March 8, 2022 • 52 mins
As we prepare to launch our second season at iHeartRadio, we’re revisiting some of Alec’s favorite episodes from the archives. In this episode, Alec speaks with ice cream magnates Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame. In the late 70s, Cohen was a rootless pottery teacher, laid off when his school closed down. Greenfield was a diligent pre-med, realizing he was never going to get into med school. They'd formed a deep friendship years earlier, as the two chubby kids in their middle-school gym class. Their joint reaction to their separate crises was to open a small ice cream shop in Burlington, Vermont. That decision would change the face of the industry and give America a model for a new set of corporate values. At the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington -- just a couple miles from the site where Cohen and Greenfield set up shop in 1978 -- Alec talks to Ben and Jerry in front of a crowd that idolizes their hometown heroes, and the energy is infectious. From their Long Island childhood to the tensions surrounding Ben & Jerry's acquisition by Dutch conglomerate Unilever in 2000, the conversation is open, honest, and brimming with the deep bond these two men continue to feel, 40 years after they first put their names together on a sign in Vermont. Thanks to Vermont Public Radio for making it possible.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Alec Baldwin. We're going to rebroadcast an episode
from our archives. This week we have a show recorded
live in Vermont with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who
you know, of course as Ben and Jerry. They've gotten
a lot of my business over the last many years.
We'll have new episodes of Here's the Thing beginning March fifteenth.
(00:20):
Until then, enjoy my talk with Ben and Jerry. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Two
thousand eighteen marks the fortieth anniversary of the first Ben
and Jerry's scoop shop in a converted Vermont gas station.
(00:42):
Back then, it was just Ben Cohen, the rootless art teacher,
and Jerry Greenfield, the diligent premed who were friends from
middle school Jim class. They figured they'd move on from
ice cream in a few years when it became boring
or unprofitable. But of course history had other things to say. Today,
(01:04):
you'd be forgiven for thinking of Ben and Jerry as
more milk and cream than flesh and blood. But it
was the real people behind the pints that emerged when
the two joined me for a rare joint interview last month.
Our conversation was taped in front of a live audience
at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington,
(01:26):
just a couple of miles from the site where Cohen
and Greenfield set up shop in Please help Me Welcome,
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. I knew I should have
(01:53):
gone into the ice cream business. Look at that applause.
You've got to look at that, you know, looking at
you were a story and seeing your lives before you
became these huge successes. You've been in each other's lives
for a long long time. You know, both of you
grew up in Brooklyn and then you met in Merrick
Long Island where you met in school. Why you stayed
(02:14):
so close to him? And then you go, I've just
never run into a better friend to spend my life with. Uh.
You know, he's kind of smart, he's funny. Uh, you know,
he has a real he has very strange eating habits
and such as well. You know, the earliest memories actually
(02:39):
I have of his eating habits as he was once
attempting to survive on these one calorie candies that his mom,
I guess packed for him in his little sandwich bag.
For school lunch and uh, and we were in gym
class together and he killed over. He fainted and uh,
(03:04):
you know it's some kind of strange liquid came out
of some facial orifice and the coach covered it up
with the gym mats so that he could show it
to the nurse when the nurse came by. In the
movie version of Your Life, I'm gonna have that kid
run up and go, Jerry, are you okay? And he's like, yeah,
(03:26):
what's your name? And you're like Ben, my name is Ben,
Thanks buddy, And that's where we all was born there. Y. Yeah.
The second food memory I have of Jerry is uh,
when he was surviving on what he called slop, which
(03:47):
was he would mix together cream of wheat and cream
of mushroom soup and he kept it around in this
jar that he kept in his car and he would
kind of drink out of it. And thank god, Ben
(04:10):
created all the flavors. So that was a slop something
that was consumed over the course of a day a week.
I I uh, I was trying to be healthy, and
(04:30):
so I was I have I have no trouble eating
the same food over and over day after day. I mean,
it's just sort of that he does not lived to
eat no imagination does eat a lot, but uh he
he doesn't care what he eats. Let's talk about Ben
for a minute. You love Ben that I love so.
(04:54):
Uh We we met first of all because we were
both fat kids in junior high school and you know,
uh we were not exactly in the main stream of
social activities. We were both kind of nerdy kids, and
uh so we we hung out together a lot, and
we remained nerdy kids. So I think that was that
(05:16):
was of cream of wheat qualifier. And you know, plus
we we always did like to eat together. I mean
we would have food together, and uh Ben, Ben was
the first person who talked to me about taught me
about uh wet crunch and dry crunch. Ben's really into
(05:38):
textures in foods. I used to talk a lot about
eating through the pain. So food was a big glue
in your relationship, very much, right. And when you say,
what's in the ice cream is his hemisphere and what's yours?
Uh well, I used to make it, but you know what,
(05:59):
what's one of the inch same things? You know, So
you think of Ben and Jerry as you think of
all these incredible flavors, and so people assume that Ben
made some of the flavors and Jerry made some of
the flavors. Jerry, what were your flavors? And it's kind
of a long pause at that point. We had stop
on the menu for a while. But so you're the
(06:19):
business end. No, no, neither one of us. No. So
you know, they were all a really good joint. What
are you saying? What you Uh, it's legal here, you know, yeah,
I think we're recording up there. Ben came up with
the flavors. I would make the ice cream. We started
with this little shop right here in Burlington. Uh. And
(06:47):
and for those people who remember forty years ago, about
two weeks after we opened up, we closed the store
because we couldn't figure out if we were making any
money to stay in business. And we put up a
little sign on the door that said closed. And uh,
we had an accountant who walked in the door and said, hey,
(07:07):
I can help you. And so I saved that first shop. Ye.
But but but I want to go back and forth
that because in you're lives, there's a lot of uh,
you're going to go to college to medical school's conceptually right,
we consider I'll take it um. And you wanted to
become a scholar, but you were into pottery, pottery, and
(07:28):
then you end up teaching pottery. Where again, was it
those who can't do? You know, well, that can't make
a lot of money selling ice cream. But but but
you were you were where did you end up teaching?
That was in the in the Adondex in the town
called Paradox, at the at the Highland Community School for
(07:50):
Disturbed teenagers. But there's one section there. I think when
you guys are not in the same city and you're
not around anything for a few years, correct, when when
we decide I did that we were going to make
ice cream together. We were not in the same place
and you were not in the same place for how long?
Oh it was years. But we made a vow. So
we decided we were gonna learn how to make ice cream,
(08:12):
and so we pledged to each other that we were
going to start making test batches of ice cream wherever
it was we were living and report the results back
and whatever. And I never made any but we also,
I think we're clear on that it should have been Ben.
Ben was the guy who stopped doing his homework. What
(08:34):
in junior high school. I mean I was the guy
I finished all my homework. I should have been making
the ice cream. But I only mentioned that five year
gap because this is back in the time of there
are no cell phones and there is no internet. So
maintaining that friendship, I mean, your friendship is integral to
this home. We wrote letters, Well, we had a chain
letter that we wrote to a group of friends, and
(08:55):
you know, each person would America enter the they're comments
and then send the letter around to the next person,
and you know, it just kind oft on circulating like that.
So you stayed in touch all that time. We didn't
We didn't lose touch. And what was the what facilitated
(09:16):
you getting back here and opening that first place in
Burlington in the former gas station that you opened up him? Well,
I failed at being a potter, No nobody would buy
my pottering. And he failed at being a doctor. He
couldn't get into medical school. So we figured we're not
(09:38):
getting anywhere in the world, and um, maybe we should
start our own business. Did you know what kind of
business were you? Right? I mean, that's interesting. You didn't
decide to go into like, you know, the camping gear business, right,
it had to be food, and uh, we were originally
going to open a restaurant. We had one friend who
knew something about business. He said, whatever you do, don't
(10:02):
open a full service restaurant. If it's got to be food,
open a very limited menu kind of place. And we
wanted to live in a rural college town. So the
idea was to take a food trend that was just
starting off in the big cities, take it to a
rural college town. And uh, the food trends that were
(10:23):
happening was bagels or ice cream, and uh, we thought
we would do bagels. And you couldn't make bagels either,
could That's kind of like sculpting, isn't it. That's kind
of like potter me. You gotta shape it, your throw
into a kiln, right right, right. It's a little more
forgiving than pottery. But you left up the pottery and
(10:43):
the bagels. Apparently. I was actually a baker's helper once
and I got fired. But when you was signed on
to that, you like the idea of a food business. Yeah,
because we didn't know anything about anything. We knew we
liked to eat, and uh, I mean you know when
you say a food business, Uh, we weren't really thinking
(11:06):
about a business. For us. It was kind of a
venture open up a shop, and we thought we would
do that for a couple of years, and then we
thought we would try something else. You know. We we
talked about becoming cross country truck drivers together after that.
So you know, it's not thank God for all our
sakes you do that. We'll be back after this. You
(11:38):
use you opened the first store in Burlington's Win seven
and and what was ice cream in America? Then? Well,
ice cream in Burlington was you had the U v M.
Dairy Bar and you had a Sewer's ice cream at
(12:01):
the bus station in downtown Burlington and that was really
the only Wasn't that enough? Well the bus station was
a pretty seedy place at the time. Uh no, uh clear.
And there was Uptons, the pinball parlor, oh Upton's right.
Cream also, Now for you to go back, when you
(12:22):
were a child, what was ice cream and your child
were you? Were you an ice cream person? Yeah, we
always had ice cream in our freezer and we would
get half gallons from the supermarket and uh it was
just kind of a staple in our house. Briars. Same
for you. Well, when I was a kid, because you
talked about the beginning of the era of the super
(12:44):
premium ice cream, people spending more money for better quality
ice cream. But when I was a kid, you went
to Howard Johnson's on the highway in Massive Peak where
I was from, and they scooped ice cream, which was
pretty good ice cream. There was carvel. You bought ires
by the container and took briars home from the supermarket
where you had the vendors and trucks like Mr Softie
(13:05):
and Good Humor was the big one on when I
could be at Truck's, you know, patrolling the neighborhood when
I was a kid. And then we get into the
era of you know, fruzing glagia and hogging does and
so forth. When you started making ice cream, did you
say to yourself, this is who we are, we're gonna
make We just wanted to make the best ice cream
(13:25):
we possibly could and our model was Steve's ice Cream
in uh Summerville, mass What made a good ice he
was He was one of the first homemade ice cream
parlors on the East Coast. He was making ice cream
in a five gallon rock salt and ice freezer in
(13:49):
the window and uh, you know, people were lined up
around the block. There was a there was a player
piano on the line. You could, you know, put a
quarter in and make the player piano play and and
it was great ice cream. He was doing nixings. Uh
you know, so you'd get a scoop of ice cream,
(14:10):
you know, vanilla, chocolate, coffee. You say, I want a
scoopa ice cream and I want heath bars mixed in,
and they would, right. They were the cold Stone forerunner.
So in the beginning, what kind of menu did you have?
Was it basic flavors or were you throwing you know, uh,
you know, spare parts in there. From the beginning, always
(14:33):
started with vanilla. We started with chocolate, We started with coffee,
you know, the real basics. Uh. We Ben had not
yet flourished as an ice cream creative. I think one
of the first flavors we came out with that was
a real knockout as far as we were concerned was
(14:55):
cantaloupe we we made. I mean, it was great ice
but we don't see that on the menu anymore than
you don't. I mean the reason why you don't see
it on the menu anymore is in order to make
cantalope ice cream. You need overripe cantalopes, and uh, you know,
the produce wholesalers in town really liked us because, you know,
(15:16):
we'd call up and we'd say, hey, do you got
any overripe cantalopes? And they just couldn't wait to get
rid of the overripe cantalopes. And Jerry would be scooping out, uh,
you know, the stuff that wasn't rotten, and uh, you know,
pushing up the overripe. Absolutely avoided the stuff that was rotten.
I did not use that, and you know, and it
(15:39):
was great. I mean it wasn't It tasted just like
a cantaloupe, except it was creamy and frozen and uh,
but the problem is you can't do it in large
quantities because not everybody would be there, like Jerry, you know,
scooping it out. You know, it's very much a hand operation.
So you come up with the flavors. You're like Jerry
cut and scoop. Though, well it was more like that
(16:06):
way with the heath bars. Uh. You know, at the beginning,
we were buying heath bars that were individually wrapped, and uh,
Jerry would line them unwrapped and and line them up
on a cutting board and we had this big two
(16:27):
handled knife. Uh and he would cut him what how
many ways, which which into thirds and then the other way.
Well it was just thirds. Uh. So we were doing
this and it was our most popular flavor, and you
know he was doing it a lot and uh and
then you know, we hired our first guy who knew
(16:52):
something about business and who was Cheeko Lager. By the way,
he uh he uh he cheeko loggerg like beer, logger
like beer. He name his Cheeko Logger Cheeico Logger. That's
the fakest name I've ever heard in my life. He
owned the bar. Uh, this is real name, like Andy Horowitz.
(17:17):
And if he wants to have one guy with a
different man Chico Lagger and uh what did? He called
up the heath bar company and said, you know, we're
using all these heath bars. Can't we buy them unwrapped?
And they said, huh uh, you know we have boxes
(17:39):
and boxes full of all these factory second heath bars
that you know there's something slightly wrong with and we
didn't wrap them. You want those? And he said, yeah,
I'll take them. And you know it was a great
deal in terms of money. And you know this guy,
you know, he was an NBA. You know, he does
his calculations and figures out out the cost of money
(18:01):
and the interest in all this kind of crap and
ended up ordering like a ton of heath bars. And
he's got him piled up in the office behind his chair.
And uh so we had a storm in the freezer
so that they didn't you know, melt or go bad
or whatever. We had them stored on the top rack
(18:21):
in the pallettes in in this walk in freezer. And
one day somebody went to get the pallette down and
he dropped him on the floor before Jerry could cut
him up, and then opened we opened up the box
and they were broken exactly right. And that became the
(18:43):
new method of breaking up the heath bars. So so
for months everything Jerry's and the freezer going step back, cheek,
I tell them already, tell him already, sweep him up.
Let's go. So you open up in burly To and
it's seventy And when do things start to fizz a
(19:04):
little bit? When do you think you're onto something? What's
the sign that you're onto something other than you're scooping,
a lot of slowing down a little before we started fizzing.
Why it turned into the winter from the summer, and
that explains why there weren't really many other ice cream
barlors here in burl at the time. Yeah, what did
(19:28):
your competitors do during the longer than they close? Well,
you know, Sewards was selling a lot of sandwiches and
hot doors. You didn't want to do that, no, because
that was the sign of an ice cream shop that
was going out of business. They started to sell all
this other crap. What do you do? We started to
sell all the crap. We were saying discount on broken
(19:54):
heath balls, we were selling soups and crepes. Actually, you know,
Jerry was in charge of the ice cream. I was
in charge of all the other crap, and we don't
sell any of that any And you you were deciding
what that would be. You with a decider of that
as well, pretty much, I think, I mean we discussed
(20:17):
it together, but we came up with a great ice
cream marketing promotion in the winter. It was called pop
sid Biswie, which stood for penny off per Celsius degree
below zero Winter Extravaganza. They all remember it. Everybody remembers
that promotion at then and Jerry's the colder it gets
(20:37):
the more you say. So, it's a miracle that you're
up here with me today about your great success. When
you tell me that acronymic what is it again? Pop
sid Biswie penny off Percelsius. She had a screwy way
of selling ice cream. We have TV commercial that had
pop sid bizwe in it. It put up each letter
(20:59):
one at a time, BOPCG one. Did you win some
marketing of boards? But you would literally discount purther weather
and that's what saved you. You think, no, but but
one of the great things that grew out of that.
So that was our first winter. We were really struggling, uh,
(21:21):
and Ben and I said to each other, boy, if
we're still in business after a year, we'll celebrate by
giving out free ice cream to everybody. Because we didn't
think we were going to stay in business, and there
was really not much there. Uh. But we were in
business after a year, and that was our first free
cone Day, which still takes place every year. It's around
(21:44):
the first Tuesday in April. You can get in line
as many times as you want at any Ben and
Jerry's shop. And when do really thinks start? When do
you look at each other and say, we gotta take
this to another level? We things started getting worse, uh,
and we said, we're never gonna make it with an
ice cream shop. We need to find another way to
(22:04):
bring in more money. And so we started selling ice
cream to some local restaurants that had asked for it.
Ben became our roots salesman. He would go around and
selling ice cream and then he was passing by all
these mom and pop stores that he was going by
delivering ice cream to restaurants, and he thought we should
(22:25):
package our ice cream into pine containers and he could
sell it in there. And that is what started the
business going forward. Yeah, there were stores, m and what
year did that start to take off? I don't know.
We we don't remember this, okay, okay, I'm just curious
(22:46):
about when do you do? You mean right now it's
a I mean, let's not kill ourselves. It's a huge company.
When did you go public? We went public first just
within the state of Vermont. Uh. The idea was to
make the community the shareholders of the business. Uh. We had,
you know, a bunch of venture capitalists that were approaching
(23:07):
us saying they wanted to invest in the business, and
we said, no, we don't want to do it that way.
We want to use this need for cash as an
opportunity to make the community the owners of the business.
Worked out great. We sold out the offering. It was
the first ever in state public stock offering, and you know,
(23:34):
a lot of people bought stock and happily the stock
went up. A lot of people made a bunch of money.
People's kids went to college on manager's stock. What was
unique about that was there was a very low minimum purchase.
There was a hundred and twenty six dollars. So it
was not aimed at sophisticated investors. It was aimed at everybody.
(23:54):
So the Vermont offering was in eighty four, and then
we had a public offering nationally in ninety eight five,
and then you sell the company to Uni Lever in
two thousand. The company got sold. The company got to
keep it independent. You did, you did explain to people
how that works. Mean you have a board and uh,
(24:14):
I mean, I just would assume a company named Ben
and Jerry, and Ben and Jerry are alive, and I'm
assuming that they're involved they're calling the shots. How does
a company get sold by your board if you don't
want it to get sold to you, a Leaver? How
did that work out? I mean, in the end you
said that we have when things with you to Lever
A fine, it worked out well, But how did it
get sold? Uh? There was a CEO who was running
(24:36):
the company at the time who um saw way for
him to make a bunch of money by selling the company,
and uh, you Lever was courting him. They were courting
each other, I think, and so Uni Leaver ended up
offering so much money for the stock, so much above
(24:56):
what the price that it was trading at, that the
board had no choice legally but to recommend uh sale. Right.
Do they have other ice cream popsicle briars Klondike, Uh,
Magnum magnum, tlenty tolenty go. They're a very big ice
(25:20):
cream every shelf of the freezer case. If you like
ice cream, you've probably already heard this one. But there's
no better ice cream conversation in our archives than with BARBERA.
Streisand I would have my kind of coffee ice cream
briars and sit in my bed and dream, go to
(25:43):
the movie. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon the Lowis Kings.
We had the greatest ice cream and we also, yeah,
you're you're, you're like me. Somebody'll say what was the
best part of the summer, I'd say, what is this
restaurant that has the best coffee ice cream with chocolate
covered Hanzel notes the rest of that interview and many
(26:03):
more that Here's the Thing dot org when we come back,
the skinny on Ben and Jerry's rolls at the company
after it was brought out by Unilever and the real
story behind Cherry Garcia. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were
(26:30):
listening to Here's the Thing Now more of my interview
with the tycoons of Truffle Kerfuffle, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
The company they founded was acquired by Dutch conglomerate Unilever
in two thousands. You're not involved. They run the company.
You're you're not on the board. What's that like for
you that your name is on it? Like, like I
(26:52):
wonder is you're still walking down the street and people
are saying I got a flavor for you, and they
still think you're the pipeline, You're the conduit, uh for
the record. We love it when people come up and say,
I've got a flavor for you that we want that kay.
I was once that an event and these these two
(27:13):
women came up to me and they said, you know
how you know girlfriends are always bringing over a pine
of Ben and Jerry's to their friend who just broke
up with their boyfriend to kind of soothe them. Well,
we think you should come out with a flavor that's
in a pink container called you can do Better Scotch.
(27:50):
Keep up, and I keep on telling the company, this
is a winner. You should come out with this. I
mean coffee ice cream with a butter Scotch ripple. I mean,
this is incredible flavor. They say, oh, we got a
flavor department. Go back then, go go go go do
whatever it did you do? That's what they say. What
(28:10):
can I say? You know, it's one thing to enter
a business because I have no business sense at all.
I mean, I have zero business sense. You know, when
people talk about ice cream, it's you know, a handful
of flavors of which you're at the top of the pile,
and I'm I'm I want to congratulate you. And it's
just amazing to have done that, you know, to have
(28:30):
built a business and then that successful. You know, we
had a saying Jerry and I, it's easy to make
it lousy, it's hard to make it right. It's really
hard to shove that chocolate chip cookie dough into the
pints of ice cream so that each point gets the
right amount of chocolate chip cookie dough. You know, we
(28:53):
used to slice open point containers four ways and to
force actions to inspect, uh, the number of chunks of
cookie dough that ended up in each section. And then
in complex flavors like heath Bar Crunch or New York Superfudge,
(29:14):
not only were you counting the number of chunks of
heath Bar, but you were counting three different size variations
that all had to appear right. I mean, there's a
reason why nobody else was making ice cream like this.
It doesn't really go through the machinery that easily. You know,
there's nothing easier to make than a homogenious liquid or
(29:39):
semi liquid like mayonnaise. How many facilities do you have
around the country to make ice cream like plants that
manufactured the ice cream, Well, there's two here in Vermont,
there's one in Nevada. You think that's it. It's pretty
much refrigerator truck and truck it all around the country. Yeah,
in the country, and then there's another plant in the Netherlands.
(30:00):
Yeah yeah. And that's about the whole thing, right, Ain't
nothing else. Uh, we're not really part. You're supposed to know, Jerry,
he makes the flavors. You count the money, Jerry, what's
going on? Well, I think this just goes to show
that Ben and I are not really on top of things.
I mean, now, when you license, I'm assuming there's a
(30:26):
licensing involved. What's the first signature flavor you come up with?
The first one unusual when we came up with was
Oreo Mint Oreo Mint, and you gotta cut a deal
with Oreo. Well we didn't. And then we got a
letter from uh Nibisco, which owns Oreo, and it was
(30:50):
a really nice stationary that it was, and that they
explained that Oreo is their most valuable trademark and they
will go to the ends of the earth to defend
and there's trademark and under no circumstances could we call
our ice cream Oreo mint. However, we could call it
mint with Oreos. So we said okay, and we changed
(31:15):
the packaging and they were fine, and then you know
about I don't know, five or eight years later, we
got another letter from the legal department at NIBISCO which
began by saying, Oreo is their most valuable trademark. They
will go to the ends of the earth to defend it,
(31:36):
and under no circumstances could we pluralize their trademark. You
may not call your ice cream mint with Oreos, you
may call it mint with Oreo cookies. So, you know,
we changed the packaging again and didn't hear from them
(31:58):
until I started doing this online demonstration demonstrating the size
of the Pentagon budget in relationship to the education budget
and the healthcare budget and the alternative energy budget, et cetera,
(32:19):
using stacks of Oreo cookies. Each Oreo cookie would equal
ten billion dollars. So I'd come out with this, you know,
huge stack representing the Pentagon, and then you had this
least little little stacks research and we got another letter
from the Labor Department of Oreos UH saying, far be
(32:41):
it from us to abridge your First Amendment rights of
free speech. But we're getting a lot of complaints from
our shareholders that the Nibisco company agrees with the point
you're trying to make about the excessive Pentagon budget. Could
you please refrain from doing that? You know, I felt
that wasn't right. But it's their cookie company, right, it
(33:05):
is their cookie company. But you see these advertisements where
they're talking about some competitor and they're calling the competitor
by brand name, And so I talked to a trademark lawyer,
and uh, I said, what's the story here, and they said,
you can use a competitor's name as long as there's
no other product that will do to make the point
(33:28):
you're trying to make. So I wrote him a letter
back saying, look, I've researched every other chocolate sandwich cookie
and no other chocolate sandwich cookie has OREOS high quality standards,
(33:49):
and that in other chocolate sandwich cookies, the amount of
white stuff in the middle tends to vary from cookie
to cookie. And I'm sure they can understand how in
my demonstration each cookie equaling ten billion dollars, it was
off by just a little and I never heard from
them again. You can't take on the Pentagon using HI cookie.
(34:17):
That's that's not gonna work. So did you learn a
profound lesson from your dealings with Nibisco, and you went
on to do other flavor Cherry Garcia. Obviously, when you
did other signature brands like that, did you get into
more or did you get letters from a dear Mr Cohen,
the estate of Mr. Garcia would like to make it
known to you in regards to Cherry Garcia, it was
(34:39):
a flavor that one of our fans came up with.
They wrote us an anonymous postcard saying dead paraphernalia always sells,
So you know, it took me a long time, what
over a year to come up with a flavor that
was deserving of honoring this guy. What I don't remember
(35:01):
you was he alive when it happened? He was? Did
he acknowledge what you did? Well? His lawyer did you know?
He was like, you know, Uh, We sent him the
first point off the line. We overnighted it on dry ice,
(35:24):
and his wife called up and said, you know, he
can't have any right now because he's in the hospital
and diabetic coma, but I really liked the flavor. And
then a few months later we got a call from
his lawyer, whose name happens to be how can't. Uh
(35:47):
he said, uh, you know, yeah, it's a really good flavor.
But we think Jerry's entitled to a little piece of
the action here, and we gave him. We gave him
a little piece of the and now is a state
occasionally argues over who pick up the little piece of
the action. But you've been politically engaged your entire life,
(36:10):
not so much, you know. I think it's uh, it's
more after I moved to Vermont. What happened when you
moved to Vermont. Part of it was having gone to college.
I went to college during the late sixties and early seventies.
There are a lot of social movements going on at
the time. And soon thereafter I came to Vermont, which, uh,
(36:31):
you know, it's just a wonderfully community oriented state. You
can go talk to your legislators in mont Pelier. I
mean it's it's it's very down home and there's a
lot of grassroots activism here. And so I've become very
supportive of the Progressive Party in Vermont. There's a it's
(36:52):
a third party here in Vermont. Uh. And you know,
plus there's Bernie h and there there is there is
nobody like Bernie Ben and I were surrogates for Bernie
in in the last presidential primary. UH. And you know
(37:15):
what's among the amazing things about Bernie, besides what he's
been fighting for for his whole political career, is that
he is not for sale. And you do do not
find people in the political world with that level of integrity.
(37:38):
And what about a year junior high in high school,
I wanted to go uh down South with the Freedom Writers,
and my parents wouldn't let me so. Again during that
same period of time, I grew up on Long Island.
My parents would every once in a while drive into
(38:01):
New York City and we would drive over the Triboro
Bridge and you get let off a street and on
one side of the street there's dilapidated housing and people
living in poverty, and on the other side there's people
living in wealth. And it didn't seem right to me,
(38:25):
and that affected me quite a bit. I think it
was Desmond Tutu who said that, Uh, in situations of injustice,
you cannot be neutral. If an elephant is standing on
the tail of a mouse, you can say you're neutral,
(38:48):
but the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. When being
confronted with injustice, you have. You know, you have three choices.
You can either ignore it, you can complain about it,
or you can do something about it. Did you guys
set up a charitable foundation for the company or do
you guys have your own foundation that you funnel money
(39:08):
into from individually or from the company. What's the mission?
What do you target? You're mostly income disparity, the arts.
What are you doing well so for for the Ben
and Jerry's foundation. Uh, it's social justice and grassroots organizing
for that. And and the interesting thing about the foundation
at the company is that the final decisions about where
(39:30):
the money goes is done by employees who volunteer their
time to make those decisions. And uh, they are remarkable,
they do an incredible job. But I think what's important
to understand is that, uh, you know, the major effect
that Ben Injuries has and the major contribution that Ben
Injuries has to society is not about the foundations. It's
(39:55):
not about donating money. It's about integrating those social concerns
into our day to day business activities and using the
businesses voice. So going back to the public sale Invermonts,
certainly that and I'm also talking about uh speaking out
(40:18):
on social and political issues, and we're gonna get to
campaign finance reform and protest about you know, all kinds
of things that are worrisome in this country that people
have been led to believe it's ineffective, and it is
not ineffective. If you see something wrong in this country,
you need to scream as loud as you possibly can.
You've got to protest, you've got to demonstrate, you've got
(40:42):
to get active. It's the patriotic thing to do. They're
they're they're working for you. I'm in a room with
congressmen and senators and I'm gonna I'm looknna like you know,
you're on the clock, buddy. Campaign finance reform, and it's
the lynch pin at every problem with oursel. How did
you get involved with that issue? I was working for
(41:02):
a long time on shifting a bunch of priorities from
the Pentagon to social needs and didn't get anywhere. I
think a lot of that reason was because of so
many defense contractor political donations, So that was one factor.
And then I was Jerry and I were both active
in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Originally it was laser
(41:23):
focused on economic disparity, but as it started broadening and
everybody who was protesting whatever came into that movement. The
message starters to get garbled, and I felt like it
was important to focus and the the common denominator between
health care and issues of the environment and energy independence
(41:46):
in Wall Street banks, the common denominator was money in
politics that uh, you know, all these corporations and high
high wealth individuals are paying Congress is not to pass
laws that protect people, but to press laws that protect corporations.
(42:07):
So I got into working to get money out of politics.
You see, the tax cut to put more money into
the bank accounts of a class of people, typically Goop supporters,
who uh and if it's if it's a significant amount
of money for these people, you see, we're Kushner paid
no taxes all these years. And the Democrats I want
(42:27):
to win the midterms because because I want to see
Trump's tax returns. You know, they announced they're gonna get
his through their hands on his tax returns, and uh,
that will be thrilling, that'll be okay, okay, um. But uh,
we have some I mean, we just have some mind
blowing questions from the audience. They're really just great questions.
(42:48):
Someone actually wrote down, they wrote vanilla or chocolate. No, no, no, no,
that was that wasn't a question. We went over some
of the backstage to see which ones they have not
been asked, you know, fifty billion times before. But I
love this one, which is what's and you hold your answer?
You actually you go first. You go first, because I
(43:09):
know your answer. What's the longest you've ever gone without
eating ice cream? I have gone months without eating ice cream.
I would probably say two or three months. You've gone
two or three months, and then what happens and they
find you in a pile the I'm I'm a feaister
(43:29):
famine kind of. I have a freezer at home that's
got a couple of hundred points in there, several gallons. Yeah,
because you never know when someone's gonna drop by your
house and you didn't have any ice cream there, I
would beat the crap at it. I mean, this guy
(43:51):
says he's gone several months. All I know is that
every once in a while he comes to me kind
of sheepishly, he says, two points less. Night. We were
a very very self disclosing backstage about our ice cream.
I mean, I mean, what's the worst sound in the world.
(44:12):
That spoon scrape in the bottom. I didn't even at
the height of my ice cream addiction. I'd be sitting
I was divorced, I'm living by myself, I'm miserable, and
what's better medicine than a pint of ice cream? And
I'd be sitting there watching CNN, and I'd be like,
I know, nine o'clock, it's almost ten o'clock. I mean, also,
I hear that scrape in said, I'd be like that,
(44:36):
Wait a minute, I didn't eat that whole thing myself.
That's not possible. What's the longest you ever went without
ice cream? A couple of weeks? Maybe one week? Speaking
of speaking of getting screwed, And I really probably should
come up with a question that's not unkind of Republicans
(44:59):
applauding the house of your Republican if you're a Republicans,
applaud if you're Republican. We have four Republicans in this
com I love this town, I love this time. There's
four Republicans here. What do we do if the Democrats
(45:20):
don't take control? What are we gonna do? You know,
I have a new life philosophy. Lower your expectations, but
assume the best it's a fine line, and I'm assuming
the best. I think we've already lowered our expectations. M
(45:48):
hm as no, there's they can possibly go. Okay, how
do you learn to stick to your lips out? Like?
I mean? Do you do exercises? It's funny you say that.
They came to me and they said do I was
gonna do a movie and they said, do you want
to play Trump? Lauren called me, Laurence, my dear friends,
(46:10):
you might play Trump. I said, are you? Why do
you freaking mind? I don't want to play Trump? I said,
who the hell wants to do that? I was gonna
go do a movie. Then the movie fell apart, and
I called up. When I go, all right, I'll come
to Trump. He's like, and literally the joke is he goes,
it's three shows. We're to do three shows before the election.
And then he's gone, it's gonna be fine, it's good,
(46:30):
big Red. So I'm like, all right, what the hell?
I do it for three shows? And then they and
then um and I said to myself for the cold opening,
it's fast, it's brassy, we're firing the canon. It's in
front of a live audience. Even though we're on TV.
It's it's like, I want to make this, in one sense,
as two dimensional as the man himself is. And and
(46:51):
so I said to myself, you have to raise your
left eyebrow like this, and then sometimes try to stick
your mouth at as far as you can, like trying
to suck the windshield out of a car, and just
make it completely stupid. I mean to make it silly
(47:12):
and stupid, because it's not you know, if we did
the really finely etched one, that's a David Fincher movie.
So we're not gonna be doing that. Um. Who do
you think of the Democrat that can beat Donald Trump? Bernie?
It is he drives a loyal you're tuning your burn, Bernie,
Well you guys or something else? Now? I love this question.
(47:33):
How do you feel Ben and Jerry's has shaped the
culture of Vermont? You know, I think before Ben and Jerry's,
Vermont was pretty much known from maple syrup. Interestingly enough,
I think after Ben and Jerry's, I think they're started
to be all these other specialty food companies, great cheese companies.
(48:00):
The name Vermont came to stand for really high quality
specialty food products. I think Vermont is UH is known
as entrepreneurial partly as a result of Ben and Jerry's
(48:21):
I think because of many things, including Bernie Sanders Romana
seen as progressive and and one of the remarkable things
about Ben and Jerry's UH is that even after it
was sold to this giant multinational, and even after Ben
and I have nothing to do with the company, the
(48:43):
company continues to be incredibly outspoken about really serious issues
like it's publicly supported Black Lives Matter, it's publicly supported
gay marriage. UH, it's publicly supported Occupy Wall Street, which
is essentially an anti corporate thing. And what's so wonderful
(49:05):
about it is Ben and I have nothing to do
with that. It's it's the company itself and the value.
You know, it's about the people. You can say all
you want about agreements and whatever. It's about the people
involved and and the people at the company are incredible. UM.
(49:27):
That's great. Um. The last question I have in a
comment is that your wife is a like, oh yeah,
and did that play an important role in your success?
I just had this image of like you in bed
with your wife, you're in the kitchen table, like then
you call Jerry him you're sorry. I called Ben this
(49:54):
morning just to say hello, and then he called me
this afternoon to ask what are you wearing tonight? And
I said, you know, I'm gonna be wearing a button
(50:14):
down shirt and uh, some jeans, and he said, oh,
I was going to wear a jacket and I said, no,
we can just be ourselves, I mean, you know. And
then I proceeded to get dressed up in my button
down shirt in my jeans, and my my dear wife said,
you're not gonna go like that. So I said, okay,
(50:39):
you want the jacket and she said, yeah, that's a
lot better. So I had to call Jerry up and say, no, Well,
let me just say that, you know, I think it's
amazing to sit with the two of you, who a
are synonymous with a with a product that people really
enjoy and love. I mean, who doesn't love ice cream,
and be your incredible friendship, I mean learning about you
(51:02):
in some more detail about what a great friendship you've had,
but also what great citizens the two of you are
and what you've done with this company. Crowd credible serf
Ben and Jerry Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. They invented
(51:28):
cookie dough ice cream, heath bar crunch, and many many more.
But one flavor they didn't invent is s'mores. That one
comes to us from the fevered imagination of a man
who might sound familiar to Here's the Thing listeners, our
engineer Zach McNeice and his mother Sandra. They submitted the
(51:49):
idea of s'more's ice cream to Ben and Jerry's. Now
every year hundreds of coupons for free pints arrive in
the mail from Vermont. Nobody asks, they just come. Ben
and Jerry are men of their word in commerce, as
in friendship. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing as a
(52:10):
production of w n y C Studios technical production by
Zach Smore's McNeese. Thanks this week to Vermont Public Radio.
Hello, it's Alec Baldwin. We're going to rebroadcast an episode
from our archives. This week we have a show recorded
live in Vermont with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who
you know, of course as Ben and Jerry. They've gotten
a lot of my business over the last many years.
We'll have new episodes of Here's the Thing beginning March fifteenth.
(00:20):
Until then, enjoy my talk with Ben and Jerry. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Two
thousand eighteen marks the fortieth anniversary of the first Ben
and Jerry's scoop shop in a converted Vermont gas station.
(00:42):
Back then, it was just Ben Cohen, the rootless art teacher,
and Jerry Greenfield, the diligent premed who were friends from
middle school Jim class. They figured they'd move on from
ice cream in a few years when it became boring
or unprofitable. But of course history had other things to say. Today,
(01:04):
you'd be forgiven for thinking of Ben and Jerry as
more milk and cream than flesh and blood. But it
was the real people behind the pints that emerged when
the two joined me for a rare joint interview last month.
Our conversation was taped in front of a live audience
at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington,
(01:26):
just a couple of miles from the site where Cohen
and Greenfield set up shop in Please help Me Welcome,
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. I knew I should have
(01:53):
gone into the ice cream business. Look at that applause.
You've got to look at that, you know, looking at
you were a story and seeing your lives before you
became these huge successes. You've been in each other's lives
for a long long time. You know, both of you
grew up in Brooklyn and then you met in Merrick
Long Island where you met in school. Why you stayed
(02:14):
so close to him? And then you go, I've just
never run into a better friend to spend my life with. Uh.
You know, he's kind of smart, he's funny. Uh, you know,
he has a real he has very strange eating habits
and such as well. You know, the earliest memories actually
(02:39):
I have of his eating habits as he was once
attempting to survive on these one calorie candies that his mom,
I guess packed for him in his little sandwich bag.
For school lunch and uh, and we were in gym
class together and he killed over. He fainted and uh,
(03:04):
you know it's some kind of strange liquid came out
of some facial orifice and the coach covered it up
with the gym mats so that he could show it
to the nurse when the nurse came by. In the
movie version of Your Life, I'm gonna have that kid
run up and go, Jerry, are you okay? And he's like, yeah,
(03:26):
what's your name? And you're like Ben, my name is Ben,
Thanks buddy, And that's where we all was born there. Y. Yeah.
The second food memory I have of Jerry is uh,
when he was surviving on what he called slop, which
(03:47):
was he would mix together cream of wheat and cream
of mushroom soup and he kept it around in this
jar that he kept in his car and he would
kind of drink out of it. And thank god, Ben
(04:10):
created all the flavors. So that was a slop something
that was consumed over the course of a day a week.
I I uh, I was trying to be healthy, and
(04:30):
so I was I have I have no trouble eating
the same food over and over day after day. I mean,
it's just sort of that he does not lived to
eat no imagination does eat a lot, but uh he
he doesn't care what he eats. Let's talk about Ben
for a minute. You love Ben that I love so.
(04:54):
Uh We we met first of all because we were
both fat kids in junior high school and you know,
uh we were not exactly in the main stream of
social activities. We were both kind of nerdy kids, and
uh so we we hung out together a lot, and
we remained nerdy kids. So I think that was that
(05:16):
was of cream of wheat qualifier. And you know, plus
we we always did like to eat together. I mean
we would have food together, and uh Ben, Ben was
the first person who talked to me about taught me
about uh wet crunch and dry crunch. Ben's really into
(05:38):
textures in foods. I used to talk a lot about
eating through the pain. So food was a big glue
in your relationship, very much, right. And when you say,
what's in the ice cream is his hemisphere and what's yours?
Uh well, I used to make it, but you know what,
(05:59):
what's one of the inch same things? You know, So
you think of Ben and Jerry as you think of
all these incredible flavors, and so people assume that Ben
made some of the flavors and Jerry made some of
the flavors. Jerry, what were your flavors? And it's kind
of a long pause at that point. We had stop
on the menu for a while. But so you're the
(06:19):
business end. No, no, neither one of us. No. So
you know, they were all a really good joint. What
are you saying? What you Uh, it's legal here, you know, yeah,
I think we're recording up there. Ben came up with
the flavors. I would make the ice cream. We started
with this little shop right here in Burlington. Uh. And
(06:47):
and for those people who remember forty years ago, about
two weeks after we opened up, we closed the store
because we couldn't figure out if we were making any
money to stay in business. And we put up a
little sign on the door that said closed. And uh,
we had an accountant who walked in the door and said, hey,
(07:07):
I can help you. And so I saved that first shop. Ye.
But but but I want to go back and forth
that because in you're lives, there's a lot of uh,
you're going to go to college to medical school's conceptually right,
we consider I'll take it um. And you wanted to
become a scholar, but you were into pottery, pottery, and
(07:28):
then you end up teaching pottery. Where again, was it
those who can't do? You know, well, that can't make
a lot of money selling ice cream. But but but
you were you were where did you end up teaching?
That was in the in the Adondex in the town
called Paradox, at the at the Highland Community School for
(07:50):
Disturbed teenagers. But there's one section there. I think when
you guys are not in the same city and you're
not around anything for a few years, correct, when when
we decide I did that we were going to make
ice cream together. We were not in the same place
and you were not in the same place for how long?
Oh it was years. But we made a vow. So
we decided we were gonna learn how to make ice cream,
(08:12):
and so we pledged to each other that we were
going to start making test batches of ice cream wherever
it was we were living and report the results back
and whatever. And I never made any but we also,
I think we're clear on that it should have been Ben.
Ben was the guy who stopped doing his homework. What
(08:34):
in junior high school. I mean I was the guy
I finished all my homework. I should have been making
the ice cream. But I only mentioned that five year
gap because this is back in the time of there
are no cell phones and there is no internet. So
maintaining that friendship, I mean, your friendship is integral to
this home. We wrote letters, Well, we had a chain
letter that we wrote to a group of friends, and
(08:55):
you know, each person would America enter the they're comments
and then send the letter around to the next person,
and you know, it just kind oft on circulating like that.
So you stayed in touch all that time. We didn't
We didn't lose touch. And what was the what facilitated
(09:16):
you getting back here and opening that first place in
Burlington in the former gas station that you opened up him? Well,
I failed at being a potter, No nobody would buy
my pottering. And he failed at being a doctor. He
couldn't get into medical school. So we figured we're not
(09:38):
getting anywhere in the world, and um, maybe we should
start our own business. Did you know what kind of
business were you? Right? I mean, that's interesting. You didn't
decide to go into like, you know, the camping gear business, right,
it had to be food, and uh, we were originally
going to open a restaurant. We had one friend who
knew something about business. He said, whatever you do, don't
(10:02):
open a full service restaurant. If it's got to be food,
open a very limited menu kind of place. And we
wanted to live in a rural college town. So the
idea was to take a food trend that was just
starting off in the big cities, take it to a
rural college town. And uh, the food trends that were
(10:23):
happening was bagels or ice cream, and uh, we thought
we would do bagels. And you couldn't make bagels either,
could That's kind of like sculpting, isn't it. That's kind
of like potter me. You gotta shape it, your throw
into a kiln, right right, right. It's a little more
forgiving than pottery. But you left up the pottery and
(10:43):
the bagels. Apparently. I was actually a baker's helper once
and I got fired. But when you was signed on
to that, you like the idea of a food business. Yeah,
because we didn't know anything about anything. We knew we
liked to eat, and uh, I mean you know when
you say a food business, Uh, we weren't really thinking
(11:06):
about a business. For us. It was kind of a
venture open up a shop, and we thought we would
do that for a couple of years, and then we
thought we would try something else. You know. We we
talked about becoming cross country truck drivers together after that.
So you know, it's not thank God for all our
sakes you do that. We'll be back after this. You
(11:38):
use you opened the first store in Burlington's Win seven
and and what was ice cream in America? Then? Well,
ice cream in Burlington was you had the U v M.
Dairy Bar and you had a Sewer's ice cream at
(12:01):
the bus station in downtown Burlington and that was really
the only Wasn't that enough? Well the bus station was
a pretty seedy place at the time. Uh no, uh clear.
And there was Uptons, the pinball parlor, oh Upton's right.
Cream also, Now for you to go back, when you
(12:22):
were a child, what was ice cream and your child
were you? Were you an ice cream person? Yeah, we
always had ice cream in our freezer and we would
get half gallons from the supermarket and uh it was
just kind of a staple in our house. Briars. Same
for you. Well, when I was a kid, because you
talked about the beginning of the era of the super
(12:44):
premium ice cream, people spending more money for better quality
ice cream. But when I was a kid, you went
to Howard Johnson's on the highway in Massive Peak where
I was from, and they scooped ice cream, which was
pretty good ice cream. There was carvel. You bought ires
by the container and took briars home from the supermarket
where you had the vendors and trucks like Mr Softie
(13:05):
and Good Humor was the big one on when I
could be at Truck's, you know, patrolling the neighborhood when
I was a kid. And then we get into the
era of you know, fruzing glagia and hogging does and
so forth. When you started making ice cream, did you
say to yourself, this is who we are, we're gonna
make We just wanted to make the best ice cream
(13:25):
we possibly could and our model was Steve's ice Cream
in uh Summerville, mass What made a good ice he
was He was one of the first homemade ice cream
parlors on the East Coast. He was making ice cream
in a five gallon rock salt and ice freezer in
(13:49):
the window and uh, you know, people were lined up
around the block. There was a there was a player
piano on the line. You could, you know, put a
quarter in and make the player piano play and and
it was great ice cream. He was doing nixings. Uh
you know, so you'd get a scoop of ice cream,
(14:10):
you know, vanilla, chocolate, coffee. You say, I want a
scoopa ice cream and I want heath bars mixed in,
and they would, right. They were the cold Stone forerunner.
So in the beginning, what kind of menu did you have?
Was it basic flavors or were you throwing you know, uh,
you know, spare parts in there. From the beginning, always
(14:33):
started with vanilla. We started with chocolate, We started with coffee,
you know, the real basics. Uh. We Ben had not
yet flourished as an ice cream creative. I think one
of the first flavors we came out with that was
a real knockout as far as we were concerned was
(14:55):
cantaloupe we we made. I mean, it was great ice
but we don't see that on the menu anymore than
you don't. I mean the reason why you don't see
it on the menu anymore is in order to make
cantalope ice cream. You need overripe cantalopes, and uh, you know,
the produce wholesalers in town really liked us because, you know,
(15:16):
we'd call up and we'd say, hey, do you got
any overripe cantalopes? And they just couldn't wait to get
rid of the overripe cantalopes. And Jerry would be scooping out, uh,
you know, the stuff that wasn't rotten, and uh, you know,
pushing up the overripe. Absolutely avoided the stuff that was rotten.
I did not use that, and you know, and it
(15:39):
was great. I mean it wasn't It tasted just like
a cantaloupe, except it was creamy and frozen and uh,
but the problem is you can't do it in large
quantities because not everybody would be there, like Jerry, you know,
scooping it out. You know, it's very much a hand operation.
So you come up with the flavors. You're like Jerry
cut and scoop. Though, well it was more like that
(16:06):
way with the heath bars. Uh. You know, at the beginning,
we were buying heath bars that were individually wrapped, and uh,
Jerry would line them unwrapped and and line them up
on a cutting board and we had this big two
(16:27):
handled knife. Uh and he would cut him what how
many ways, which which into thirds and then the other way.
Well it was just thirds. Uh. So we were doing
this and it was our most popular flavor, and you
know he was doing it a lot and uh and
then you know, we hired our first guy who knew
(16:52):
something about business and who was Cheeko Lager. By the way,
he uh he uh he cheeko loggerg like beer, logger
like beer. He name his Cheeko Logger Cheeico Logger. That's
the fakest name I've ever heard in my life. He
owned the bar. Uh, this is real name, like Andy Horowitz.
(17:17):
And if he wants to have one guy with a
different man Chico Lagger and uh what did? He called
up the heath bar company and said, you know, we're
using all these heath bars. Can't we buy them unwrapped?
And they said, huh uh, you know we have boxes
(17:39):
and boxes full of all these factory second heath bars
that you know there's something slightly wrong with and we
didn't wrap them. You want those? And he said, yeah,
I'll take them. And you know it was a great
deal in terms of money. And you know this guy,
you know, he was an NBA. You know, he does
his calculations and figures out out the cost of money
(18:01):
and the interest in all this kind of crap and
ended up ordering like a ton of heath bars. And
he's got him piled up in the office behind his chair.
And uh so we had a storm in the freezer
so that they didn't you know, melt or go bad
or whatever. We had them stored on the top rack
(18:21):
in the pallettes in in this walk in freezer. And
one day somebody went to get the pallette down and
he dropped him on the floor before Jerry could cut
him up, and then opened we opened up the box
and they were broken exactly right. And that became the
(18:43):
new method of breaking up the heath bars. So so
for months everything Jerry's and the freezer going step back, cheek,
I tell them already, tell him already, sweep him up.
Let's go. So you open up in burly To and
it's seventy And when do things start to fizz a
(19:04):
little bit? When do you think you're onto something? What's
the sign that you're onto something other than you're scooping,
a lot of slowing down a little before we started fizzing.
Why it turned into the winter from the summer, and
that explains why there weren't really many other ice cream
barlors here in burl at the time. Yeah, what did
(19:28):
your competitors do during the longer than they close? Well,
you know, Sewards was selling a lot of sandwiches and
hot doors. You didn't want to do that, no, because
that was the sign of an ice cream shop that
was going out of business. They started to sell all
this other crap. What do you do? We started to
sell all the crap. We were saying discount on broken
(19:54):
heath balls, we were selling soups and crepes. Actually, you know,
Jerry was in charge of the ice cream. I was
in charge of all the other crap, and we don't
sell any of that any And you you were deciding
what that would be. You with a decider of that
as well, pretty much, I think, I mean we discussed
(20:17):
it together, but we came up with a great ice
cream marketing promotion in the winter. It was called pop
sid Biswie, which stood for penny off per Celsius degree
below zero Winter Extravaganza. They all remember it. Everybody remembers
that promotion at then and Jerry's the colder it gets
(20:37):
the more you say. So, it's a miracle that you're
up here with me today about your great success. When
you tell me that acronymic what is it again? Pop
sid Biswie penny off Percelsius. She had a screwy way
of selling ice cream. We have TV commercial that had
pop sid bizwe in it. It put up each letter
(20:59):
one at a time, BOPCG one. Did you win some
marketing of boards? But you would literally discount purther weather
and that's what saved you. You think, no, but but
one of the great things that grew out of that.
So that was our first winter. We were really struggling, uh,
(21:21):
and Ben and I said to each other, boy, if
we're still in business after a year, we'll celebrate by
giving out free ice cream to everybody. Because we didn't
think we were going to stay in business, and there
was really not much there. Uh. But we were in
business after a year, and that was our first free
cone Day, which still takes place every year. It's around
(21:44):
the first Tuesday in April. You can get in line
as many times as you want at any Ben and
Jerry's shop. And when do really thinks start? When do
you look at each other and say, we gotta take
this to another level? We things started getting worse, uh,
and we said, we're never gonna make it with an
ice cream shop. We need to find another way to
(22:04):
bring in more money. And so we started selling ice
cream to some local restaurants that had asked for it.
Ben became our roots salesman. He would go around and
selling ice cream and then he was passing by all
these mom and pop stores that he was going by
delivering ice cream to restaurants, and he thought we should
(22:25):
package our ice cream into pine containers and he could
sell it in there. And that is what started the
business going forward. Yeah, there were stores, m and what
year did that start to take off? I don't know.
We we don't remember this, okay, okay, I'm just curious
(22:46):
about when do you do? You mean right now it's
a I mean, let's not kill ourselves. It's a huge company.
When did you go public? We went public first just
within the state of Vermont. Uh. The idea was to
make the community the shareholders of the business. Uh. We had,
you know, a bunch of venture capitalists that were approaching
(23:07):
us saying they wanted to invest in the business, and
we said, no, we don't want to do it that way.
We want to use this need for cash as an
opportunity to make the community the owners of the business.
Worked out great. We sold out the offering. It was
the first ever in state public stock offering, and you know,
(23:34):
a lot of people bought stock and happily the stock
went up. A lot of people made a bunch of money.
People's kids went to college on manager's stock. What was
unique about that was there was a very low minimum purchase.
There was a hundred and twenty six dollars. So it
was not aimed at sophisticated investors. It was aimed at everybody.
(23:54):
So the Vermont offering was in eighty four, and then
we had a public offering nationally in ninety eight five,
and then you sell the company to Uni Lever in
two thousand. The company got sold. The company got to
keep it independent. You did, you did explain to people
how that works. Mean you have a board and uh,
(24:14):
I mean, I just would assume a company named Ben
and Jerry, and Ben and Jerry are alive, and I'm
assuming that they're involved they're calling the shots. How does
a company get sold by your board if you don't
want it to get sold to you, a Leaver? How
did that work out? I mean, in the end you
said that we have when things with you to Lever
A fine, it worked out well, But how did it
get sold? Uh? There was a CEO who was running
(24:36):
the company at the time who um saw way for
him to make a bunch of money by selling the company,
and uh, you Lever was courting him. They were courting
each other, I think, and so Uni Leaver ended up
offering so much money for the stock, so much above
(24:56):
what the price that it was trading at, that the
board had no choice legally but to recommend uh sale. Right.
Do they have other ice cream popsicle briars Klondike, Uh,
Magnum magnum, tlenty tolenty go. They're a very big ice
(25:20):
cream every shelf of the freezer case. If you like
ice cream, you've probably already heard this one. But there's
no better ice cream conversation in our archives than with BARBERA.
Streisand I would have my kind of coffee ice cream
briars and sit in my bed and dream, go to
(25:43):
the movie. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon the Lowis Kings.
We had the greatest ice cream and we also, yeah,
you're you're, you're like me. Somebody'll say what was the
best part of the summer, I'd say, what is this
restaurant that has the best coffee ice cream with chocolate
covered Hanzel notes the rest of that interview and many
(26:03):
more that Here's the Thing dot org when we come back,
the skinny on Ben and Jerry's rolls at the company
after it was brought out by Unilever and the real
story behind Cherry Garcia. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were
(26:30):
listening to Here's the Thing Now more of my interview
with the tycoons of Truffle Kerfuffle, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
The company they founded was acquired by Dutch conglomerate Unilever
in two thousands. You're not involved. They run the company.
You're you're not on the board. What's that like for
you that your name is on it? Like, like I
(26:52):
wonder is you're still walking down the street and people
are saying I got a flavor for you, and they
still think you're the pipeline, You're the conduit, uh for
the record. We love it when people come up and say,
I've got a flavor for you that we want that kay.
I was once that an event and these these two
(27:13):
women came up to me and they said, you know
how you know girlfriends are always bringing over a pine
of Ben and Jerry's to their friend who just broke
up with their boyfriend to kind of soothe them. Well,
we think you should come out with a flavor that's
in a pink container called you can do Better Scotch.
(27:50):
Keep up, and I keep on telling the company, this
is a winner. You should come out with this. I
mean coffee ice cream with a butter Scotch ripple. I mean,
this is incredible flavor. They say, oh, we got a
flavor department. Go back then, go go go go do
whatever it did you do? That's what they say. What
(28:10):
can I say? You know, it's one thing to enter
a business because I have no business sense at all.
I mean, I have zero business sense. You know, when
people talk about ice cream, it's you know, a handful
of flavors of which you're at the top of the pile,
and I'm I'm I want to congratulate you. And it's
just amazing to have done that, you know, to have
(28:30):
built a business and then that successful. You know, we
had a saying Jerry and I, it's easy to make
it lousy, it's hard to make it right. It's really
hard to shove that chocolate chip cookie dough into the
pints of ice cream so that each point gets the
right amount of chocolate chip cookie dough. You know, we
(28:53):
used to slice open point containers four ways and to
force actions to inspect, uh, the number of chunks of
cookie dough that ended up in each section. And then
in complex flavors like heath Bar Crunch or New York Superfudge,
(29:14):
not only were you counting the number of chunks of
heath Bar, but you were counting three different size variations
that all had to appear right. I mean, there's a
reason why nobody else was making ice cream like this.
It doesn't really go through the machinery that easily. You know,
there's nothing easier to make than a homogenious liquid or
(29:39):
semi liquid like mayonnaise. How many facilities do you have
around the country to make ice cream like plants that
manufactured the ice cream, Well, there's two here in Vermont,
there's one in Nevada. You think that's it. It's pretty
much refrigerator truck and truck it all around the country. Yeah,
in the country, and then there's another plant in the Netherlands.
(30:00):
Yeah yeah. And that's about the whole thing, right, Ain't
nothing else. Uh, we're not really part. You're supposed to know, Jerry,
he makes the flavors. You count the money, Jerry, what's
going on? Well, I think this just goes to show
that Ben and I are not really on top of things.
I mean, now, when you license, I'm assuming there's a
(30:26):
licensing involved. What's the first signature flavor you come up with?
The first one unusual when we came up with was
Oreo Mint Oreo Mint, and you gotta cut a deal
with Oreo. Well we didn't. And then we got a
letter from uh Nibisco, which owns Oreo, and it was
(30:50):
a really nice stationary that it was, and that they
explained that Oreo is their most valuable trademark and they
will go to the ends of the earth to defend
and there's trademark and under no circumstances could we call
our ice cream Oreo mint. However, we could call it
mint with Oreos. So we said okay, and we changed
(31:15):
the packaging and they were fine, and then you know
about I don't know, five or eight years later, we
got another letter from the legal department at NIBISCO which
began by saying, Oreo is their most valuable trademark. They
will go to the ends of the earth to defend it,
(31:36):
and under no circumstances could we pluralize their trademark. You
may not call your ice cream mint with Oreos, you
may call it mint with Oreo cookies. So, you know,
we changed the packaging again and didn't hear from them
(31:58):
until I started doing this online demonstration demonstrating the size
of the Pentagon budget in relationship to the education budget
and the healthcare budget and the alternative energy budget, et cetera,
(32:19):
using stacks of Oreo cookies. Each Oreo cookie would equal
ten billion dollars. So I'd come out with this, you know,
huge stack representing the Pentagon, and then you had this
least little little stacks research and we got another letter
from the Labor Department of Oreos UH saying, far be
(32:41):
it from us to abridge your First Amendment rights of
free speech. But we're getting a lot of complaints from
our shareholders that the Nibisco company agrees with the point
you're trying to make about the excessive Pentagon budget. Could
you please refrain from doing that? You know, I felt
that wasn't right. But it's their cookie company, right, it
(33:05):
is their cookie company. But you see these advertisements where
they're talking about some competitor and they're calling the competitor
by brand name, And so I talked to a trademark lawyer,
and uh, I said, what's the story here, and they said,
you can use a competitor's name as long as there's
no other product that will do to make the point
(33:28):
you're trying to make. So I wrote him a letter
back saying, look, I've researched every other chocolate sandwich cookie
and no other chocolate sandwich cookie has OREOS high quality standards,
(33:49):
and that in other chocolate sandwich cookies, the amount of
white stuff in the middle tends to vary from cookie
to cookie. And I'm sure they can understand how in
my demonstration each cookie equaling ten billion dollars, it was
off by just a little and I never heard from
them again. You can't take on the Pentagon using HI cookie.
(34:17):
That's that's not gonna work. So did you learn a
profound lesson from your dealings with Nibisco, and you went
on to do other flavor Cherry Garcia. Obviously, when you
did other signature brands like that, did you get into
more or did you get letters from a dear Mr Cohen,
the estate of Mr. Garcia would like to make it
known to you in regards to Cherry Garcia, it was
(34:39):
a flavor that one of our fans came up with.
They wrote us an anonymous postcard saying dead paraphernalia always sells,
So you know, it took me a long time, what
over a year to come up with a flavor that
was deserving of honoring this guy. What I don't remember
(35:01):
you was he alive when it happened? He was? Did
he acknowledge what you did? Well? His lawyer did you know?
He was like, you know, Uh, We sent him the
first point off the line. We overnighted it on dry ice,
(35:24):
and his wife called up and said, you know, he
can't have any right now because he's in the hospital
and diabetic coma, but I really liked the flavor. And
then a few months later we got a call from
his lawyer, whose name happens to be how can't. Uh
(35:47):
he said, uh, you know, yeah, it's a really good flavor.
But we think Jerry's entitled to a little piece of
the action here, and we gave him. We gave him
a little piece of the and now is a state
occasionally argues over who pick up the little piece of
the action. But you've been politically engaged your entire life,
(36:10):
not so much, you know. I think it's uh, it's
more after I moved to Vermont. What happened when you
moved to Vermont. Part of it was having gone to college.
I went to college during the late sixties and early seventies.
There are a lot of social movements going on at
the time. And soon thereafter I came to Vermont, which, uh,
(36:31):
you know, it's just a wonderfully community oriented state. You
can go talk to your legislators in mont Pelier. I
mean it's it's it's very down home and there's a
lot of grassroots activism here. And so I've become very
supportive of the Progressive Party in Vermont. There's a it's
(36:52):
a third party here in Vermont. Uh. And you know,
plus there's Bernie h and there there is there is
nobody like Bernie Ben and I were surrogates for Bernie
in in the last presidential primary. UH. And you know
(37:15):
what's among the amazing things about Bernie, besides what he's
been fighting for for his whole political career, is that
he is not for sale. And you do do not
find people in the political world with that level of integrity.
(37:38):
And what about a year junior high in high school,
I wanted to go uh down South with the Freedom Writers,
and my parents wouldn't let me so. Again during that
same period of time, I grew up on Long Island.
My parents would every once in a while drive into
(38:01):
New York City and we would drive over the Triboro
Bridge and you get let off a street and on
one side of the street there's dilapidated housing and people
living in poverty, and on the other side there's people
living in wealth. And it didn't seem right to me,
(38:25):
and that affected me quite a bit. I think it
was Desmond Tutu who said that, Uh, in situations of injustice,
you cannot be neutral. If an elephant is standing on
the tail of a mouse, you can say you're neutral,
(38:48):
but the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. When being
confronted with injustice, you have. You know, you have three choices.
You can either ignore it, you can complain about it,
or you can do something about it. Did you guys
set up a charitable foundation for the company or do
you guys have your own foundation that you funnel money
(39:08):
into from individually or from the company. What's the mission?
What do you target? You're mostly income disparity, the arts.
What are you doing well so for for the Ben
and Jerry's foundation. Uh, it's social justice and grassroots organizing
for that. And and the interesting thing about the foundation
at the company is that the final decisions about where
(39:30):
the money goes is done by employees who volunteer their
time to make those decisions. And uh, they are remarkable,
they do an incredible job. But I think what's important
to understand is that, uh, you know, the major effect
that Ben Injuries has and the major contribution that Ben
Injuries has to society is not about the foundations. It's
(39:55):
not about donating money. It's about integrating those social concerns
into our day to day business activities and using the
businesses voice. So going back to the public sale Invermonts,
certainly that and I'm also talking about uh speaking out
(40:18):
on social and political issues, and we're gonna get to
campaign finance reform and protest about you know, all kinds
of things that are worrisome in this country that people
have been led to believe it's ineffective, and it is
not ineffective. If you see something wrong in this country,
you need to scream as loud as you possibly can.
You've got to protest, you've got to demonstrate, you've got
(40:42):
to get active. It's the patriotic thing to do. They're
they're they're working for you. I'm in a room with
congressmen and senators and I'm gonna I'm looknna like you know,
you're on the clock, buddy. Campaign finance reform, and it's
the lynch pin at every problem with oursel. How did
you get involved with that issue? I was working for
(41:02):
a long time on shifting a bunch of priorities from
the Pentagon to social needs and didn't get anywhere. I
think a lot of that reason was because of so
many defense contractor political donations, So that was one factor.
And then I was Jerry and I were both active
in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Originally it was laser
(41:23):
focused on economic disparity, but as it started broadening and
everybody who was protesting whatever came into that movement. The
message starters to get garbled, and I felt like it
was important to focus and the the common denominator between
health care and issues of the environment and energy independence
(41:46):
in Wall Street banks, the common denominator was money in
politics that uh, you know, all these corporations and high
high wealth individuals are paying Congress is not to pass
laws that protect people, but to press laws that protect corporations.
(42:07):
So I got into working to get money out of politics.
You see, the tax cut to put more money into
the bank accounts of a class of people, typically Goop supporters,
who uh and if it's if it's a significant amount
of money for these people, you see, we're Kushner paid
no taxes all these years. And the Democrats I want
(42:27):
to win the midterms because because I want to see
Trump's tax returns. You know, they announced they're gonna get
his through their hands on his tax returns, and uh,
that will be thrilling, that'll be okay, okay, um. But uh,
we have some I mean, we just have some mind
blowing questions from the audience. They're really just great questions.
(42:48):
Someone actually wrote down, they wrote vanilla or chocolate. No, no, no, no,
that was that wasn't a question. We went over some
of the backstage to see which ones they have not
been asked, you know, fifty billion times before. But I
love this one, which is what's and you hold your answer?
You actually you go first. You go first, because I
(43:09):
know your answer. What's the longest you've ever gone without
eating ice cream? I have gone months without eating ice cream.
I would probably say two or three months. You've gone
two or three months, and then what happens and they
find you in a pile the I'm I'm a feaister
(43:29):
famine kind of. I have a freezer at home that's
got a couple of hundred points in there, several gallons. Yeah,
because you never know when someone's gonna drop by your
house and you didn't have any ice cream there, I
would beat the crap at it. I mean, this guy
(43:51):
says he's gone several months. All I know is that
every once in a while he comes to me kind
of sheepishly, he says, two points less. Night. We were
a very very self disclosing backstage about our ice cream.
I mean, I mean, what's the worst sound in the world.
(44:12):
That spoon scrape in the bottom. I didn't even at
the height of my ice cream addiction. I'd be sitting
I was divorced, I'm living by myself, I'm miserable, and
what's better medicine than a pint of ice cream? And
I'd be sitting there watching CNN, and I'd be like,
I know, nine o'clock, it's almost ten o'clock. I mean, also,
I hear that scrape in said, I'd be like that,
(44:36):
Wait a minute, I didn't eat that whole thing myself.
That's not possible. What's the longest you ever went without
ice cream? A couple of weeks? Maybe one week? Speaking
of speaking of getting screwed, And I really probably should
come up with a question that's not unkind of Republicans
(44:59):
applauding the house of your Republican if you're a Republicans,
applaud if you're Republican. We have four Republicans in this
com I love this town, I love this time. There's
four Republicans here. What do we do if the Democrats
(45:20):
don't take control? What are we gonna do? You know,
I have a new life philosophy. Lower your expectations, but
assume the best it's a fine line, and I'm assuming
the best. I think we've already lowered our expectations. M
(45:48):
hm as no, there's they can possibly go. Okay, how
do you learn to stick to your lips out? Like?
I mean? Do you do exercises? It's funny you say that.
They came to me and they said do I was
gonna do a movie and they said, do you want
to play Trump? Lauren called me, Laurence, my dear friends,
(46:10):
you might play Trump. I said, are you? Why do
you freaking mind? I don't want to play Trump? I said,
who the hell wants to do that? I was gonna
go do a movie. Then the movie fell apart, and
I called up. When I go, all right, I'll come
to Trump. He's like, and literally the joke is he goes,
it's three shows. We're to do three shows before the election.
And then he's gone, it's gonna be fine, it's good,
(46:30):
big Red. So I'm like, all right, what the hell?
I do it for three shows? And then they and
then um and I said to myself for the cold opening,
it's fast, it's brassy, we're firing the canon. It's in
front of a live audience. Even though we're on TV.
It's it's like, I want to make this, in one sense,
as two dimensional as the man himself is. And and
(46:51):
so I said to myself, you have to raise your
left eyebrow like this, and then sometimes try to stick
your mouth at as far as you can, like trying
to suck the windshield out of a car, and just
make it completely stupid. I mean to make it silly
(47:12):
and stupid, because it's not you know, if we did
the really finely etched one, that's a David Fincher movie.
So we're not gonna be doing that. Um. Who do
you think of the Democrat that can beat Donald Trump? Bernie?
It is he drives a loyal you're tuning your burn, Bernie,
Well you guys or something else? Now? I love this question.
(47:33):
How do you feel Ben and Jerry's has shaped the
culture of Vermont? You know, I think before Ben and Jerry's,
Vermont was pretty much known from maple syrup. Interestingly enough,
I think after Ben and Jerry's, I think they're started
to be all these other specialty food companies, great cheese companies.
(48:00):
The name Vermont came to stand for really high quality
specialty food products. I think Vermont is UH is known
as entrepreneurial partly as a result of Ben and Jerry's
(48:21):
I think because of many things, including Bernie Sanders Romana
seen as progressive and and one of the remarkable things
about Ben and Jerry's UH is that even after it
was sold to this giant multinational, and even after Ben
and I have nothing to do with the company, the
(48:43):
company continues to be incredibly outspoken about really serious issues
like it's publicly supported Black Lives Matter, it's publicly supported
gay marriage. UH, it's publicly supported Occupy Wall Street, which
is essentially an anti corporate thing. And what's so wonderful
(49:05):
about it is Ben and I have nothing to do
with that. It's it's the company itself and the value.
You know, it's about the people. You can say all
you want about agreements and whatever. It's about the people
involved and and the people at the company are incredible. UM.
(49:27):
That's great. Um. The last question I have in a
comment is that your wife is a like, oh yeah,
and did that play an important role in your success?
I just had this image of like you in bed
with your wife, you're in the kitchen table, like then
you call Jerry him you're sorry. I called Ben this
(49:54):
morning just to say hello, and then he called me
this afternoon to ask what are you wearing tonight? And
I said, you know, I'm gonna be wearing a button
(50:14):
down shirt and uh, some jeans, and he said, oh,
I was going to wear a jacket and I said, no,
we can just be ourselves, I mean, you know. And
then I proceeded to get dressed up in my button
down shirt in my jeans, and my my dear wife said,
you're not gonna go like that. So I said, okay,
(50:39):
you want the jacket and she said, yeah, that's a
lot better. So I had to call Jerry up and say, no, Well,
let me just say that, you know, I think it's
amazing to sit with the two of you, who a
are synonymous with a with a product that people really
enjoy and love. I mean, who doesn't love ice cream,
and be your incredible friendship, I mean learning about you
(51:02):
in some more detail about what a great friendship you've had,
but also what great citizens the two of you are
and what you've done with this company. Crowd credible serf
Ben and Jerry Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. They invented
(51:28):
cookie dough ice cream, heath bar crunch, and many many more.
But one flavor they didn't invent is s'mores. That one
comes to us from the fevered imagination of a man
who might sound familiar to Here's the Thing listeners, our
engineer Zach McNeice and his mother Sandra. They submitted the
(51:49):
idea of s'more's ice cream to Ben and Jerry's. Now
every year hundreds of coupons for free pints arrive in
the mail from Vermont. Nobody asks, they just come. Ben
and Jerry are men of their word in commerce, as
in friendship. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing as a
(52:10):
production of w n y C Studios technical production by
Zach Smore's McNeese. Thanks this week to Vermont Public Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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