How I Built This with Guy Raz - Ben & Jerry's: Ben Cohen And Jerry Greenfield (2017)

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

In the mid-1970s two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield decided to open an ice cream shop in Burlington, Vermont. Their quirky little shop packaged and sold unusual flavors like Honey Coffee, Mocha Walnut, and Mint with Oreo Cookies. In 1981, the regional brand spread across the country after Time magazine called it the "best ice cream in America." Today, Ben & Jerry's is one of the top selling ice cream brands in the world. And, like the original founders, the company doesn't shy away from speaking out on social issues. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Clay McCabe of Zipper Rescue, a repair kit that helps people fix their broken zippers at home. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, everyone, it's Guy here, so I hope you're doing well, given the circumstances. Like many of you, our team is working remotely at the moment, and we're all working really hard to produce some fresh episodes for you. It's a little challenging, but they are going to be coming your way really soon. Anyway, this week we wanted to go deep into the How I Built This Archives

to find a story that would bring all of us a little levity and comfort and joy. And I think you will agree we found the story. Oh, and just a quick warning, this episode does contain some salty language. Pillsbury had bought Hagenas, so they owned them, and they went to independent ice cream distributors. and told them that if those distributors continued to deliver Ben and Jerry's, that they wouldn't sell them, Hagenas, anymore. You know, we recognized that Pillsbury was using their power to keep competitors out.

So what did you do? We took our case to the people. We decided to go after the Pillsbury Do Boy, the most beloved food mascot in the country. Yeah. The pudgy little. doughboy. But this particular case, it was a matter of survival. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how two hippies named Ben and Jerry turn their small ice cream shop in Burlington, Vermont, into one of the most iconic ice cream brands in the world. I don't know about you, but I have a feeling that most people, At some point have spent a quiet evening in front of the television with a spoon and a pint of, you know, chunky monkey or Cherry Garcia or New York Super Fudge Chunker, or Chocolate Chip cookie dough. Because there's something really comforting about a pint of Ben and Jerry's, even though it's full of sugar and saturated fat, it somehow feels okay. You know what I mean? Maybe it's the fair trade symbol on the front or the we buy from local Vermont dairy farmers on the side of the point.

or most likely seeing Ben and Jerry's photo on it because you kind of know they're good guys that their hearts in the right place. And the thing is, all that peace and justice and love and equality stuff that Ben and Jerry's kind of tied together with their brand, it's real. It wasn't a gimmick. It wasn't a strategy designed to attract customers because it's who they are. There weren't social enterprises back when these guys started and they certainly never planned to get rich. But they did do well and they did do good. And their amazing story of building one of the most beloved ice cream brands actually begins almost 60 years ago when Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were at the same middle school on Long Island in New York.

We were both fat as kids. We were both, you know, nerdy, not in the mainstream socially. You know, we were the two slowest, fatest kids in gym class. So, you know, if you're running around the track and you're half a lap behind everybody else, and there's another guy there besides you, you know, you get pretty friendly with that guy. And did you end up going to the same high school? We did. Yeah, we went to Calhoun High School. We graduated.

Jerry was a math league. I was in debate club. Wow. I lettered in debate clubs. You letter in math? All right, so you guys grew up in Long Island. You finished high school there. And did you, where did you go?

Jerry, where did you go to college? Ben, where'd you go? I went to a lot of colleges. I went to Colgate. I went to Skidmore. I went to NYU. I went to the new school. Wow, you did the circuit.

I dropped out of all those schools. All right. And then I finally joined the University Without Walls, which was, the most unstructured college program at the time. The idea was that the whole world was your campus and you go out there and learn whatever you wanted to learn and then you come back to this administrative body and prove that you learned it and they give you a degree.

And I dropped out of there too. So that was my college career. Still too much structure for Ben, as I like to tell people. Jerry, how about you? I went to Oberlin College in Ohio. I did four years straight. I was pre-med and applied to and got rejected from lots of medical schools on two different occasions. So you guys were, I mean, look, I think.

Failures. Let's be honest. That's just not true. That's just untrue. But what happened after you graduate? How did you guys reconnect? Well, I was working out of school for. disturbed kids in the Adirondacks.

I was teaching pottery there, and then I decided I wanted to try to learn, try to be a real potter, you know, those who can't teach, those who can't do, well, I tried doing and nobody would buy my pots. So I left the Adirondacks. I moved to New York City in order to get, you know, some more other influences on my pottery. And, of course, it was so expensive to live in New York that I needed to spend all my time. I'm making rent, driving cab.

And so I have this apartment, pretty grungy apartment. And Jerry showed up. In New York? Yep. And you moved into Ben's apartment, or you just ended up both being? I did. So after I graduated college and after my first bout of medical school rejections, I moved in with Ben in New York City.

And then I left and went to North Carolina. And after my second bout of medical school rejections, I connected with Ben again. And it was at that point that we decided to put our fortunes together and open up a little shop, which, yeah, which turned out to be an ice cream business. You know, we didn't exactly think of it as a business. We thought of it as a venture. Like, let's do something because we're not. Right. That's exactly right.

Because we're failures. Let's do something for a couple of years, and then after we do that, let's do something else. We talked about becoming cross-country truck drivers after we did this ice cream shop. So was ice cream the main idea? Was that what you were going to do from the beginning? Because I've read that you weren't really sure what kind of shop you were going to do. Yeah, we thought we would do something with food because we'd always like to eat. And we wanted to live in a college town.

So we thought about picking a food that was becoming popular in big cities but had not yet been brought to a college town. And at that time, the foods we thought about were bagels and homemade ice cream. So we went to a used restaurant supply store to price out bagel-making equipment. This was G&G restaurant supply in Albany, New York. Lou was there. Lou was this old guy with a gold chain around his neck and a big cigar in his mouth. And he told us we didn't have enough money to buy big equipment. He also told us, hey, I wouldn't screw you.

Life's too short. So I'm curious. I mean, I'm curious because you guys were in your mid-20s. And did you sit down like and, you know, hang out late? nights putting out a strategy thinking, you know, sort of starting to think about different ideas you could do together and were you meeting in cafes during the day? Or was it, like, how did it even, how did you even start to develop this idea? Or was it just much less, you know, was just much more sort of, yeah, let's just do this. This was in the old days. Before cafe culture.

Right, right, right. No, we did not meet in cafes to discuss this. But we did discuss it quite a bit, and we researched it quite a bit. We sent away for 30 SBA pamphlets that cost between 15 cents and $3 per on all the different aspects of running a business. This is just like pamphlets from the small business administration that you, I guess, were available. Yeah. That the government would put out. How to calculate your break-even point. Pretty basic stuff.

Our goal when we opened was to make $20,000 a year apiece. Which was pretty good money, I guess, in the late 70s, right? No, it was shitty money. And it took us a long time to achieve that goal. So when you were in New York kind of thinking about what you could do, how did you settle on an ice cream shop and how did you settle on Burlington, Vermont? Well, we settled on ice cream because bagel equipment was too expensive, and we settled on Burlington, Vermont, because originally we settled on Saratoga Springs. And we actually moved to

Saratoga Springs to get ready to open up the place. And we're spending most of our time working on this business plan for an ice cream shop and doing a lot of research and we took this correspondence course and how to make ice cream. We were doing the correspondence course. We got the big college textbook called Ice Cream by William S. R. Buckle S. R. Buckle S. R. Thank you. The father of modern American ice cream. And Jerry could understand that very complex textbook because he had this biochemistry background from his failed medical. school experience. Oh, right. So there was some other ice cream shop that opened up in Saratoga Springs before us. It was called Afternoon Delight. Did they make good ice cream? We don't know. We left town

before they opened up. You just figured we're not going to open up here because there's a shop. We didn't want to compete. We figured we had a better chance of success if we opened up in a place where there wasn't much competition. And originally we were looking for warm rural college towns and all the warm ones already had ice cream. Yeah. You know, as we went further and further north, but then the only town left that we knew anything about was Burlington, which, you know, was an hour and a half south. The Canadian border, it's kind of cold and there wasn't much ice cream here.

I just want to pause for a sec, because I think a lot of people hear Ben and Jerry's and think these guys were hippies, which is true. And they're, you know, they're sort of activists and, but that it was just kind of slap dash, but you guys really did actually, I mean, there was some method to this. I mean, you researched, you actually scoped out possible locations. I mean, this wasn't, I mean, you were really actually trying to do this in a methodical way. We're very hard workers. Yeah. No, I mean, you are. I mean. No, but when you describe it, you're, and yes, all those things happen, but the way you're describing it is putting a lot more thought and planning into it

than we actually did. I mean, we just took one step at a time and we did whatever the next thing was in front of us. I think it was near that time that we kind of realized that, you know, the word business is, you know, essentially kind of a busyness. That is mostly common sense and a lot of work. Yeah. And, I mean, this is pre-internet. So you couldn't just go online and type in how to make ice cream.

which you could do today, or where do I buy restaurant equipment? Like, you, I mean, things took a lot longer, presumably. The yellow pages. Yeah. Spent a lot more time with the phone book and the yellow pages. Yeah. I mean, you know, when Ben and I talk to people today about taking a correspondence course, correspondence courses don't exist.

Right. I mean, the closest thing would be an online course. But the idea that somebody would mail you a textbook and then you read through these textbooks and you fill out answers to a test and you mail it back to your professor and then they grade it and then they mail it back to you and you find out how you did on your test. It's a quaint idea. Yeah. How much, how much did that course cost, by the way? Five dollars.

Wow. We split one between the two of us. When you decided, when you told, I don't know, friends or parents or family, like, we're going to go to Burlington, Vermont and we're going to open up an ice cream shop. Did anybody just say, do you guys realize that maybe seven months out of the year, it's really cold there? And it just might not make a whole lot of sense. Or did that conversation never come up? My parents were really happy. Because finally their son was giving up the idea of being a potter for the rest of his life and finally becoming a businessman.

And this really turned him on. And they were so supportive of it that I started thinking, oh, I must be doing the wrong thing. Yes, of course we thought about, you know, the cold weather. Jerry even came up with this idea of a promotion that ended up in the business plan called Popsid Biswe, which was the penny off per Celsius degree below zero winter extravaganza. Wait, can you say that again? slowly? Popsid Biswee, the penny off per Celsius degree below zero winter extravagance.

You can say it slowly if you want. That's incredible. And how did it work? The colder it got, the more you saved. For every degree below zero Celsius, which is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. You got a penny off the price of your cone, which was significant at the time because a cone cost 52 cents. Huh. All right.

So you get to Burlington, Vermont. and you start looking around for the perfect place to open up your ice cream shop? Well, we got one of those clickers. We did customer counts at various corners around Burlington. We didn't know exactly what number we were looking for, but we did customer counts. Did you really? You stood at a corner with a clicker and you just clicked? Yeah.

And you would just click as people pass so you would know how many people pass that location every hour? Yeah. Ice cream is an impulse item. You need to make money. of the passing traffic. I mean, I'm going to just interrupt you for a site because that, again, like, that is a pretty sophisticated technique. It's all in the SBA manual.

Oh, wow. So in those manuals, it would say go to a corner with a clicker and click how many people pass and that will determine where you should open your shop? You know, I'm going to interrupt here because I haven't been giving Ben enough credit all these years. Ben actually does think a lot of these things through. And I think it was me who wasn't thinking him through. But, yeah, I think Ben's a very thoughtful person. So after all that research, where was the location that you thought would work? Was it actually on the main drag?

It wasn't on the main drag. It was a block off the main drag. But it happened to be right across from City Hall Park, which was a great thing for us, an ice cream park where, you know, get a cone, sit in the park. And it also was an old gas station. It was totally dilapidated. It was falling apart. Nobody wanted to rent it.

And it had some parking spaces in front where the gas pumps used to be, which was also an incredible boon for an ice cream shop in a city to have some places where people could pull up in a car and jump out, get a scoop. So how much money did you have to have to sign the lease and then also buy the equipment and, you know, get the store ready for customers? So Ben and I each had $4,000. That you saved up or you, yeah. Yeah. Ben actually borrowed two out of the $4,000 from his father. But that was fine because that was our commitment to each other that we were each going to

come up with $4,000. And then we wrote this business plan. in order to try to borrow money from the local bank. You know, we wrote a business plan only because we felt like it was the only way the bank was going to lend us money. And did this business plan sort of have projections, like five-year projections showing revenue and profit and loss and all that stuff? It had projections. I can't remember if it was five years. I mean, it probably wasn't five years. The beautiful thing about the business plan. So Ben and I didn't know how to write a business plan. But we have a friend, Jeff Furman, who is mentioned often.

And Jeff used to work for the small business administration in New York City. And Jeff got us a copy of a business plan that was from a pizza parlor in New York. So Ben and I pretty much copied that business plan, except every place where it said slice of pizza. We crossed it out and we wrote in ice cream cone. And the other great thing about the business. business plan was when we first rode out and figured out our projections for how much ice cream we would sell and how much it would cost. The projections told us that we weren't going to sell enough ice cream to stay in business. So we just changed the projections. Kind of like the government.

And I think that's the way everybody does it. You just make it up. I mean, you have this idea. Yeah. Yeah. That people come up with these projections and they're based on something. And they're just made up. That's so true. Yeah. You see it all the time in Silicon Valley.

Right. And if they don't work, you make up different ones. It's brilliant. What did that first store look like? Was it sort of bright and, you know, with the clouds and painted on the walls and cows and things like that? No, but it was beautiful. I mean, most Ben says it was beautiful, and it was beautiful. Most people would have described it as pretty funky.

Yeah. Which is probably right. I mean, fit with the aesthetic of what you were selling anyway, right? Yeah, homemade ice cream. It very much looked homemade. And it was very low budget as well. Yeah. How would you, when you opened that for shop, how, what flavors were you serving?

Did you remember? Vanilla, chocolate. strawberry. So it was basic. Coffee. Pretty basic. Yeah. You know, the first two flavors that we did that were not your normal ones were Oreo mint and Heathbar crunch. And I read, I mean, I read that Jerry, you were sort of the ice cream maker and Ben,

you were the tastier. And I remember reading a long time ago that you had like some, you couldn't taste things because of some, you know, sinus. Or I can't remember what you, things that you dealt with had. And so you would focus on the feel of the ice cream. Is that true? Yeah. I have a very, very poor sense of smell. What's the term for that?

It's called anasmia. It makes a lot of sense, though. In some ways, not having a sense of smell was this kind of hidden blessing, right? Because you had to rely on other senses that maybe competitors weren't thinking about. They were focusing only on flavor or smell rather than the feel of ice cream. Right. How did you, I mean, I remember the first time I tried Beninjeri's in the, in the, I grew up in Los Angeles, so not until the late 80s. But it was, it was so different because it was chunky ice cream, had big chunks and was, was that completely different in 1978.

Was, were other people making ice cream like that? No, they weren't, uh, packaging ice cream like that. Uh, ice cream like that came out of the homemade ice cream parlor genre. Like with big chunks and like nuts. Right, right, right. Because a lot of them, our shop and a bunch of other homemade ice cream shops, you're making ice cream essentially in overgrown home style ice cream making equipment. So it's really easy to put in big chunks.

The difference is that no commercial ice creams were packaging ice cream like that. And as we discovered, the reason why they weren't doing it is because the machinery, the commercial ice cream machinery, was not designed to be able to handle large chunks. Right. So all you would get would be these little itsy-bitty pieces that would flow through the machinery well, but you didn't get the requisite mouth feel. Right. I was making the ice cream.

Yeah. And it was no picnic putting in those big chunks. And Ben and I had many discussions about it. Like discussions? Like what? So I was arguing for having a larger number of smaller chunks that were well distributed throughout the ice cream. And, you know, Ben was saying, no, what people want, and this is what Ben wanted, of course, but what people want is a really big chunk.

And they don't care if they get a chunk in every bite, as long. long as they know, there's a really big chunk coming up next. And it turns out Ben was right. People love it. Well, I mean, what happened after you opened that first store? Were you just a huge hit in Burlington right away? No. We were a hit in the summer. The first summer was great. And then the first winner was also a revelation. You know, it can get very slow. Were there days that would go by where you get like one or two customers? Probably a few more than that, but, you know, it's very slow. And it was actually during that first winter when Ben and I came up with the idea of free cone day

that if we were still in business after a year, we would celebrate and treat all our customers by giving out free ice cream because we thought it was so unlikely that we would still be in business. And we recognize so clearly that if we were, We were still in business. It was going to be because of the support of our customers. Was there any tension between the two of you at that time? Just about the size of the chunks. Ben and I have a lot of trust in each other and each other's judgment.

So we were never doubting what the other person was doing. So there was that. And then I think another thing was we have very different skills. and interests. Ben is tremendously creative, very spontaneous, very entrepreneurial, and I like a manageable agenda. So, you know, it made sense that Ben would come up with all these flavors and do all the marketing, and I would sit back and make the ice cream because I sort of knew what I needed to do. So what was the turning point? How were you able to survive that first year? We ended up getting a, you know, SBA has this service called score, the service core of retired executives.

And, you know, if you're a little business, you could get in touch with the SBA and say, hey, I'd like a mentor. Huh. And they would set you up with some retired business guy who would volunteer to be a mentor. And we asked for one of those, and we got one. and it was in the middle of the winter and we were losing our shirts and we couldn't make our loan payments to the bank and he says, oh, you know, that's no problem.

Just go to your bank and ask for a moratorium on your loan. Who watch this guy? Manny. He was an old guy named Manny. And he said, well, just tell him you can't pay your loan right now that you can pay it, you know, when the weather turns. You know, the like just let you pay interest. and we went to the bank and we said that and they said, sure, no problem.

Just pay interest and, you know, we'll extend the loan and that got us through. Wow. And this was only in Vermont at the time, right? Yeah, yeah. Wow. So the shop opens in 78 and then I guess it was 1981 when Ben and Jerry's happened to be in an article in Time magazine, which was hugely influential magazine at the time. What did that mean?

And when you read, what did they call you at the time? The best ice cream in the world. The best ice cream in the world. It's incredible. Yeah, it was a real, yeah, it was a real struggle. Were you expecting that article? Well, but not only that, so it was the cover story of Time Magazine. Wow.

And that was the first sentence of the cover story. What you must understand at the outset is that Ben and Jerry's in Burlington, Vermont, is the best ice cream in the world. Wow. That was all we needed to read. If you read on, it continued to say that, you know, blah, blah, blah, ice cream somewhere else is the best ice cream in the world. Somewhere else isn't the best ice cream of the world.

But, you know, who needed to go any further than that? Well, you know, prior to that article coming out, I started to realize that, you know, all these, you know, reviews that you see for Broadway shows, you know, where they say, This is the best play ever. Oh, you laugh your ass off. Whatever it is. If you see only one play this year. And then there are all these little excerpts from an article that was, you know, like two, you know, a page.

And, you know, the page went on to say, yeah, really wasn't that great. But, you know, there was a moment where you laughed your ass on. And they just took that one little phrase, laugh my ass off. And I, you know, figured if they can do it. When we come back, once the laughing died down, how Ben and Jerry got a taste for the ruthless and competitive side of the ice cream business, how the Pillsbury doughboy tried to take a bite out of the company, and how Ben and Jerry fought back. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy

Raus. So in the early 1980s, Ben and Jerry's was just one shop in Burlington, Vermont, and it was doing well. Ben and Jerry gave out big, generous scoops of ice cream. They had happy customers, but they were pretty bad at doing all the things it took to run a business. We weren't making a profit, you know, the 16 hours a day that we were open seven days a week. The standards that we had, for ourselves in terms of how a retail shop should be run, we're not standards that we were able to achieve. We were really good at creating an atmosphere in the shop that was welcoming and fun, less than excellent at hiring people, at supervising people, and most of all, we were really bad at portion control. You were giving away too much ice cream.

Yes, we, you know, when you scoop out a nice big scoop for a customer, you get this beautiful smile and really warm response. And it's really positive reinforcement for over scooping. And, you know, Ben and I, we wanted to make people happy. Well, and also we wanted to keep our prices really low. You know, in terms of the food service business, in every business except for ice cream, The portions are controlled in the back out of sight of the customer. And when you're scooping ice cream, you're supposed to control the portion inside of the customer.

And if the scoop is too big, you're supposed to take a little off, and the customer hates that. One of the reasons we started packaging our ice cream was because we weren't so good at running a shop. And one of the things we thought about was, well, maybe we were, we can't control how much ice cream we're putting on a cone, but you certainly can control how much ice cream you're putting into a pint container because it only fits so much. Right. So that was a big turning point for you when you decided, let's package this stuff.

Well, before that, we decided to hack it in two and a half gallon tubs and sell it to other people and let them figure out how to control the portions. And then they were charging massive premium for it probably, right? Well, you know, I mean, I was the guy who was going around selling the ice cream to these restaurants. And the restaurants would say, no, I'm not going to carry your ice cream anymore because my employees are eating it. A lot of our problems would be solved if we made the ice cream shittier. You guys started to sort of get more attention and to distribute your ice cream in pines, I guess. Pillsbury, which was distributing other brands, like I guess Hagenas, they threatened other distributors.

They said stop distributing Ben and Jerry's to the shops, right? Yeah, well, Pillsbury had bought Hagenas, so they owned them. And they went to independent ice cream distributors who were distributing all sorts of different brands of ice creams. and, you know, told them that if those distributors continued to deliver Ben and Jerry's, that they wouldn't sell them, Hagenas, anymore. Did it start to cut into your sales? Well, you know, we recognize that this was a real threat. Plus, it seemed like it was illegal, that it was a restraint of trade,

that Pillsbury was controlling the marketplace, and they were using their power to keep competitors at. But you couldn't sue them, right? I mean, you were a $4 million company and they were a multi-million, maybe billion dollar company. Well, I think we did have a legal case, but we realized that that was not really going to be the best place for us to fight them because they were so enormous. So would you do? We took our case to the people. We started the What's the Do Boy Afraid of Campaign. We decided to go after the Pillsbury Do Boy, which was the most beloved food mascot in the country, the pudgy little doughboy.

How'd you go after him? Well, it was started by me going to Minneapolis to the Pillsbury World Headquarters. I was a one-person picket line. The sign said, what's the doughboy of France? of. It was a hand-lettered sign. Yeah, I'd never really done anything like that before. And did anybody at Pillsbury come out and say, okay, well, meet you or did they just ignore you? Like, you were this crazy man protesting in front of their headquarters? Nobody had any idea what I was doing there. It was a fight for us. I don't know that it was a fight for them.

It was a fight for survival from us, so nobody knew what was going on. So did they eventually drop their restrictions and allow, distributors to presumably allow, they did stop forcing distributors to not carry Ben and Jerry's, right? Well, there were a lot of steps that we took escalating the pressure on Pillsbury, you know, starting with a small classified ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine, and we flew aerial banners around the sports stadiums in Boston, and we took out signs. of the on the signs of the transit buses in Boston and we had a... And the signs said the same thing?

What's the doughboy afraid of? The sign on the side of the transit buses had these two pudgy white hands squeezing a pint of Ben and Jerry's. I think it said, don't let Pillsbury's dollars strangle Ben and Jerry's or something very provocative. It's amazing because just doing that is a lot of work. like, you know, organizing that campaign. You were also running a business and trying to sell ice cream. Were you just the two of you, were you just constantly working all the time? Yes.

But this particular case, it was a matter of survival. You know, this was like you're either going to get shut down and you can't get your ice cream out to people or you do whatever you can to get it out there. Do you remember that, Ben? Do you remember working all the time? Yeah. I certainly felt during many of the times at Beninjuries that the experience was like falling down the side of a cliff trying to grab onto whatever branch was there.

Wow. You can hold on to. So, you know, in that situation, you know, falling down the side of a cliff, you know, grabbing onto branches, you're not really thinking about, Well, am I having a good time? But, you know, you're energized. You know, you're energized. You know, you're using all the skills you have. You know, you're doing everything you can to save your life.

And, you know, it's really interesting. It's a peak experience. Did you guys, as you started, as you grew and grew, it was plainly obvious that you were, you were going to both make a decent amount of money from this. Were you okay with that? I mean, did that conflict with your own values? Or were you able to kind of say, all right, you know, whatever, where I've got money and that's just the way it is? I mean, so for me, I think it was something I needed to grapple with.

I mean, you know, part of the thing for both Ben and me was that we never really saw ourselves as bosses. You know, from early on, we were scooping ice cream right next to everybody else who was scooping ice cream. We were mopping the floors at night. And we didn't have a very good boss mentality. We had a good worker mentality. You know, Ben is the most anti-authoritarian person I've ever come across. And here he was being an authority. I mean, it was laughable.

You were the CEO. I was. And how did you feel about that? that then. I mean, did you also feel like, you know, this is weird. I'm a businessman. I never signed up for this. Yeah. There was a time when Jerry and I both turned around and looked at ourselves and said to each other, you know, we're not ice cream in anymore. We're spending our time being bosses and hiring and firing and so much of what we were doing was in order to pay our loans back to the bank and we felt like we were becoming just another cog in this economic

machine. Our reaction to that was to sell the business and we actually put it up for sale. This was early on. This was in the 80s. And then I ran into this older restaurateur that I had come to know a little and I explained to him that we were planning to sell the business and he said, Ben, how could you possibly do that? The business is your baby. It has so much potential ahead of it. And I said, Maurice, you know what business does. It exploits the community. It exploits its employees. It exploits the environment. And he said, Ben, if there's something that you don't like about business, why don't you do it different? And that was. was when we decided to conduct this experiment to see if it was possible that business could be a tool for improving the quality of life for people as opposed to making people's lives worse.

One of the things you guys did was you had a policy where the highest paid employee couldn't earn more than five times as hell are you of an entry-level worker. you also had like daycare and you did college tuition aid and a bunch of things. Profit sharing, is that what you mean when you say you wanted to try to do business differently? That's part of it. But I think the more critical part of it is using our business to address social issues through the very fabric of our business. So that meant like taking very, very vocal positions on hot button issues, but also doing things like working with former prisoners, former felons, right, who were making brownies in a bakery in New York. That's our project with the Grayston Bakery and deliberately choosing to use this ingredient supplier, because this particular ingredient supplier

was driven by a social mission of providing employment opportunities for formerly unemployable people. And that's a very good example of how Beninjury has demonstrated that it's possible to make a profit and address social problems at the same time. So after all your success in the 1990s,

eventually Ben and Jerry's did end up selling. It sold to Unilever, which is this huge multinational, right? It sold, I think, in 2000. And it was sold by the company's board without your permission? That's correct. How did it happen? I mean, how was your company sold without your assent? Well, it was a public company, which meant that anybody could own shares.

and Unilever ended up offering so much money that the board of the company couldn't find an alternative for the shareholders that they thought was acceptable. Did you guys say to the board, you can't do this? You can't do this. Or did you just sort of at a certain point say, all right, nothing we can do? Well, eventually we had to go along with it. Why were you opposed to it? You know, I think that the thing that was most important was to maintain the social mission of the company. We felt like, you know, if another company were to buy Ben & Juries, that they would not continue those cutting edge social mission activities. What did it mean practically for the two of you? Did it mean that you were sort of done going into Ben and Jerry's? into the offices every day?

You know, I think a lot of it was up to us about what it meant. There was going to continue to be an independent board in the new entity that oversaw the social mission. And I think Ben and I could have remained on that board. And we both chose not to. Why? Well, I can't speak for Ben. I had no idea what was going to happen to the company. And, I mean, quite frankly, I just didn't want to be part of it at that point.

How about you, Ben? Why didn't you want to be on the board? You know, I felt like I had lost, you know, a major battle in terms of trying to keep the company independent. You know, I didn't want to continue under the ownership of Unilever. So did you both kind of just mentally check out? Yeah, I certainly checked out for a while. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Were you sad?

I mean, were you upset? I mean, so here's the thing. Like, a lot of people who've been on the show and a lot of people listening would say, oh, my God, they walked away with millions of dollars. Like, what an incredible achievement. They started this little shop in Burlington, and it's an international brand, and it's done all these amazing things. like this is their moment to shine and to do a dance.

But it sounds like you guys were really depressed about this. Yeah. You know, if the goal was to make a bunch of money, then I guess it would have been a different reaction, but that wasn't really the goal. Right. You guys were very vocal about your positions on guns and on, you know, obviously socially liberal. The company still does that.

today. I mean, even though you're not, you know, you're not owners of it. Is that, is it surprise you that they still do that? Well, it became intertwined with the brand. Right. You know, if Unilever bought a brand and bought the goodwill that goes along with that brand and bought the reputation that goes along with that brand, they need to continue those activities. in order to keep that brand strong. I'm very pleasantly surprised and proud of what the company does. I mean, the company came out in support of Occupy Wall Street a few years ago, which is amazing because that was essentially an anti-corporate movement.

You're talking about Ben and Jerry's, not Unilever. Yes. And within the last year, the company came out. with a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. I mean, the company does not shy away from controversial issues. And that is a really difficult thing for a business to do, which is why you don't see businesses doing it. And yet Ben and Jerry is courageous enough to wade into those areas.

Do you guys see each other pretty regularly? Pretty regular. You still hang out? Like you hang out a lot? Yeah, a lot. It is, I mean, if there's one thing about your story that to me is more interesting than anything else, it's your friendship. I just, it's just, it really is a powerful part of it. I know it's sort of sappy and I don't mean to like make you guys feel uncomfortable.

It's just, it is amazing. It's really impressive that you really like to hang out with each other. You're good friends. You know, people say that. And I don't really understand. it that much. I mean, you know, lots of people have friends that they've had for most of their life. Well, I do appreciate it more and more the older I get, I must say. You know, and sometimes recently Ben and I have been talking about how we're a little bit like Fred and Barney on the

Flintstones. Because we drive places together a lot and I think we just relate like that. Yeah. Is it strange to think that this little ice cream shop, you started as a $500 million company? Well, it's strange to, I mean, to me, it doesn't feel like the same thing. I mean, they're just not the same. The company has taken on a life of its own. Yeah. You know, the ice cream shop will always, to me, be Ben and me in the store, making ice cream, scoop an ice cream, Ben behind the stove cooking up food. I mean, that's what the ice cream shop was.

I mean, your name, Ben and Jerry. I mean, that name, Ben and Jerry, like, it's you and will be forever. It's like Lee and Perrin's, you know, Worcestershire sauce. Like, who's Lee? Who's Perrin, right? Like, someday. Who's hog and who's dog? Someday, like in 50 or 100 years, people are going to say, they're just going to call it Ben

and Jerry's. Like, you're not going to think about the people behind it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know what you mean. I mean, half the people think we're dead. You know, and we get credit for it. I mean, think about the guy who invented vanilla. Yeah, who was that?

He don't get credit for shit. No, no, not at all. Well, you know, so to me, it's amazing to the degree that the company continues to be outspoken about progressive issues and progressive values. It's of no interest to me to have Ben and Jerrys be thriving. and whatever, if it's just selling ice cream. I mean, who wants to be part of that? When you guys think about this incredible thing that you built,

how much of it was because of all your hard work and your talent and your intelligence and how much of it was just because you were lucky? There is a very big part of good fortune involved. I think there's a lot of people who work real. hard, who have really good ideas, who are really committed, and they don't have the same level of success that Ben and Jerry said. Yeah, I mean, I guess originally we were going to open our ice cream shop in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Yeah. And, you know, some other ice cream shop opened up before us, and we didn't want to compete, so that's what brought us to Vermont. I think if we had started in New York, we never would have given. gained the local following that we gained in Vermont. In Vermont, we could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Did either of your parents, did either of them ever get to see what Ben and Jerry's became? Yeah, mine were still alive probably through the 1980s.

Yeah, same for my parents. Were they proud of you? They were a whole lot prouder than when I was trying to be a potter. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, founders of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. By the way, there was a study done by the International Dairy Foods Association, and they asked people to name their favorite ice cream. And as you can imagine, the usual suspects turned up, chocolate, vanilla, mint chip. But right there, right near the top was cookie dough, chocolate chip cookie dough,

which, okay, may not be all that surprising because everybody makes cookie dough. right? But it wasn't always a classic flavor because in fact, it was invented by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in that tiny little shop in Burlington in the 1980s. At what point did Cherry Garcia enter into the Ben and Jerry's Ove? We got a postcard that said we're both deadheads and we're also Ben and Jerry's fans, and we think you ought to come out with a. flavor called Jerry Garcia because it would be a real hoot for the fans and dead paraphernalia always sells. What did Jerry Garcia think of it? Well, there was one quote that was reported saying, well, at least they didn't name a motor

oil after me. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're updating a story we ran about a year ago about something we almost never think about unless it breaks. The common everyday zipper. The moment of, oh my God, my backpack just split open on me and I'm on a trip in Central America. This is Clay McKay, man.

He's kind of an expert on broken zippers because he's got hundreds of stories. I had a musician that was getting ready for a show and his zipper had blown out on his pants, you know, and he was, I mean, who wants to go play a show in front of thousands of people with your pants unzipped. And when those zippers break, lots of people just throw the item away in the trash, even if it's your favorite pair of jeans or the backpack that's been everywhere with you.

But this is not the way Clay was raised. When he was a kid in McCall, Idaho, his dad had a repair shop, and he would fix everything. Every day there was somebody who'd come into the shop and have a broken zipper, and he'd fix it in about five minutes. And eventually, Clay's dad built a spin-off business. He made a kit for people so they could repair their zippers at home. So it was just kind of a full do-it-yourself kit that had a handful of different sliders in them,

which is the little metal piece that you'd grab onto. And the slider is the thing that can break or fall off a zipper. So this repair kit was like a little bag that had a bunch of different types. of the sliders, and it also had these little stapler things for attaching the slider back to the zipper's teeth. Anyway, all this was happening back in the early 1990s. Clay's dad put the repair kits on a very basic website and started to sell them in a few chain stores. So that was kind of like supporting our whole family pretty much. It was a meager living, but it was enough to get us by. But things got harder after Clay's dad died. His mom took over the business, but she had a hard time

keeping it up. So about five years ago, Clay decided to take it over. Because it didn't feel finished to me. It felt like there was a lot more potential in what he had started. But in order to tap into that potential, Clay decided the whole look and feel of the business had to change. I mean, the old website was like, it was straight out of the 90s, and it hadn't been changed since. You know, it almost got to the point where it was like so retro, it was cool again. So Clay did a complete rebranding of his dad's zippoor. rescue kit. He updated the website, designed a new logo, and then he started to, you know, go out and shake the trees a little. You know, things started happening immediately. It was like,

okay, I landed us a new account here and started to kind of get a handle on what was going on with Amazon and how, you know, how it all worked. And actually, once he got the kit on Amazon, Clay had to deal with a wave of knockoffs. But he says one thing he offers that the other guys don't is customer service. In fact, he takes a lot of the calls himself. It becomes so meaningful when you're helping somebody fix something that's just literally irreplaceable. You know, it kind of gets me through my days. Like if I'm having a hard day and I get that call of some cute old lady, you know, I've had a southern lady be like, you walk on water. And, you know, they're just so happy to have this little thing working again in their lives. That's Clay McCabe of Portland, Oregon.

His company is called Zipper Rescue. For now, Clay is not too worried about how the current health crisis could harm his business. In fact, in a down economy, he hopes that more people will turn to small companies like Zipper Rescue to repair and restore stuff they already have. If you want to find out more about Clay or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.NPR.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at HIVT at npr.org.

And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This. Our show was produced this week by Rumpteen Arablewe, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Candice Lim, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Rainey Toll. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR. If you're looking for your next binge watch or you want the latest on all the big movies and albums, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour has you covered. Every weekday, we are your guide to all things entertainment.

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