Ben And Jerry: Famous Entrepreneurs Who Turned $5 Course In A Multi-Million Ice Cream Business

Recently, I read about Ben And Jerry’s Ice Cream and how these two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, worked together to build a world famous Ice Cream company.

Both Ben and Jerry have had an association with ice cream during their study days as they worked as ice cream truck driver and ice cream scooper respectively.  However, they shifted to other areas of work after their education only to meet later and deciding to go for an ice cream business.  The idea of ice cream business was not by choice but because of the fact that the equipments for making bagels were very expensive and at that time, unaffordable for them.  Both of them took a correspondence course in ice cream making for $5 each from the Penn State University.  Finally in 1978, The first Ben and Jerry’s store opened up in a Burlington’s abandoned gas station which they got renovated.  The business touched $4.4. million in sales within 6 years and in 2000 the company finally got acquired by Unilever for $326 million.

Some of the take aways and tips for budding entrepreneurs from Ben and Jerry’s story are:

1. Be Creative: Ben and Jerry’s didn’t go after making usual flavors and rather brought into the market, the flavors which people never expected and creative names they never heard of.  Apart from the products, their way of marketing the products was also creative with the use of “Cowmobile” to tour the entire United States and distributing free scoops.

2. Be Socially Responsible: Ben & Jerry’s always tried to connect with the community and be environment friendly company.  The establishment of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation for funding community projects, paying Vermont’s dairy farmers a premium of half a million dollars to offset losses due to volatile prices, using recycled material to build an ice cream shop etc. are some of the examples of social responsibility demonstrated by Ben & Jerry’s.

3. Have Fun: Business doesn’t need to be serious all the time.  Celebrate each and every event, holiday, festivals etc. along with the employees and if possible, involve your customers.  This is what Ben & Jerry’s did; never lost an opportunity to connect with your employees and customers.

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Posted by Vikrant on Jun 23 2008. Filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry