As keynote speaker of Duke's Community Service Week, Ben Cohen shared his story of rising from the fattest kid in his seventh-grade gym class to becoming the successful co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.
Ben Cohen’s story is a story of defying convention, redefining business, pursuing justice—and enjoying ice cream all along the way. As keynote speaker of Duke’s Community Service Week, Cohen shared his story of rising from the fattest kid in his seventh-grade gym class to becoming the successful co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. His talk was sponsored by the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, the Community Service Center, the economics department, East Campus Residential Life, the Fuqua School of Business’ Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and the Coach K Center for Leadership and Ethics.
He began his speech by comically recounting his failed educational endeavors. After dropping out of college, Cohen and childhood friend Jerry Greenfield, a rejected medical school applicant, decided in 1977 to open an ice cream parlor. Getting their ice cream business up and running was a challenging affair. They even had to defeat the Pillsbury Doughboy when Pillsbury bought Haagen-Dazs and prohibited Haagen-Dazs’ distributors from selling Ben & Jerry’s. With perseverance and a successful “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign, they expanded their company, with distributors selling their ice cream to businesses around the northeastern United States.
As Ben & Jerry’s became more successful, Cohen and Greenfield grew disillusioned as they realized that they had turned from hippy ice-cream-makers into professional businessmen. “We felt we were becoming another cog in the economic machine that exploits communities and the environment,” Cohen said.
Cohen and Greenfield then decided to defy business conventions. Greatly in need of money to replace their World War II-era ice-cream-making equipment, they decided to use their need for cash to turn members of the community into owners of their business.
They placed advertisements in newspapers in which they made an in-state stock offering. People responded, and soon, one in every 100 Vermont families had ownership in Ben & Jerry’s.
A few years later, Cohen and Greenfield established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, to which they contributed 7.5 percent of the company’s pre-tax profits. This was the highest of any publicly held company in the country.
“We wanted to experiment using the tool of business to help communities and the environment,” Cohen said to a crowd that numbered more than 100. “We wondered if the tool of business is neutral, like a hammer. It can be used to build things or knock them down.”
In answering this question, Cohen came up with a new definition of business by redefining the “bottom line” to include not just how much money was available at the end of the month, but also how much the business had contributed to improving lives within the community. As a result, Ben & Jerry’s adopted what it felt were socially responsible practices such as buying pecans from black farmers and blueberries from Native Americans.
Cohen ended his talk by criticizing the federal discretionary budget. Displaying a plastic pie chart with an approximately four-foot diameter, he said that 15 percent of Pentagon spending could be re-allocated to social services.
Cohen said in closing that the country is at a watershed moment and the upcoming election is not about “us middle class intelligentsia,” but about people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.
After Cohen’s talk, students attended an ice cream reception. Eating an ice cream bar, freshman Dan Friedman said Cohen’s business ethics are “not something you see everyday.”
Organizers of the event were also pleased with his talk.
“It’s exciting to have him here,” said senior Mary Ellison Baars, co-director of the Community Service Center. “He’s easy to talk to. It’s awesome to see so many here. He touched on many things and reached a broad audience.”
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