Summer, Ben & Jerry's, and What Happened to Businesses "Doing Good"

Also, the time I helped Ben and Jerry test their first ice cream pops

It’s full-on summer, when unimaginative editors everywhere assign young reporters a story about “the business of ice cream.”

That’s what happened to me in 1987. Thankfully, that year the most interesting thing in the business of ice cream was a relative newcomer called Ben & Jerry’s. Reporting that story initiated a years-long journalistic relationship that I enjoyed with Ben Cohen, who now is trying to wrest his company back from the one he sold it to, Unilever.

In July of ‘87 I flew to Burlington, Vt., rented a car and drove to the Ben & Jerry’s barn headquarters in nearby Waterbury to spend a day mostly with Ben and sometimes with his co-founder, Jerry Greenfield. They showed me around, briefed me about the business, and told their founding story – how the two met as kids in Merrick, N.Y., on Long Island; failed at almost everything; decided to start a business together; sent away for a $5 correspondence course on how to make ice cream; scrounged up $8,000 from friends and family; and started making crazy chunky flavors in a former gas station in Burlington. Before long, they were selling Cherry Garcia and New York Super Fudge Chunk nationwide.

Actually, my favorite memory of the visit was talking with Ben and Jerry at Ben’s desk – a beat-up metal number that looked like it had been bought second-hand from a DMV – when a guy from their “lab” walked in with a dozen chocolate-covered ice cream pops laid out on a metal tray. The company at the time did not sell ice cream pops, but wanted to. These were test products.

I thought they were just for Ben and Jerry. But Ben handed some to me to try. He wanted my opinion. And we weren’t to leave the room until all twelve were eaten. (That’s four each, if you, you know, do the math.) While I’m sure my input had zero impact on any Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pop flavors, then or now, it was charming to be asked.

Over the next two decades, I reached out to Ben now and then when I was doing a story and needed some colorful commentary. I was almost exclusively covering tech, but Ben hovered around the tech industry, I think in part because tech founders and CEOs in those days were aligned with Ben’s hippy-ish, counter-culture, do-good-for-the-world business ethos. (Yeah, I know – things have changed in tech.)

In fact, in 1997, Ben and Jerry descended on a three-day conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., of about 500 tech founders and investors called Agenda. They handed out ice cream and did some carnival-barker style preaching about using tech to make the world better. In my column for USA Today about the conference, I wrote this:

4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.: Time for the ice cream social. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is served, and both Ben (Cohen) and Jerry (Greenfield) are on hand. I stand in line with Ted Waitt, CEO of Gateway 2000, and Jeffrey Bezos, founder of amazon.com (sic). They talk of what flavor they’ll pick, not of Microsoft’s situation.

“Microsoft’s situation” was that, earlier the same day, the Justice Department announced it was suing Microsoft for antitrust. Bill Gates, then Microsoft’s CEO, was at the conference when that news came out. He stayed and seemed unfazed. I wrote: “Although I ask everyone in sight about Justice’s move, most shrug it off and turn to what concerns them most: tech trends and their own feuds.” I added: “Sometimes the technology industry feels like a rural town full of divorced people.”

(Ben and Jerry. in 2025.)

But I digress. Back to Ben. I tapped him, for instance, in 1999, when I wrote a piece about the twentieth anniversary of the Sony Walkman. He told me he put his on for the first time while driving from Boston to Vermont, and was so enthralled by the sound that he missed his exit and drove an hour and a half in the wrong direction.

In 2006, when more and more companies were saying they wanted to be “socially responsible,” I asked Ben about it, since his company had always been that way. “What we discovered, and we didn’t know this going into it, was that if your customers support what the company is about, the bond that is created is immeasurable,” he told me. “It goes way beyond whether you have a cute TV ad. It’s a spiritual connection.”

Where did that mindset go?

Here’s, perhaps, the unfortunate part for Ben. In my 1987 story, I quoted Ben telling me: “We’d turn down any buyout offer. And you should print that.” Obviously, I did. Thirteen years later, in 2000, Ben and Jerry sold their company to Unilever. They believed it would be in the company’s best interest. In the acquisition agreement, Unilever promised independence to Ben & Jerry’s and said it would carry on the company’s tradition of engaging “in these critical, global economic and social missions.”

By 2025, Ben and Jerry accused Unilever of breaking those promises. “Jerry and I both came to the realization that under the current leadership of Unilever-slash-Magnum, the social mission was essentially going to die,” Ben said at an investor conference.

He was there because he has been raising money to buy back Ben & Jerry’s. You can read a detailed account of his fight in a recent New York magazine story. It’s apparently a long way from being over.

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Here is the story (and sidebar) as it appeared in USA Today on July 17, 1987. From my clips collection.