervene and one to Bill spore who was the chair of the board of Pillsbury telling him the bug off and we're getting we're getting thousands of costs and which so we

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follow that up with you know we took a big billboard out on route 128 we take on the back of buses we got a picture of these two white pudgy hands squeezing a pint of Ben & Jerry's I took out a classified ad in Rolling

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Stone magazine you know under bumper stickers flew a plane over BC college football games with a what's the Doughboy afraid of banner all designed to get the media's attention you know back then you know no Twitter no you had

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a you had to go through the gatekeepers you had to get the attention of a reporter or a or an editor and it worked we were feeding the media and they were eating it up and so we're getting we're

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getting millions and millions of dollars worth of free publicity this is just a sampling Calvin Trillin wrote an article in The New Yorker cover of the Boston Globe magazine and you know so we're getting national name recognition that we never

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could have purchased and it only took pills very about a year and a half to figure that out so eventually we also hired a great law firm Robson gray out of Boston and eventually Pillsbury backs down and and they enable us to maintain

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our distribution now while that's all going on we're also trying to raise the money for the new factory typically at this stage one of business needs to raise money they turn to venture capital Ben wanted nothing to do with venture

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capital he didn't want some guy in a suit telling him how to run the business so he came up with this idea that we would do a stock offering limited only to residents of the state of Vermont there's SEC exemption that allows you to

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do that you know his idea was that the people who had lined up at the gas station should own the business so a lot of Hoops to jump through before you can do this with the Vermont Department of

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Banking and Insurance we jump through them all and that's our tombstone you know most tombstones get placed after an IPO is completed you know it's just you know a you know kind of a big celebration but we needed to sell our stocks so we we

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put the tombstone not in the financial pages we had them with the movie and TV listings and and with the sports pages the P the pages where people were actually reading now you know if the price there is ten dollars and fifty

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cents a share the minimum purchase twelve shares one hundred and twenty six dollars you know we had a very lengthy prospectus that gave you a lot of reasons why you were going to lose your money if you invested in Ben & Jerry's

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and Vince feeling was if it's a hundred 26 bucks they're not going to read the prospectus everybody's got 126 bucks they'll just send them in and we did a roadshow you know four o'clock every afternoon Ben Jerry and I would get into a van and

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load up some ice cream and we drive to a Holiday Inn somewhere around the state do a little dog and pony show well in two months it was a great success we raised $750,000 net of expenses in two months we gave up seventeen percent

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of the company the VCS had wanted a third of the company for that same level of investment so very efficient eighteen hundred people or households made investments we estimated that was one in every hundred Vermont households and we

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sent them all a bumper sticker I've got a scoop of the action if you follow closely you'll see that 800 numbers and bumper stickers were very integral to the success of been injuries so we got 750 we have

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to get the rest of the money while all of this was going on we're talking with banks saying will you lend us 2.1 million dollars and they're going what are you nuts I mean you're you're fighting Pillsbury you're trying to

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raise money with this crazy Vermont stock offering that's not going to work we got rejected by every bank in Vermont New Hampshire Massachusetts New York City finally a banker in Albany New York worked for marine Midland Bank ten

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cartlidge looked at us and said I believe in you and he went this 2.1 million dollars and and with that in hand plus our equity we qualified for an urban development action grant which was subordinated debt so on august 1st 1984

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we had our three and a half million dollars and we could get into the ground before snow flew and that was the key you know we'd been designing the plant and designing the process but in Vermont used to be not so much anymore we used

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to have winters like this so we had it and we had to get in there and pour the concrete before the ground froze and then we built through the winter but we did it and that's a that's a picture of

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it a little after completion that's a that's a cow by the way that came off he that's a family farm it's a heifer so we didn't have to milk it but the the tour the the factory was built to allow for factory tours so the

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cows completed the scene and we started making ice cream there in June 1985 so I want you to think about this week um we got our our financing on August 1st and we're making ice cream in June you know

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that's what like ten months you know Chris and Val could build a house and in 10 months event and I could not so it's really quite amazing that that we completed that so let's let's talk let's talk a little bit about ice cream these

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some of these pictures are blurry because I pulled them off the interstate but I'm good to talk about anybody some Jerry Garcia here tonight yeah so where did the idea of of a flavor called Cherry Garcia and honor of Jerry Garcia

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come come from actually suggested anonymously via postcard front of the postcard was Ronnie reg a President Reagan and dreadlocks the back of the postcard anonymous from two dead heads in Portland Maine said we think you should name a flavor Cherry Garcia in

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honor of Jerry Garcia we know it will sell because Dead paraphernalia always sells so soon as the plants up and running you know we run the Cherry Garcia now the question we had the dilemma we faced was do we ask

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permission of Jerry and we gave this considerable thought and as it were Jerry and Ben are out on the west coast and they run into one of the editors of relics which is the Grateful Dead fan magazine and they they tell her what's

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up we're doing this flavor suggest that anonymously it's a tribute to Jerry and Ben and Jerry are both real big dead heads I mean they're they love the van they love the music so they asked the editor you know

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well should we ask permission she says well and make some phone calls and we have no idea who she called but she came back and said just go ahead and do it and that was the answer we wanted so

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that's what we did so we've run the flavor and we send an ICBM out to to the the Grateful Dead offices ICBM is ice-cream by mail it's actually a bit of a misnomer because we sent it FedEx you know six pints

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Styrofoam container little dry ice we labeled it machine parts so we didn't have to fill out the hazardous material so we send it out to nobody carry we sent it out to Jerry's office and holding our breath a week later

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receptionist buzzes through and says Chico I got a woman on the line says she's Jerry Garcia's wife and she wants to talk with the other Benner Jerry and they're both out of the office will you take the call and I'm going well of

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course I'm going to take that call I mean who what's the EO would not want to talk with Jerry Garcia's wife so I talked to her and she's oh we got the ice cream we love it course Jerry's a

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diabetic I don't we're not sure that that he actually ate it but he was quoted as saying as long as they don't name a motor oil after me I'm okay so we think we're all set but then two weeks

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later we do get a call from the Grateful Dead attorney how can't and that's another long story I'll just I'll just summarize it by saying after a few bumps in the road and when and we made it clear that you know we're not litigating

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with the Grateful Dead if you don't want us to do it we won't do it but we came to a great agreement royalty a lot of the money going to their nonprofit foundation and it was a great win-win so

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and that actually became the model for a number of other flavors that we developed so fish food any fish fans here you know fish is one of the great exports of Vermont we did fish food wavy gravy it

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was anybody anybody at Woodstock anybody here at Woodstock nobody wants to have in there nobody here that's amazing wavy gravy was the announcer Woodstock he was the guy who said what we have in mind is breakfast in bed for four

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hundred thousand people also quoted as saying the the 90s or the 60s standing on their head we did you know Jimmy Fallon others this is it's a little blurred but that's net Netflix and chilled which is the newest one that

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just came out and of course my favorite for our left sweaty balls you know there was one actor when that came out there was a there was a movement to boycott Ben & Jerry's when that came out I think the organization

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was mother's with no sense of humor and and I debated I debated whether I should include that but you know it's a trust talk and Chris Marsh has talked about alligators mating and I have to believe somewhere along the line I'm not the

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first guy to stand up here and talk about shorty balls moving ahead so 1988 were about 48 million in sales we've been doubling you know we went from 1 to 2 to 4 to 10 to 20 million 30 to 48 million and we're

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adding a lot of management the founders are becoming a little less active so we thought it was important to memorialize the values and the vision of the business into a mission statement and it's really blurry but I'm going to read

Speaker A

you the just the top line Benny Jerry's is founded and dedicated I can't even read that to identity to it to a new corporate concept of link prosperity link prosperities the the key words there we had three missions product

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economic and social and what the concept of link prosperity is it's not about making ice cream making money and then giving some of your money away what we try to do is lead with our values and incorporate all three aspects of the

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mission into day-to-day decision making then would talk about not just optimizing profits but optimizing the community so how do we do that here's just one quick example Greyston bakery there in Yonkers an engineer who turned into a Buddhist Buddhist monk I guess

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Bernie Glassman founded the Greyston Baker bakery they are dedicated to employing people that most any other business would say were unemployable no interviews no resumes they just take the next person on the list and give them a job and an opportunity and at the time

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in 1987 when we first when Ben and Ben got together they were mostly making the brownies and selling them in gourmet shops like Bloomingdale's very high-end very small quantity and we went to them and said well what if we could use it as

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an ingredient in one of our ice creams it would dramatically increase their sales it would enable them to hire a whole lot more people and that's what we did and it's been a great working relationship you know tens of

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millions of dollars worth of brownies that we've purchased it's now also used the Greyston product is also used in half baked which I think chef will tell me is the top seller for the company right now so I don't have time to tell

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you everything so I'm gonna give you the brief history of the rest of the story I left as CEO in 1991 and the guy who took my place guy by the name of Chuck lacy is Valley Symington son-in-law I had

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hired Chuck a couple of years earlier two or three years earlier and he succeeded me and the first thing Chuck did was he got cookie dough in the pints we had been this wasn't another flavor suggested anonymously but we couldn't

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figure out how to automate it how to make it through the production equipment and Chuck worked with a local vendor and they figured it out and cookie dough wasn't another flavor cookie dough was a phenomena and that and a low fat line of

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of yogurts took our sales from 77 my last year to a hundred thirty million over the next three years just phenomenal phenomenal growth when I left I wrote my book which is Charles says is available both new and used and

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electronically on Amazon and I stayed on the board of vintage areas and I think until about 87 and then I said okay time to do something else and I left in 2000 the business got sold to Unilever again a long story I'm not going to go

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into the details but I will tell you you know the question everybody asks is well how did those shareholders who bought into the Vermont stock offering do how did they do with that 126 well they got four thousand six hundred

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ninety seven dollars back there seven time return if you do the math it's about 25% annual return over each of those 16 years and I did a little research for the hundred 26 you could have bought two shares of General

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Electric and you would have had half that amount of money Unilever I think it's done a great job they they honor the mission they've they've done great jobs with sourcing and it is now reportedly a 1 billion dollar international brand and you can

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find it if you travel the world when we get past you know the current circumstance and you can go back to traveling the world you can find it everywhere that picture on the corner is me that's a year ago January that and I

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were in Tasmania up by on the north coast up by barn Boogle dunes were one of my Kaiser's playgrounds and the main streets three blocks long I mean this is a nothing town on the North Shore of Tasmania which doesn't have too many

Speaker A

people to begin with and there's that point of sale outside and inside a big freezer of Ben and Jerry's ice cream I did not try and use my ice cream for life club the carnival would have been too much work I want to give another

Speaker A

shout out to Jeff who's in the back and and Caitlin I don't know if Caitlin's here who was scooping for us [Applause] they they have just got a great shop on promenade Street in Bluffton next to farm next to Woody's and they also they

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do catering they can bring that rig to a to a wedding or an event and you know the great thing about our franchise scoop shops is they to honor the value in the missions of the business so Jeff

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is very active in his community and he's supporting a whole lot of nonprofit organizations with what he does so you know after I wrote my book I I did a bunch of speaking I went on the circuit you know some of the business groups but

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a lot to students and you know whenever Benja and I go out and I haven't done this in 20 years but when when they continue to go out when I used to go out part of what we tried to do when we met

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with students was to inspire them and and let them know that it was possible for them to achieve their dreams you know with if they were passionate hard work and a whole lot of luck that they too could be successful and I always

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left them with this one of our favorite quotes you know when this came out been put this on every bulletin board throughout the company he had a little stand bait up that he could stamp it under his name so I'm gonna I'm

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gonna stop there I'm gonna take five minutes or so questions and then we're gonna have a chav nth we're gonna have I'll explain that I got a little note from Jerry I have to read but we're gonna have an auction to raise a little

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money for the trust with a very highly collectible thing but I've got five minutes first for some question twelve fifty I'll tell you what I'm gonna do you said twelve fifty will you do twelve fifteen I'll get another one

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another package just like this twenty-five hundred dollars to the truck [Applause] thank you very much

Topics:Ben & Jerry'sice creamentrepreneurshipbusiness growthstartup storyBurlington Vermontsmall businessmarketingFree Cone Daysuper-premium ice cream

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