In 1983 their company was growing fast, but so were its debts. They decided on a share issue – but only made stocks available to people living in Vermont. Ben and Jerry toured the state in a bus to publicise the flotation, and one in every hundred Vermont households bought stock, most at the minimum price.All the company’s milk and cream is bought from a cooperative of 500 of the local family dairy farmers. That identification with the state has been crucial in their development of a core group of loyal customers.
In 1991 the price of milk dropped suddenly throughout America and it became clear that these small farms, which traditionally form the backbone of the Vermont economy, were being forced out of business by larger corporations overproducing elsewhere in the States. “I said, ‘Maurice, you know what business does; it exploits the community, it exploits the employees, it exploits the environment.’ Maurice said, ‘Ben, you own the company. If there’s something you don’t like about the way business is done, why don’t you just do it different?’ That had never occurred to me before.” Cue a blinding light, and the invention of “business as a force for progressive social change”.THE FIRST PART of the Ben & Jerry’s mission statement says they will make and sell all-natural ice-creams made from Vermont dairy products. Success turned them from ice- cream makers into businessmen, and “for us, having grown up in the Sixties, the idea of becoming real business people had very negative connotations,” they recall in Double Dip. So Jerry went off to Arizona with his girlfriend (and future wife) Elizabeth, and Ben put the company up for sale.Every great mythical story has its turning point, and the legend of Ben & Jerry’s, as it is recorded in their (not very) good book, found its epiphany in a visit by Ben to his friend Maurice, an eccentric 80-year- old artist and restaurateur.
To promote winter sales they gave money off for every degree the temperature fell below zero. In the autumn they organised the first of many annual free festivals for their customers. Using skills he had picked up on a college course in carnival techniques, Ben posed as an Indian mystic and had a breeze block smashed on his stomach.It was all good fun, but very hard work. In 1977 the pair decided to indulge their shared passion for eating by going into the food business together. Bagel deliveries seemed like a good idea, but the equipment they needed cost $40,000. All they needed to make ice-cream was an old freezer and $5 for the correspondence course, so that was that.They chose Burlington and set about converting the old gas station into an ice-cream parlour.
“Talk about living hand-to-mouth,” they recall in a new book, Double Dip: Lead With Your Values And Make Money Too (Simon & Schuster), that combines biography with business theory. “We were eating saltine crackers and sardines from Wool-worths. There was no heat in the gas station, so it was as cold at work as it was at home. When we took the place over, there was a three-inch sheet of ice on the floor because the roof had failed.”They opened with a five-gallon freezer and a friend playing ragtime tunes on an old piano. Unable to afford advertising, they gave away ice-cream instead: to everyone on opening day, to mothers on Mother’s Day, then at random to people waiting in the queue. “We were not cool, we were not popular: we were fat, smart kids.”Ben remembers watching his father eat half a gallon of ice-cream from the carton with a soup spoon at the dinner table, which may have something to do with his theory about tasting: “You’ve got to eat through the pint [the size of a Ben & Jerry's tub] to experience how the chunks and swirls combine. I get really concerned when we have all these people in research and development who are really skinny.”Ben and Jerry stayed friends throughout school, and college.
