Ben & Jerry's

This is the story of Ben & Jerry’s before the became an international powerhouse. They started small and used their innovative idea to grow and until recently they’re factory was the largest building in Vermont (until UVM created their Student Center on campus.)  They used only the finest ingredients from local sources, boosting the Vermont dairy sector. Through the support of local industry and products they have created a product that builds local businesses and promotes local well-being with sustainable, healthy, socially conscious methods.

This synopsis comes directly from my father who had the unique opportunity to see this growth of a national symbol and an international commodity first hand.

Ben and Jerry: start local, buy local – go global.

I knew them back when they were just Ben and Jerry, two guys with an idea and a "how to make ice cream" correspondence course from Penn State University under their belts.  It was 1981. Burlington Vermont. I was an 18 year old college freshman in the Animal Science department at the University of Vermont.  My work-study job, a fine job at $4.25 an hour, was working in the UVM Dairy Plant. I made cottage cheese and ice cream mix from UVMs local herd of Holstein dairy cows. That ice cream mix was used to make some fabulous ice cream with all fresh ingredients at the tiny UVM Dairy Bar just down the hall from where the mix itself was made.

One of my duties was to help these two crazy looking guys from New York, long hair, beards and not well showered, load up their broken down (yellow, held together with rust) Ford F-150 pickup which, like these two guys, had certainly seen better days, with 50 20-liter boxes of fresh ice cream mix.  They knew not to buy the better truck until their little shop in downtown Burlington started to turn a bit of profit. Their idea was simple: take the best, freshest and only locally produced ingredients and turn it into gourmet ice cream.  They became locally famous for big chunks of chocolate, strawberries, cherries, or my favorite, heath bar wrapped in decadently rich ice cream.  Their trick was to whip half as much air into the mix making it not go as far, but be twice as creamy and therefore charge 3 times as much. It was a profit making venture from the beginning but it was what they did with their profits that has made them famous. They started the whole idea (I may be wrong on ‘who’ actually started it but they were close) of socially conscious investing. You might not get the biggest return, but it was the right thing to do. And the response was overwhelming.  Their little shop “Ben and Jerry’s Homemade” was festooned with rainbows, black and white checkered floor and black and white enigmatic cows on the walls. It literally made you walk in and ask, “homemade what?” then walk out with a thick and rich cone of ice cream with a funny name like Cherry Garcia, Phish Food, New York Super Fudge Chunk, Chocolate Cookie Dough and pleased that you were supporting a local business that itself was supporting local business.

Ben and Jerry started from humble beginnings with a strong desire to help build local resiliency in other local humble businesses and they went on to eventually stop buying their mix from the UVM dairy plant and make their own in what would become Vermont’s largest building. They offer tours daily and you can find their locally owned and operated franchises in nearly every college town in America and now even Europe. Ben and Jerry made it popular to do the right thing with their corporate profits during a time (the 80’s) when it was not fashionable…they help make it so and the world can thank these two former New York cab drivers who took a mail in college course and went on to make the ‘world’s best ice cream…or at least Vermont’s Finest.