Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream Inc.: Keeping the Mission(s) Alive

Ben & Jerry’s

In 1963, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield became friends at their Long Island, New York, high school. Fourteen years later, dissatisfied with their respective careers, they decided to start a food company together. Resolving to live in a rural area more consistent with their 1960s counterculture perspective, they moved to Vermont. After an initial attempt at starting a bagel delivery service, they enrolled in a $5 correspondence course on ice cream making from Penn State. They incorporated their company on December 16, 1977, and opened the first Ben & Jerry’s homemade ice cream shop in Burlington four months later with an investment of $12,000.

The shop was an immediate success. By 1980, relatively low wintertime demand at the shop drove the pair to package their ice cream in pints and to start selling them to small retail outlets in the area. In 1981, sales had increased enough to require expansion of manufacturing into a second building.

The company was able to sell as much ice cream as it could make; growth consistently averaged over 60% annually (see Exhibit 2) and came mainly from entering new geographic markets with pint- sized containers. By 1990 the company was selling its products in all major markets, and had a fairly high penetration of the relevant supermarkets and “mom and pop” stores that represented the bulk of ice cream sales (see Exhibit 3).

In 1988, Ben and Jerry were named U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year at a White House ceremony. The company had become a phenomenon.