Ejovi Nuwere

I had the pleasure of meeting with Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben&Jerry’s icecream. He gave a keynote speech at the
Entrepreneurs Organization Chicago university. Afterwards he spent a lot of time with audience members, answering questions and debating issues. When one of the organizers asked “Jerry, your plane will be leaving soon, do you want to get going now?” He shouted “No! I want to be here with my people!” Here are my notes from his presentation:

Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s is speaking about his experiences with his best friend Ben and how they grew up together and the various jobs they held. He started first talking about the fact that Ben & Jerry was recently purchased by another company but they didn’t want to sell the company. He seems disappointed that the sale went threw but they had no option because it was a public company at the time and the acquiring company offered too much for them to legally reject.

“To learn how to make ice cream we took a $5 correspondence course from the university of penn, we were poor so we split the course fee between the two of us”

On raising money: “We figured the bank wouldn’t give us a loan, we had no job experience, no business experience, no local family and no money. And we were new to the area.”

On selling ice cream: “During the winter, as we expected, no one wanted to buy ice cream, but we made some money selling ice cream to the local restaurants that had been interested in selling it to their customers. Then we came up with the idea of putting ice cream in a car during the winter and driving around vermont as quickly as possible to sell it to restaurants. Next we had the idea to put the ice cream in little pint containers and sell them to the mom and pop stores he was passing on the way to the restaurants. Most of the small stores refused to buy from us until we made a guarantee, if you don’t sell it we will buy it back, and thats when we really started to grew.” Jerry talks about his companies battle against Häagen-Dazs and Pillsbury who attempted to restrict the distribution of their ice cream around the country.

On corporate responsibility: They came to a point when they wanted to get out of the business because of their negative feelings about big business. One of the advisors said “’if you don’t like the way big business is run, why don’t you run yours differently?’ We’d never thought about that, so we stayed with it and decided to do things differently.” “Business is now the most influential force in our world now, and in our community. If you think about it, first it was religion, then nation states and now its businesses. You can look at the architect of your city for proof. The oldest and largest standing buildings are the religious buildings, the second oldest were government and now the largest buildings in our cities are businesses. But businesses are different because while religion and government have a mission to give back to the community businesses do not, we wanted to build a business that does. Its the idea of spirituality in businesses.”

“One of the ways we figured out to give back while doing business, we looked for businesses that were giving back to their community and we made partnerships with them. We found a bakery in NY that hired individuals who recovered from drug abuse and we realized that they made a great brownie so we decided to create a brownie flavored ice cream that became very profitable.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 7:28 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.