Ben & Jerry's: Ben Cohen And Jerry Greenfield

In the mid-1970s two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield decided to open an ice cream shop in Burlington, Vermont. Their quirky little shop packaged and sold unusual flavors like Honey Coffee, Mocha Walnut, and Mint with Oreo Cookies. In 1981, the regional brand spread across the country after Time magazine called it the "best ice cream in America." Today, Ben & Jerry's is one of the top selling ice cream brands in the world. And, like the original founders, the company doesn't shy away from speaking out on social issues. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That", how David Stover and his team at Bureo turn fishing nets into skateboards. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Pillsbury had bought Haagen-Dazs, so they owned them. And they went to independent ice cream distributors and, you know, told them that if those distributors continued to deliver Ben & Jerry's, that they wouldn't sell them Haagen-Dazs anymore. You know, we recognized that Pillsbury was controlling the marketplace and they were using their power to keep competitors out.

• 0:31Guy Raz?

  So what'd you do?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  We took our case to the people. We decided to go after the Pillsbury Doughboy, the most beloved food mascot in the country, the pudgy little doughboy.

• 0:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  But this particular case, it was a matter of survival.

• 0:58Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:10Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how two hippies named Ben and Jerry turned their small ice cream shop in Burlington, Vermont, into one of the most iconic ice cream brands in the world.

• 1:28Guy Raz?

  I don't know about you, but I have a feeling that most people, at some point, have spent a quiet evening in front of the television with a spoon and a pint of, you know, Chunky Monkey, or Cherry Garcia, or New York Super Fudge Chunk, or Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Because there's something really comforting about a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Even though it's full of sugar and saturated fat, it somehow feels OK. You know what I mean? Maybe it's the fair trade symbol on the front, or the "we buy from local Vermont dairy farmers" on the side of the pint, or most likely, seeing Ben and Jerry's photo on it. Because you kind of know they're good guys, that their heart's in the right place.

• 2:11Guy Raz?

  And the thing is, all that peace and justice and love and equality stuff that Ben and Jerry's kind of tied together with their brand, it's real. It wasn't a gimmick. It wasn't a strategy designed to attract customers, because it's who they are. There weren't social enterprises back when these guys started, and they certainly never planned to get rich. But they did do well, and they did do good. And their amazing story of building one of the most beloved ice cream brands actually begins almost 60 years ago, when Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were at the same middle school on Long Island in New York.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  We were both fat as kids. We were both nerdy, not in the mainstream socially.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  You know, we were the two slowest, fattest kids in gym class. You know, if you're running around the track and you're half a lap behind everybody else, and there's another guy there beside you, you know, you get pretty friendly with that guy.

• 3:13Guy Raz?

  And did you end up going to the same high school?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  We did. Yeah, we went to Calhoun High School. We graduated.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Jerry was a mathlete. I was in debate club.

• 3:23Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I lettered in debate clubs.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  You lettered?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Letter and math.

• 3:33Guy Raz?

  All right, so you guys grew up in Long Island. You finished high school there. And did you-- where did you go? Jerry, where did you go to college? Ben, where'd you go?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  I went to a lot of colleges. I went to Colgate. I went to Skidmore. I went to NYU. I went to the New School.

• 3:50Guy Raz?

  Wow, you did the circuit.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  I dropped out of all those schools.

• 3:53Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  And then I finally joined the University Without Walls, which was the most unstructured college program at the time. The idea was that the whole world was your campus. You go out there and learn whatever you wanted to learn, and then you come back to this administrative body and prove that you learned it, and they give you a degree. And I dropped out of there, too. Uh, so.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  That was my college career.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Still too much structure for Ben, as I like to tell people.

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  Jerry, how about you?

• 4:29Speaker 00

  I went to Oberlin College in Ohio. I did four years straight. I was pre-med and applied to and got rejected from lots of medical schools on two different occasions, so.

• 4:43Guy Raz?

  So you guys were, I mean, look.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Failures, failures, I think is what you call it.

• 4:47Guy Raz?

  Let's be honest, that's just not true. That's just untrue. But, but what happened after you graduated? How did you guys reconnect?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Well, I, I was working at a school for disturbed kids in the Adirondacks. I was teaching pottery there and then I decided I wanted to try to learn, try to be a real potter, you know, those who can't teach, those who can do. Well, I tried doing and nobody would buy my pots. So I, I, I left the Adirondacks. I moved to New York City in order to get, you know, some more other influences on my pottery. And of course, it was so expensive to live in New York that I needed to spend all my time making rent, driving cab. And so I had this apartment and it was a pretty grungy apartment. And Jerry

• 5:41Speaker 02

  showed up.

• 5:42Guy Raz?

  In New York?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:43Guy Raz?

  And you, but you, you moved into Ben's apartment or you just, you just ended up both being?

• 5:47Speaker 00

  I did. So this, after I graduated college and after my first bout of medical school rejections, I moved in with Ben in New York City. And then I left and went to North Carolina. And after my second bout of medical school rejections, I connected with Ben again. And it was at that point that we decided to. Put our fortunes together and open up a little

• 6:16Guy Raz?

  Business.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Shop, which, yeah, which turned out to be an ice cream business. You know, we didn't exactly think of it as a business. We thought of it as a venture.

• 6:23Guy Raz?

  Like, let's do something because we're not

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Because we're failures.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Let's do something for a couple of years and then after we do that, let's do something else. We talked about becoming cross-country truck drivers after we did this ice cream shop.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  So was ice cream the main idea? Was that what you were going to do from the beginning? Because I've read that you weren't really sure what kind of shop you were going to do.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, we thought we would do something with food because we had always liked to eat. And we wanted to live in a college town. So we thought about picking a food that was becoming popular in big cities, but had not yet been brought to a college town. And at that time, the foods we thought about were bagels and homemade ice cream.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  So we went to a used restaurant supply store to price out bagel-making equipment. This was G and G Restaurant Supply in Albany, New York. Lou was there. Lou was this old guy with a gold chain around his neck and a big cigar in his mouth. And he told us we didn't have enough money to buy bagel equipment.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  He also told us, hey, I wouldn't screw you. Life's too short.

• 7:48Guy Raz?

  So I'm curious. I mean, I'm curious, because you guys were in your mid-20s. And did you sit down, like, and, you know, hang out late nights, putting out a strategy, thinking, you know, sort of starting to think about different ideas you could do together? And were you meeting in cafes during the day? Or was it, like, how did it even, how did you even start to develop this idea? Or was it just much less, you know, was it just much more sort of, yeah, let's just do this?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  This was in the old days.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Before cafe culture.

• 8:22Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  No, we did not meet in cafes to discuss this. But we did discuss it quite a bit and we researched it quite a bit. We sent away for Thirty SBA pamphlets that cost between fifteen cents and three dollars per on all the different aspects of running a business.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  This is just like pamphlets from the, from the Small Business Administration that you, I guess, were available.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that the government would put out.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  And how to, how to calculate your break even point. Uh, pretty, pretty basic stuff.

• 9:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Our goal when we opened was to make twenty thousand dollars a year apiece.

• 9:12Guy Raz?

  Which was, which was pretty good money, I guess, in, in the late seventies, right?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  No, it was shitty money. And, and it took us a long time to achieve that goal.

• 9:31Guy Raz?

  So, so when you were in New York, kind of thinking about what you could do, how did you settle on, on an ice cream shop and how did you settle on Burlington, Vermont?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Well, we settled on ice cream because bagel equipment was too expensive and we settled on Burlington, Vermont because originally we settled on Saratoga Springs. And we actually moved to Saratoga Springs to get ready to open up the place. And we were spending most of our time working on this business plan for an ice cream shop and doing a lot of research and we took this correspondence course in how to make ice cream. We were doing the correspondence course. We got the big college textbook called Ice Cream by William S. Arbuckle.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Wendell S. Arbuckle.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Uh, thank you, the father of modern American ice cream. Jerry could understand that very complex textbook because he had this biochemistry background from his failed medical school experience. So there were some other ice cream shop that opened up in Saratoga Springs before us. It was called Afternoon Delight.

• 10:46Guy Raz?

  Did, did they make good ice cream?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  We don't know. We left town before they opened up.

• 10:50Guy Raz?

  You just figured we're not gonna, we're not gonna open up here because there's already a shop?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  We didn't, we didn't want to compete. We figured we, we had a better chance of success if we opened up in a place where there wasn't much competition and, uh...

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Originally, we were looking for warm rural college towns and all the warm ones already had ice cream.

• 11:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, as we went further and further north, but then the only town left that we knew anything about was Burlington, which, you know, was an hour and a half south of the Canadian border.

• 11:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  It's kind of cold and there wasn't much ice cream here.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, I just want to pause for a sec because I think a lot of people hear Ben and Jerry's and think, these guys were hippies, which is true, and they're, you know, they're sort of activists and, but that it was just kind of slapdash. But you guys really did actually, I mean, there was some method to this. I mean, you researched, you actually scoped out possible locations. I mean, this wasn't, I mean, you were really actually trying to do this in a methodical way.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  We're very hard workers.

• 11:51Guy Raz?

  No, I mean, you are.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  No, but, but when you describe it, you're, and yes, all those things happened, but the way you're describing it is putting a lot more thought and planning into it than, than we actually did. I mean, we, we just took one step at a time and we did whatever the next thing was in front of us.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I, I think it was near that time that we kind of realized that, you know, the word business is, you know, essentially a kind of a busyness. That it's mostly common sense and a lot of work.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, I mean, this is pre-internet, so you couldn't just go online and type in how to make ice cream, which you could do today, or where do I buy restaurant equipment? Like, you, I mean, things took a lot longer, presumably.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  The Yellow Pages.

• 12:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Spent a lot more time with the phone book and the Yellow Pages. Yeah. I mean, you know, when, when Ben and I talk to people today about taking a correspondence course, correspondence courses don't exist.

• 12:53Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  I mean, the closest thing would be an online course. But the idea that, that somebody would mail you a textbook and then you read through these textbooks and you fill out answers to a test and you mail it back to your professor and then they grade it and then they mail it back to you and you find out how you did on your test, it's a quaint idea.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How much, how much did that course cost, by the way?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Five dollars.

• 13:22Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  We split one between the two of us.

• 13:24Guy Raz?

  When you decided, when you told, I don't know, friends or parents or family, like, "We're gonna go to Burlington, Vermont, and we're gonna open up an ice cream shop." Did anybody just say, "Do you guys realize that, you know, maybe seven months out of the year, it's really cold there?" And it just might not make a whole lot of sense? Or did that conversation never come up?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  My parents were really happy.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Finally, their son was giving up the idea of being a potter for the rest of his life and finally becoming a businessman. This really turned him on. And they were so supportive of it that I started thinking, "Oh, I must be doing the wrong thing."

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yes, of course, we thought about, you know, the cold weather. Jerry even came up with this idea of a promotion that ended up in the business plan called "Popsidbizwi," which was the penny off per Celsius degree below zero winter extravaganza.

• 14:31Guy Raz?

  Wait, can you say that again, slowly?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  "Popsidbizwi, the penny off per Celsius degree below zero winter extravaganza." You can say it slowly if you want.

• 14:40Guy Raz?

  That's incredible.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  And how did it work?

• 14:43Guy Raz?

  How did it work?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  The colder it got, the more you saved. For every degree below zero Celsius, which is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, you got a penny off the price of your cone, which was significant at the time because a cone cost 52 cents.

• 14:58Guy Raz?

  Huh. All right, so you get to Burlington, Vermont, and you start looking around for the perfect place to open up your ice cream shop?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Well, we got one of those clickers. We did customer counts at various corners around Burlington. We didn't know exactly what number we were looking for, but we did customer counts.

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  Did you really, you stood at a corner with a clicker and you just clicked?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  And you would just click as people passed, so you would know how many people passed that location every hour?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ice cream is an impulse item. You need to make money off the passing traffic.

• 15:32Guy Raz?

  I mean, I'm gonna just interrupt you for a second, because that, again, like, that is a pretty sophisticated technique.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  It's all in the SBA manuals.

• 15:40Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. So in those manuals, it would say, "Go to a corner with a clicker and click how many people passed," and that will determine where you should open your shop?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  You know, I'm gonna interrupt here because I haven't been giving Ben enough credit all these years. Ben actually does think a lot of these things through.

• 16:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And I think, I think it was me who wasn't thinking him through, but um, yeah, I think Ben's a very thoughtful person.

• 16:11Guy Raz?

  So, so after, after all that research, where was the location that you, you thought would work? Was it, was it actually on the main drag?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  It wasn't on the main drag. It was a block off the main drag. But it happened to be, you know, right across from City Hall Park, which was a great thing for us, an ice cream parlor, you know, get a cone, sit in the park. And it also was an old gas station. It was totally dilapidated. It was falling apart. Nobody wanted to rent it. And it had some parking spaces in front where the gas pumps used to be. Which was also an incredible boon for an ice cream shop in a city. To have some places where people could pull up in a car and jump out, get a, get a scoop.

• 16:54Guy Raz?

  So how much money did you have to have to sign the lease and then also buy the equipment and, you know, get the store ready for customers?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  So Ben and I each had $4,000 and

• 17:08Guy Raz?

  That you saved up or you, yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ben, Ben actually borrowed two out of the 4,000 from his father. But that was fine because that was our commitment to each other that we were, we were each gonna come up with $4,000. And, and then we wrote this business plan in order to try to borrow money from the local bank. You know, we wrote a business plan only because we felt like it was the only way the bank was gonna lend us money.

• 17:34Guy Raz?

  And did this business plan sort of have projections, like five-year projections showing revenue and profit and loss and all that stuff?

• 17:41Speaker 00

  It, it had projections. I can't remember if it was five years. I mean, it probably wasn't five years. The beautiful thing about the business plan. So Ben and I didn't know how to write a business plan. But we, we have a friend, Jeff Furman, who is mentioned often. And Jeff used to work for the Small Business Administration in New York City. And Jeff got us a copy of a business plan that was from a pizza parlor in New York. So Ben and I pretty much copied that business plan, except every place where it said slice of pizza, we, we crossed it out and we wrote in ice cream cone. And the other great thing about the business plan was when we first rode out

• 18:25Speaker 00

  and figured out our projections for how much ice cream we would sell and how much it would cost, the projections told us that we weren't going to sell enough ice cream to stay in business.

• 18:38Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  So we just changed the projections.

• 18:42Guy Raz?

  Kind of like the government.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  And I think that's the way everybody does it. You just make it up.

• 18:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  I mean, you have this idea.

• 18:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  That, that people come up with these projections and they're based on something and they're just made up.

• 18:58Guy Raz?

  That's so true, yeah. You see it all the time in Silicon Valley.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Right, and, and if they don't work, you make up different ones. It's brilliant.

• 19:07Guy Raz?

  What did that first store look like? Was it, was it sort of bright and, and, you know, with, with the clouds and the painted on the walls and cows and things like that?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  No, but it was beautiful.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  I mean, most, Ben says it was beautiful and it was beautiful. Most people would have described it as pretty funky.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:36Guy Raz?

  Which is probably right. I mean, fit with the aesthetic of what, what you were selling anyway, right?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, homemade ice cream.

• 19:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  It very much looked homemade.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And it was very low budget as well.

• 19:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How would you, when you opened that first shop, how, what, what flavors were you serving? Do you, do you remember?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Jerry probably remembers better.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry.

• 19:59Guy Raz?

  So it was basic.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Coffee.

• 20:01Guy Raz?

  Straightforward.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Pretty, pretty basic.

• 20:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  You know, the, the two unusual, the, the first two flavors that we did that were not your normal ones were Oreo Mint and Heath Bar Crunch.

• 20:15Guy Raz?

  And I read, I mean, I read that Jerry, you were sort of the ice cream maker and Ben, you were the taster. And I remember reading a long time ago that you had like some, you couldn't taste things because of some, you know, sinus or I can't remember what you, things that you dealt with or had. And so you would focus on the feel of the ice cream. Is that true?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a very, very poor sense of smell. What's the term for that? It's called anosmia.

• 20:46Guy Raz?

  It makes a lot of sense, though. In some ways, not having a sense of smell was this kind of hidden blessing, right? Because you had to rely on other senses that maybe competitors weren't thinking about. They were focusing only on flavor or smell rather than the feel of ice cream.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:05Guy Raz?

  How did you, I mean, I remember the first time I tried Ben and Jerry's in the, I grew up in Los Angeles, so not until the late 80s. But it was, it was so different because it was chunky ice cream, had big chunks. And was that completely different in 1978? Was, were other people making ice cream like that?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  No, they weren't packaging ice cream like that. Ice cream like that came out of the homemade ice cream parlor genre.

• 21:34Guy Raz?

  Like with big chunks and like nuts?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Right, right, right, right. Because a lot of them, our shop and a bunch of other homemade ice cream shops, you're making ice cream essentially in overgrown home style ice cream making equipment. So it's really easy to put in big chunks. The difference is that no commercial ice creams were packaging ice cream like that. And

• 22:07Speaker 02

  As we discovered, the reason why they weren't doing it is because the machinery, the commercial ice cream machinery was not designed to be able to handle large chunks.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  So all you would get would be these little itsy bitsy pieces that would flow through the machinery well, but you didn't get the requisite mouth feel.

• 22:29Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  I was making the ice cream.

• 22:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  And it was no picnic, putting in those big chunks. And Ben and I had many, uh, discussions about it.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  Like discussions, like, like what?

• 22:45Speaker 00

  So I was arguing for having a larger number of smaller chunks that were well distributed throughout the ice cream. And, you know, Ben was saying, no, what people want, and this is what Ben wanted, of course, but what people want is a really big chunk. And they don't care if they get a chunk in every bite, as long as they know there's a really big chunk coming up next. And it turns out Ben was right. People love it.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  Well, I mean, what happened after you opened that first store? Were you just a, a, a huge hit in Burlington right away?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  No, no, we, uh, we were a hit in the summer. The first summer was great. And then the first winter was also a revelation. Uh, you know, it can get very slow.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  Were there days that would go by where you'd get like one or two customers?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Probably a few more than that, but, uh, you know, it's very slow. And, and it was actually during that first winter when Ben and I came up with the idea of Free Cone Day, that if we were still in business after a year, we would celebrate and treat all our customers by giving out free ice cream because we thought it was so unlikely that we would still be in business. And, and we recognized so clearly that if we were still in business, it was going to be because of the support of our customers.

• 24:13Guy Raz?

  Was there any tension between the, the two of you at that time?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Just about the size of the chunks.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Ben and I have a lot of trust in each other and each other's judgment. So we were never doubting what the other person was doing. So there was that. And then, and then I think another thing was we have very different skills and interests. Ben is tremendously creative, very spontaneous, very entrepreneurial. And I like a manageable agenda. So, you know, it was, it, it made sense that Ben would come up with all these flavors and do all the marketing and, and I would sit back and make the ice cream because I sort of knew what I needed to do.

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  So what, what was the turning point? How were you able to survive that first year?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  We, we ended up getting a, you know, SBA has this service called SCORE. The Service Core of Retired Executives. And, you know, if you're, if you're a little business, you could get in touch with the SBA and say, hey, I'd, I'd like a mentor. And they would set you up with some retired business guy who would volunteer to be a mentor. And we asked for one of those and we got one. And it was in the middle of the winter and we were losing our shirts and we couldn't make our loan payments to the bank.

• 25:49Guy Raz?

  And, uh, Yeah.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  He says, oh, you know, that's no problem. Just go to your bank and ask for a moratorium on your loan.

• 25:55Guy Raz?

  Who, who was this guy?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Manny. He was an old guy named Manny. And, uh, he said, well, just tell them you can't pay your loan right now, that you can pay it, you know, when the weather turns, you know, they'll, the, the, the like just let you pay interest. And we went to the bank and we said that and they said, sure, no problem. Just pay interest and, you know, we'll extend the loan and that got us through.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Wow. And this was only in Vermont at the time, right?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:25Guy Raz?

  Wow. So the, the shop opens in 78 and then I guess it was, it was 1981 when Ben and Jerry's happened to be in an article in Time Magazine, which was hugely influential magazine at the time. What, what did, what did that mean? And when you read, what did they call you at the time?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  The best ice cream in the world.

• 26:46Guy Raz?

  The best ice cream in the world. It's incredible.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a real, yeah, it was a real stroke of luck.

• 26:51Guy Raz?

  Were you expecting that?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Well, but not only that. So it was the cover story of Time Magazine.

• 26:56Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  And that was the first sentence of the cover story.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  What you must understand at the outset is that Ben and Jerry's in Burlington, Vermont is the best ice cream in the world.

• 27:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  That was all we needed to read.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  If you, if you read on, it continued to say that, you know, blah, blah, blah, ice cream somewhere else is the best ice cream in the world, blah, blah, somewhere else isn't the best ice cream in the world. But, you know, who needed to go any further than that? Well, you know, I, you know, prior to that article coming out, I, I started to realize that, you know, all these, you know, reviews that you see for Broadway shows, you know, where they say this is the best play ever, oh, you laugh your ass off, whatever it is.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  If you see only one play this year.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And then there are all these little excerpts from an article that was, you know, like two, you know, a page. And, you know, the page went on to say, eh, it really wasn't that great, but, you know, there was a moment where you laughed your ass off. And they just took that, one little phrase, laughed my ass off. And, uh, and I, you know, figured if they can do it, I can do it.

• 28:11Guy Raz?

  When we come back, once the laughing died down, how Ben and Jerry got a taste for the ruthless and competitive side of the ice cream business, how the Pillsbury Doughboy tried to take a bite out of the company, and how Ben and Jerry fought back. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 28:45Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Kai Raz. So in the early 1980s, Ben & Jerry's was just one shop in Burlington, Vermont, and it was doing well. Ben & Jerry's gave out big generous scoops of ice cream. They had happy customers, but they were pretty bad at doing all the things it took to run a business.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  We weren't making a profit. You know, the 16 hours a day that we were open seven days a week. The standards that we had for ourselves in terms of how a retail shop should be run were not standards that we were able to achieve.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  We were really good at creating an atmosphere in the shop that was welcoming and fun, less than excellent at hiring people, at supervising people. And most of all, we were really bad at portion control.

• 29:46Guy Raz?

  You were giving away too much ice cream.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yes, we-- you know, when you scoop out a nice big scoop for a customer, you get this beautiful smile and really warm response. And it's really positive reinforcement for over scooping. And, you know, Ben and I, we wanted to make people happy.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Well, and also, we wanted to keep our prices really low. You know, in terms of the food service business, in every business except for ice cream, the portions are controlled in the back--

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  --out of sight of the customer. And when you're scooping ice cream-- You're supposed to control the portion inside of the customer. And if the scoop is too big, you're supposed to take a little off and the customer hates that.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  One of the reasons we started packaging our ice cream was because we weren't so good at running a shop. And one of the things we thought about was, well, maybe we can't control how much ice cream we're putting on a cone. But you certainly can control how much ice cream you're putting into a pint container because it only fits so much.

• 30:58Guy Raz?

  Right. So that was a big turning point for you when you decided, let's package this stuff?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Well, before that, we decided to pack it in two and a half gallon tubs and sell it to other people and let them figure out how to control the portions.

• 31:13Guy Raz?

  And then they were charging massive premium for it, probably, right?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I mean, I was the guy who was going around selling the ice cream to these restaurants. And the restaurants would say, no, I'm not going to carry your ice cream anymore because my employees are eating it. A lot of our problems would be solved if we made the ice cream shittier.

• 31:43Guy Raz?

  You guys started to sort of get more attention and to distribute your ice cream in pints, I guess. Pillsbury, which was distributing other brands, like I guess Haagen Dazs, they threatened other distributors. They said, stop distributing Ben and Jerry's to the shops, right?

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, Pillsbury had bought Haagen Dazs, so they own them. And they went to independent ice cream distributors who were distributing all sorts of different brands of ice creams and told them that if...

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Those distributors continued to deliver Ben & Jerry's that they wouldn't sell them Haagen-Dazs anymore.

• 32:26Guy Raz?

  Did it start to cut into your sales?

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Well, you know, we recognized that this was a real threat. Plus, it seemed like it was illegal, that

• 32:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  That it was a restraint of trade, that Pillsbury was controlling the marketplace and they were using their power to keep competitors out.

• 32:47Guy Raz?

  But you couldn't sue them, right? I mean, you were a $4 million company and they were a multi-million, maybe billion-dollar company.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Well, I think we did have a legal case, but we realized that that was not really going to be the best place for us to fight them because they were so enormous.

• 33:07Guy Raz?

  So what'd you do?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  We took our case to the people. We started the What's the Doughboy Afraid Of campaign.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  We decided to go after the Pillsbury Doughboy, which was the most beloved food mascot in the country. The pudgy little doughboy.

• 33:31Guy Raz?

  How'd you go after him?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Well, it was started by me going to Minneapolis to the Pillsbury World Headquarters. I was a one-person picket line. The sign said, "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" It was a hand-lettered sign. Yeah, I'd never really done anything like that before.

• 33:53Guy Raz?

  And did anybody at Pillsbury come out and say, "Okay, we'll meet you," or did they just ignore you like you were this crazy man protesting in front of their headquarters?

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Nobody had any idea what I was doing there. It was a fight for us. I don't know that it was a fight for them.

• 34:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  It was a fight for survival from us, so nobody knew what was going on.

• 34:13Guy Raz?

  So did they eventually drop their restrictions and allow distributors to, presumably allow, they did stop forcing distributors to not carry Ben & Jerry's, right?

• 34:25Speaker 00

  Well, there were a lot of steps that we took escalating the pressure on Pillsbury, you know, starting with

• 34:37Speaker 00

  A small classified ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine and we flew aerial banners around the sports stadiums in Boston and we took out signs of the, on the signs of the transit buses in Boston and we had a tour.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  And the signs said the same thing, what's the doughboy afraid of?

• 34:56Speaker 00

  The sign on the side of the transit buses had these two pudgy white hands squeezing a pint of Ben and Jerry's and I think it said, "Don't let Pillsbury's dollars strangle Ben and Jerry's," or something very provocative.

• 35:12Guy Raz?

  It's amazing because just doing that is a lot of work, like, you know, organizing that campaign. You were also running a business and trying to sell ice cream. Were you just, the two of you, were you just constantly working all the time?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yes. But this particular case, it was a matter of survival. You know, this was like, you're either going to get shut down and you can't get your ice cream out to people or you do whatever you can to get it out there.

• 35:44Guy Raz?

  Do you remember that, do you remember that, Ben? Do you remember working all the time?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I certainly felt during many of the times at Ben and Jerry's that the experience was like falling down the side of a cliff trying to grab onto whatever branch was there you could hold on to. So, you know, in that situation, you know, falling down the side of a cliff, you know, grabbing onto branches, you're not really thinking about, well, am I having a good time?

• 36:18Guy Raz?

  Last ride.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  But, you know, you're energized, you know, you're using all the skills you have, you know, you're doing everything you can to save your life and, you know, it's really interesting. It's a peak experience.

• 36:43Guy Raz?

  Did you guys, as you started, as you, as you grew and grew, it was plainly obvious that you were, you were going to both make a decent amount of money from, from this. Were you okay with that? I mean, I mean, did that, did that conflict with, with your own values? Or were you able to kind of say, all right, you know, whatever, where I'm, I've got money and that's, that's just the way it is?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  I mean, so for me, I think it was something I needed to grapple with. I mean, you know, part of the thing for both Ben and me was that we never really saw ourselves as bosses. You know, from, from early on, we were scooping ice cream right next to everybody else who was scooping ice cream.

• 37:27Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  We were mopping the floors at night. And we didn't have a very good boss mentality. We, we had a good worker mentality. You know, Ben is the most anti-authoritarian person I've ever come across. And here he was being an authority. I mean, it was, it was laughable.

• 37:45Guy Raz?

  You were the CEO.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I was.

• 37:47Guy Raz?

  And how did you feel about that, Ben? I mean, did you, did you also feel like, you know, this is weird. I'm a businessman. I never signed up for this.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. There was a time when, when Jerry and I both turned around and looked at ourselves and said to each other, you know, we're not ice cream men anymore. We're spending our time being bosses and hiring and firing. And so much of what we were doing was in order to pay our loans back to the bank. And we felt like we were becoming just another cog in this economic machine. Our reaction to that was to, to sell the business. And we actually put it up for sale. This was early on. This was in the, in the 80s.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  And then I ran into this older restaurateur that I had come to know a little. And I explained to him that we were planning to sell the business. And he said, Ben, how could you possibly do that? The business is your baby. It's it has so much potential ahead of it. And I said, Maurice, you know what business does. It exploits the community. It exploits its employees. It exploits the environment. And he said, Ben, if there's something that you don't like about business, why don't you do it different? And that was when we decided to conduct this experiment to see if it was possible

• 39:25Speaker 02

  that business could be a tool for improving the quality of life for people as opposed to making people's lives worse.

• 39:39Guy Raz?

  One of the things you guys you guys did was you had a policy where the highest paid employee couldn't earn more than five times the salary of an entry level worker. You also had like daycare and you did college tuition aid and a bunch of things. Profit sharing. Is that what you mean when you say you wanted to try to do business differently?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  That's part of it. But I think the more critical part of it is using our business to address social issues through the very fabric of our business.

• 40:15Guy Raz?

  So that meant like taking very, very vocal positions on hot button issues, but also doing things like like working with former prisoners, former former former felons, right? Who were making brownies in a bakery in New York.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  That that's our project with the Grayston Bakery and deliberately choosing to use this ingredient supplier because this particular ingredient supplier was driven by a social mission of providing employment opportunities for formerly unemployable people.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  And that's a very good example of how Ben & Jerry's demonstrated that it's possible to make a profit and address social problems at the same time.

• 41:13Guy Raz?

  So after all your success in the 1990s, eventually Ben & Jerry's did end up selling. It sold to Unilever, which is this huge multinational, right? It sold, I think, in 2000, and it was sold by the company's board without your permission?

• 41:32Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 41:33Guy Raz?

  How did it happen? I mean, how was your company sold without your assent?

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Well, it was a public company, which meant that anybody could own shares. And Unilever ended up offering so much money that the board of the company couldn't find an alternative for the shareholders that they thought was acceptable.

• 42:00Guy Raz?

  Did you guys say to the board, "You can't do this. You can't do this." Or did you just sort of at a certain point say, "All right, nothing we can do"?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Well, eventually, we had to go along with it.

• 42:11Guy Raz?

  Why were you opposed to it?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  You know, I think that the thing that was most important was to maintain the social mission of the company. We felt like, you know, if another company were to buy Ben & Jerry's, that they would not continue those cutting-edge social mission activities.

• 42:35Guy Raz?

  What did it mean practically for the two of you? Did it mean that you were sort of done going into Ben & Jerry's, into the offices, every day?

• 42:44Speaker 00

  You know, I think a lot of it was up to us about what it meant. There was going to continue to be an independent board in the new entity that oversaw the social mission, and I think Ben and I could have... remained on that board and we both chose not to.

• 43:05Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Well, I can't speak for Ben. You know, I had no idea what was gonna happen to the company. And I mean, quite frankly, I just didn't want to be part of it at that point.

• 43:18Guy Raz?

  How about you, Ben? Why didn't you want to be on the board?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  You know, I felt like I had lost, you know, a major battle in terms of trying to keep the company independent. You know, I didn't want to continue under the ownership of Unilever.

• 43:37Guy Raz?

  So, did you both kind of just mentally check out?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I certainly, I certainly checked out for a while.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

• 43:47Guy Raz?

  Were you sad? I mean, were you upset? I mean, so here's the thing, like, a lot of people who've been on the show and a lot of people listening would say, oh, my God, they walked away with millions of dollars. Like, what an incredible achievement. They started this little shop in Burlington and it's an international brand and it's done all these amazing things. Like, this is their moment to shine and to do a dance. But it sounds like you guys were really depressed about this.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, if the goal was to make a bunch of money, then I guess, you know, it would have been a different reaction, but that wasn't really the goal.

• 44:24Guy Raz?

  Right. You guys were very vocal about your positions on guns and on, you know, obviously socially liberal. The company still does that today. I mean, even though you're not, you know, you're not owners of it. Is that, does this surprise you that they still do that?

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Well, it became intertwined with the brand.

• 44:49Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, if Unilever bought a brand and bought the goodwill that goes along with that brand and bought the reputation that goes along with that brand. They need to continue those activities in order to keep that brand strong.

• 45:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm very pleasantly surprised and proud of what the company does. I mean, the company came out in support of Occupy Wall Street a few years ago, which, you know, is amazing because that, that was essentially an anti corporate movement.

• 45:31Guy Raz?

  You're talking about Ben and Jerry's, not, not Unilever.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yes. And within the last year, the company came out with a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. I mean, the company does not shy away from controversial issues. And that is a really difficult thing for a business to do, which is why you don't see businesses doing it. And yet Ben and Jerry's is courageous enough to wade into those areas.

• 46:05Guy Raz?

  Do you, do you guys see each other pretty regularly?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Pretty regularly.

• 46:09Guy Raz?

  Do you still hang out? Like you hang out a lot?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot.

• 46:14Guy Raz?

  It is, it is, I mean, if there's one thing about your story that to me is more interesting than anything else, it's your friendship. I just, it's just, it really is a powerful part of it. I know it sounds sort of sappy and I don't mean to like make, make you guys feel uncomfortable. It's just, it is amazing. It's really impressive that you, that you really like to hang out with each other. You're, you're good friends.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  You know, people say that and I don't, I don't really understand it that much. I mean, you know, lots of people have friends that they've had for most of their life.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Well, I, I do appreciate it more and more the older I get, I, I must say. You know, and sometimes recently Ben and I have been talking about how we're a little bit like Fred and Barney on the Flintstones. Because we drive places together a lot and I think we just relate like that.

• 47:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Is it strange to think that this little ice cream shop you started is a $500 million company?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Well, it's strange to, I mean, to me, it doesn't feel like the same thing. I mean, they're just not the same. The company has taken on a life of its own.

• 47:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  You know, the ice cream shop will always, to me, be Ben and me in the store making ice cream, scooping ice cream, Ben behind the stove cooking up food. I mean, that's, that's what the ice cream shop was.

• 47:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, your name, Ben and Jerry, I mean, that name, Ben and Jerry, like, it's you and will be forever. It's like, like Lee and Perrin's Worcestershire sauce. Like, who's Lee? Who's Perrin, right? Like, someday.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Who's Hogg and who's Dog?

• 47:59Guy Raz?

  Someday, like in 50 or 100 years, people are gonna say, they're just gonna call it Ben and Jerry's. Like, you're not gonna think about the people behind it, right? I mean, you know what I mean?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, half the people think we're dead.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  You know, and we get credit for it. I mean, think about the guy who invented vanilla.

• 48:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah, who was that?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  He don't get credit for shit.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  No, no, not at all.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Well, you know, so to me, it's amazing to the degree that the company continues to be outspoken about progressive issues and progressive values. It's not, it's of no interest to me to have Ben and Jerry's be thriving and whatever if it's just selling ice cream. I mean, who wants to be part of that?

• 48:49Guy Raz?

  When you guys think about this incredible thing that you built,

• 48:56Guy Raz?

  how much of it was because of all your hard work and your talent and your intelligence? And how much of it was just because you were lucky?

• 49:04Speaker 00

  There is a very big part of good fortune involved. I think there's a lot of people who work really hard, who have really good ideas, who are really committed, and they don't have the same level of success that Ben and Jerry's had.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I guess originally, we were gonna open our ice cream shop in Saratoga Springs, New York.

• 49:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  And, you know, some other ice cream shop opened up before us, and we didn't want to compete, so that's what brought us to Vermont. I think if we had started in New York, we never would have gained the local following that we gained in Vermont. In Vermont, we could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  Did either of your parents, did either of them ever get to see what Ben and Jerry's became?

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, mine were still alive, you know, probably through the 1980s.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, same for my parents.

• 50:09Guy Raz?

  Were they proud of you?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  They were a whole lot prouder than when I was trying to be a potter.

• 50:16Guy Raz?

  Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founders of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream. By the way, there was a study done earlier this year by the International Dairy Foods Association, and they asked people to name their favorite ice cream. And as you could imagine, the usual suspects turned up: chocolate, vanilla, mint chip. But right there, right near the top, was cookie dough, chocolate chip cookie dough, which, okay, may not be all that surprising, because everybody makes cookie dough, right? But it wasn't always a classic flavor, because in fact, it was invented by Ben Cohen and

• 50:58Guy Raz?

  Jerry Greenfield in that tiny little shop in Burlington in the 1980s. And to this day, it's one of their most popular flavors.

• 51:09Guy Raz?

  At what point did Cherry Garcia enter into the Ben and Jerry's oeuvre?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  We got a postcard, an anonymous postcard that said, "We're both Deadheads, and we're also Ben and Jerry's fans, and we think you ought to come out with a flavor called Cherry Garcia because it would be a real hoot for the fans, and dead paraphernalia always sells."

• 51:37Guy Raz?

  What did Jerry Garcia think of it?

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Well, there was one quote that was reported saying, "Well, at least they didn't name a motor oil after me."

• 52:01Guy Raz?

  And stick around, because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 52:09Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around, because it's time now for How You Built That. And I'm just going to say one word right now may bring back a warm memory for some of you. The word is plastics. And as we know, the future of plastics is not particularly great. I mean, think of all those tiny pellets from plastic cups and straws and plastic bags and all of it swirling around in this giant vortex and washing up on our beaches. And that's where David Stover and his friend Ben come in. They're avid surfers, and they just hate seeing all of that pollution.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  So we started researching all the types of plastic that are getting into the ocean. And we kind of stumbled across this issue of discarded fishing nets.

• 52:52Guy Raz?

  So it turns out that most commercial fishing nets are made of this really thick plastic. And when those nets get old, they just get... Thrown away.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  The nets can be left illegally in a landfill. They can be burnt on beaches, which happens quite often. And unfortunately, in many cases, the nets can be left in the ocean.

• 53:10Guy Raz?

  David and Ben both had backgrounds in engineering. So a few years ago, they decided to run an experiment. And what they did was, they collected a bunch of old nets from fishermen in Massachusetts. And then they found a plastics lab where they could melt the nets down, you know, maybe repurpose them.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  And the nets are melted into, it's kind of like a spaghetti string. It's chopped up, like the end of the spaghetti is chopped up by a little blade and put into these little pellets. You know, it's very similar to like putting your hand into a bag of rice when you put your hand in the bag of pellets.

• 53:43Guy Raz?

  OK, so the question is, what can you actually do with a bunch of plastic pellets? Well, David and Ben actually figured that out when Ben was working on a project in Santiago, Chile. He was at a park watching a bunch of skateboarders.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  And kids kept riding by on these cruiser skateboards. And he called me like that day and was like, I got it. Like, why don't we just make skateboard decks from the plastic? Like, it's durable, it's strong. And we kind of turned that idea over to Kevin on our team, who had worked for Boeing. And he started playing around with designs of a skateboard deck from the fishing nets.

• 54:17Guy Raz?

  OK, so a total stroke of luck. It turns out that at that very same time, the government of Chile was giving out grants to fund all these different kinds of startups. So David packed up, moved to Chile, started collecting fishing nets, and found a factory in Santiago to work on turning those old nets into skateboard decks.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  The first couple of times we made boards, they were not pretty and not ridable. And we had to kind of adjust the temperature of the mold and how the material was processed. And that took, you know, the better part of six to eight months of going back and forth.

• 54:53Guy Raz?

  Finally, though, they settled on a design that held its shape and actually looked pretty good.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  We designed the board like a fish, which is a shape of a skateboard. It has kind of a fish tail. And we put a fish eye on it and fish scales. And, you know, it was just something that grabbed people's attention.

• 55:10Guy Raz?

  David's company is called Bureo. And since its launch three years ago, it's repurposed more than 300,000 pounds of old fishing nets and sold about 8,000 skateboards. And David says they hope to turn a profit by next year.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  The biggest question we get asked from everyone is, You know, what are you guys going to do when you run out of nets? But our clever response has always been, well, if we run out of fishing nets, then I guess our job is done and we can sleep easy at night.

• 55:38Guy Raz?

  That's David Stover, co-founder of Bureo. To learn more about it, head to our Facebook page. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks for listening to our show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. Please also subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us, that's h i b t at npr.org. You can tweet us at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers.

• 56:23Guy Raz?

  Our intern is Diana Mustak. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.