Ben and Jerry dish out ice cream, ideas

Hundreds of students packed the lower level of Irvine Auditorium yesterday, lured by free ice cream and a chance to hear Ben and Jerry speak. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, entrepreneurs and owners of the Vermont-based ice cream and frozen yogurt business that bears their names, discussed their ideas of radical business philosophy and social responsibility. Friends since the seventh grade, Cohen and Greenfield realized their dream of becoming their own bosses in May of 1978, when they opened an ice cream store in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt. Soon after, the pair found themselves the owners of a business with a net worth of $3 million. At this point, Cohen and Greenfield were on the verge of selling the business. "We weren't scooping ice cream anymore," Greenfield explained. "It had become a big business and we didn't want to be responsible for exploiting people like most businesses do." But these two visionaries managed to find a way to run their business in a manner that supports people rather than exploits them. In their efforts to make the local community around them prosper as their business grew, Cohen and Greenfield offered Vermont residents a chance to stock in the ice cream company at a reduced price. "When all the stock was gone, one out of every 100 families in Vermont owned shares in our company," Greenfield said. Greenfield emphasized the fact that business is the most powerful force in our society. "If business is the most powerful institution," he asked, "then why aren't businesses using their power to help society rather than destroy it?" Greenfield said that many businesses fail to measure success correctly and cited the profit motive as one of the main reasons for businesses' social irresponsibility to the community. "Businesses tend to measure their success by how much profit they are making," he said. "They base their decisions on which [option] will bring the most profit." Greenfield stated that their company was trying to integrate their business needs with those of the surrounding community. "We have a Ben and Jerry foundation," Greenfield said. "We give 7.5% of pre-tax profits to non-profit organizations. "We measure our success not only by how much profit the company is generating, but also by how much we have helped to improve the quality of the community," Greenfield said. "We have begun to choose courses of action that have a positive effect on the community and our business at the same time." He mentioned that many of their products integrate social concerns into the production process. Rainforest Crunch is one of those products. The ice cream contains brazil nuts which are harvested from rainforests. "This is more profitable both for the environment and for the community," Greenfield said. "People are less inclined to cut down rainforests if they are profitable." Chocolate Fudge Brownie is another flavor on the list of socially responsible products. "We buy the brownies from a bakery in inner-city New York that employs homeless people," Greenfield said. "This way we are able to get our ingredients and the employees of the bakery can count on a job as long as we are creating a market for [the product]." Cohen and Greenfield buy their pecans from farmers in the South, their coffee beans from an Aztec cooperative in Mexico, and their dairy products from a co-op in Vermont. "It is very important that we keep the money going back to the people who need it," Greenfield said. "We are using the power of our company to be socially responsible. "We at Ben and Jerry are learning that business has a spiritual aspect," he added. "We are all interconnected. As we help others, we cannot help but to help ourselves."