Ben & Jerry's might be a household name in the contemporary ice cream industry, but co-founder Ben Cohen isn't likely to slow down any time soon.
Since the company's inception in 1978, Ben & Jerry's has become one of the most beloved ice cream brands the world over, forever changing the way customers enjoyed their supply of ice cream in the five decades that followed.
While the brand has managed to ascend to the very top of American culture itself, as Cohen remembers it, the company's history was an altogether humble one.
"We met in seventh grade gym class," the 74-year-old Cohen remembers of his initial introduction to company, Jerry Greenfield. "We were the two slowest, fattest kids in the class running around the track. Coach would say, 'If you can't run the mile in under seven minutes, you're going to have to run it until you do.' And we'd yell back, 'Coach, if we can't run it under seven minutes the first time, we're not going to run it in under seven minutes the second time.'"
From there, Cohen and Greenfield went on to become close friends throughout junior high and high school, managing to keep in touch after their graduation as they each embarked on separate career paths.
"I dropped out of college and eventually started really getting into pottery and tried to become a potter. But nobody would buy my pottery," Cohen says with a laugh. "Jerry went through four years [of college] pre-med and couldn't get into med school. And so we found ourselves two failures."
While no doubt an anxious situation to be in, the two soon found the solution in one of their favorite pastimes: food. At the time, Cohen and Greenfield envisioned plans to bring "trendy" food items that were commonly found in the big cities to more local communities. Initially, they thought of opening a simple bagel shop, but after the finding the necessary equipment to be too expensive, they settled on ice cream.
Using a five-dollar course from Penn State University on the process behind making ice cream, Cohen and Greenfield wound up successfully kickstarting an ice cream shop in a converted gas station. As challenging as many of the obstacles in their way were, Ben & Jerry's quickly became a local hotspot for rich and creamy ice cream combinations, thanks in large part to its key industry characteristic: entire chunks of food mixed into the product.
From globs of cookie dough to chocolate covered-potato chips to generous swirls of fudge, Ben & Jerry's has become famous for its generously-sized additions of large chunks tossed into their ice cream mix.
Interestingly, Cohen cites the idea to use these novel ingredients based both on his own childhood love for textures like mashed-up cookies and candies in his ice cream as well as a pre-existing medical condition that resulted in a weak sense of smell and taste.
"When you have a sensory deficit, the other senses make up for it, so I have a very advanced sense of mouthfeel," Cohen explains. "For me, a huge part of food in general is texture, and in terms of ice cream, what I want is the texture contrast between the smooth, creamy ice cream and the crunchy chunks."
Fortunately, millions of would-be customers felt the same way as Ben, triggering Ben & Jerry's rapid climb to the forefront of grocery store's freezer aisles.
In addition to its signature variety of chunks, Ben & Jerry's also remains well-known and frequently praised by shoppers for their outspoken stance on political and social issues. While most companies might prefer to steer clear of these issues to avoid rankling their consumers, Ben & Jerry's has never shied away from speaking out on topics they feel strongly about.
"From the very beginning, when we were opening up the homemade ice cream shop, Jerry and I said, 'We want to run this business the way that regular people on the street would like to see businesses run.' And I think for regular people on the street, they buy products from corporation in spite of the values of the corporations."
"They pretty much understand that corporations are only interested in one thing, which is maximizing their short term profits and they don't really give a sh*t about anything else. But regular people would like corporates to give a sh*t about other stuff," Cohen continued. "Corporations are the most powerful in our society. And you can use that force for the overall benefit of people. You can use that force to work for justice.""
Through a combination of these two traits, Ben & Jerry's became one of the trendiest ice cream brands in the larger food industry, leading to nationwide interest from fans with an avid sweet tooth.
It wasn't always easy, of course. As Ben & Jerry's success continued, they found themselves confronting new challenges, including a newfound rivalry with Häagen-Dazs, the number one ice cream brand in the U.S. at the time.
When Häagen-Dazs' parent company Pillsbury threatened to pull their product from any grocery suppliers' stores that stocked Ben & Jerry's, Cohen and Greenfield responded in grand fashion: namely, by spreading awareness of their rival's efforts through the "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" campaign.
"We realized we didn't have the money to fight Pillsbury in court," Cohen says. "This was existential for the company. I mean, Häagen-Dazs was using any decent distributor throughout the country, so if we couldn't distribute through those same distributors, it was kind of the end for Ben & Jerry's."
Through such informative acts as flying aerial banners around sports stadiums, press conferences and satirical posters, Ben & Jerry's managed to fight on for another day, with Pillsbury eventually choosing to walk back their threats to grocery distributors.
Just as they'd managed to do at the offset, Ben & Jerry's accrued a larger and larger fan following due to their flavorful ice cream combinations, including such hits as Half Baked, Phish Food, Cherry Garcia and many others. Sadly, not every flavor the company produced managed to acquire a firm place in the freezer section, with some of Cohen's personal favorites winding up in Ben & Jerry's aptly named Flavor Graveyard.
"We had a flavor called Mocha Walnut that I thought was great," Cohen says of one favorite bygone flavor. "You know, it wasn't too sweet... it had some subtlety to it. But we ended up getting complaint letters on it. Half the people said that the mocha had too much chocolate; the other half said that it had too much coffee."
Nevertheless, even considering the handful of flavors that have been laid to rest in the Flavor Graveyard, the brand has managed to become one of the most iconic ice cream entities in the U.S., with virtually everyone having their own go-to favorite flavor.
While Ben & Jerry's continues to enjoy unrivaled popularity among modern consumers, the company nevertheless is engaged in a fair number of logistical challenges. This includes their repeated clashes with brand owner Unilever, who acquired Ben & Jerry's in 2000.
As new problems continue to flare up in the social atmosphere, Ben & Jerry's maintains a hardline stance on speaking up on ongoing news stories related to international politics, something that's caused significant issues with Unilever.
Recounting Ben & Jerry's strained relationship with their parent company, Cohen points to various legal battles each company has been involved in with one another. Wearied by the frustration of being owned by a company they felt failed to represent the same values as the Ben & Jerry's brand, co-founder Jerry Greenfield chose to step away, leaving Cohen to lead the Free Ben & Jerry's campaign on his own.
"We were both talking about how Ben & Jerry's as we know it is essentially going to die if it remains under the ownership of the Magnum Ice Cream Company [a spin-off from Unilever's ice cream division that includes Magnum, Ben & Jerry's and Popsicle, among others]," Cohen says of Jerry's exit. "And we knew it was going to take a public pressure campaign to get them to be willing to sell, and that there was going to be a bunch of conflict involved. And Jerry is a very peaceful, loving guy, and he really is averse to conflict. And so it's not the kind of thing that he could do and that he's just not comfortable putting himself in a situation where it's him versus somebody else. And so he decided to resign in protest, and I'm continuing the fight."
True to his word, and just as he'd managed to do in his crusade against Pillsbury in the 1980s, Cohen is getting the word about Ben & Jerry's desire to break off from Unilever, allowing them to once again speak on activist issues without pushback from a corporate owner.
Nowadays, Cohen's hectic schedule leading the Free Ben & Jerry's campaign occupies most of his time, with his schedule largely consisting of outreach efforts with social media engagement, attending local arts festivals like South by Southwest and lining up other potential partners should Unilever decide to sell the brand.
It's a hard road to venture down, as well as one made all the more difficult without his longtime partner Jerry by his side.
"It's definitely more fun doing stuff together with Jerry," Cohen reflects. "I'm missing that part. It's not as much fun as it would have been and I feel kind of alone. Jerry and I just have this really special relationship. There's certainly a bunch of other people that are supporting me and helping me and working with me, but at the same time – you know, Jerry moved to Denver to be closer to his grandkids, so I just don't get to spend as much time with them. So that's a loss. But the Free Ben & Jerry's campaign has kind of taken over my life."
"My hope for Ben & Jerry's is that the Magnum Corporate will see the light and that they'll be willing to see it to this group of investors who believe in the social mission of the company, and that the company will thrive, the social mission will thrive [and] the company will continue to grow."
Ben & Jerry's might have an uphill battle ahead of them, but Cohen remains confident that the brand always find a place among Americans' appetite, thanks especially to the outspoken views the company holds so near and dear.
"I think that's become a very significant part of the brand," Cohen says of Ben & Jerry's activism and outreach efforts. "Which is really interesting. That wasn't the idea. We weren't trying to do that. But I think a significant percentage of Ben & Jerry's customers that are buying the product, it's even better because of the values and the social activism of company."
"I think just about the proudest moment of my business career was when Ben & Jerry's came out with this statement after the killing of George Floyd that, 'We must dismantle white supremacy,' and I had nothing do with it, Jerry had nothing to do with it and it was just beautiful to see that the company itself had embraced those values and came out with that, the most powerful statement," the Ben & Jerry's co-founder went on to say.
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