Ben Cohen

And in an ice cream shop, you're portioning it right in front of the customer and you get a lot of positive reinforcement for a really big scoop.

Right, right.

Right, exactly.

So anyhow, we decided to start packing our ice cream in pint containers and that's what kind of turned the corner for the business.

And the business was growing and we got to a state where we couldn't fill our orders because we were out of space and we couldn't store our raw ingredients because we didn't have enough space.

It's the stage in a business's life when it needs a cash infusion to move to the next level, which for us would be building our first real ice cream plant.

And, you know, there were all these venture capitalists that were coming to us.

We didn't solicit them, but they saw, hey, here's a business that's growing.

We can give you money.

And then, you know, it's essentially a few people who already have a lot of money who would like to have more money.

and instead what we wanted to do was to make the community the owners of the business so that as the business prospered the community would automatically prosper because they'd be owners we wanted to sell it to our neighbors so we had this first ever vermont public stock offering

And sold out the offering.

One out of every hundred Vermont families bought stock in Ben and Jerry's.

And, you know, we would hold these shareholders meetings.

And, you know, most companies are trying to do it at an inconvenient time and place because they don't want people to show up.

We had it on the weekend and it was a big music festival and everything.

That was really good.

And then lots of people got to eat ice cream.

That's correct.

Yeah.