The Best One Yet
🍦 “Banana Split” — Interview with Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder Ben Cohen
19 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Ben Cohen start Ben & Jerry's from a gas station?
It developed a very, very loyal, small loyal following. But the interesting thing about it is that people would say, oh, I love this flavor. They couldn't tell you what flavor it was.
I got to pause the pod for a sec because this almost sounds like a setup to a joke. The Ben and Jerry's co-founder, the CEO of Greenpeace, an ethnobotanist. Come up with a flavor of ice cream inspired by a Woodstock guy who dresses as a clown and molding together a bunch of nuts.
I like the way you think, Nick.
Yetis, grab your spoon, loosen your drawstrings, and meet us in the freezer aisle. Because today's guest turned dessert into descent. That's right. We're interviewing Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry's. The Ben. in Ben & Jerry's. This hippie launched the most successful ice cream brand in history from a dilapidated gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
And best of all, he did it all with his best friend from seventh grade. But Ben & Jerry got famous for giving out one ingredient that every brand avoids. Politics. Politics. It's not a Ben & Jerry's flavor unless it's got two scoops of activist double entendre, Jack. I scream, you scream, but nobody screams like this ice cream.
Ha ha!
In 1984, they went from Main Street to Wall Street with the most unique IPO of all time. Then in the year 2000, they sold to Unilever for $326 million in the most unique exit of all time. And now they're doing over a billion bucks in half-baked revenue from Burlington to Bushwick to Bangkok, baby. But today, Ben says that the corporate suits are muzzling the brand that still has his name on it.
They're drowning his fish food jack. So Ben is trying to buy back Ben & Jerry's right now, and we will ask him all about it. We'll also ask whether a brand getting political is profitable or painful. As in an ice cream high or an ice cream headache. But first, we'll get into the Ben & Jerry's origin story that helped inspire us to launch our business.
Besties, he's the duke of full-fat dairy, the sultan of democratic socialism. And yet, he's also the king of the capitalist cone. If Ben and Jerry's made a flavor about Ben Cohen right now, we already know the name, don't we, Jack? Rum raisin rebel with a coconut cause. Or maybe, depending on how this interview goes, hostile takeover hot fudge. How does that sound?
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Chapter 2: What unique approach did Ben & Jerry's take with their IPO?
It's never been done before, but there is this fine print in the law, and he showed me the book. He brought it out. That would allow you and Jerry to register as stockbrokers and sell shares and Ben & Jerry's to Vermonters. And as long as you don't go over state lines, then the SEC doesn't get involved and – And you could do it.
And, you know, the accountants and the lawyers were all telling us, you're crazy. Don't do it. It's never going to work. And we said, screw it. If we can't do it this way, then we don't really want to grow the business.
How did the lawyers feel about giving out cookie dough as dividends? Was that ever on the table? Ben, with a typical IPO, there's a roadshow and the investment bankers go to Fidelity, they go to Vanguard, they go to BlackRock and they pitch the stock. How did you guys pitch the stock within the state boundaries of Vermont?
We went to the Holiday Inn in Bennington, and we went to the hotel in Brattleboro, and we went to, you know, there was a hotel in Middlebury.
That's where Jack and I met, actually, was in Middlebury, Vermont. I still think this is wild. People talk about now people buying, you know, houses with NVIDIA AI money. Jack's family bought a house in... With ice cream money, with a bunch of fish food. Yeah.
Now, a quick word from our sponsor.
The other thing, Ben, Jack and I have studied so much about you, and we're going to get into all this, but there is an inspiring detail of your life before we get into the business side, that you turned your greatest weakness into a strength as a person. Because you suffered from anosmia, you have difficulty tasting and smelling certain things.
And yet you became the creative force behind the food brand Ben & Jerry's. So how did your weakness and taste buds translate to strength and ice cream flavor at the beginning of Ben & Jerry's? It is kind of strange. I mean, you wouldn't think of it.
But the way Jerry and I worked it out is that He was the guy making the ice cream, and I was the taster. You can't have the same guy who's making it, tasting it. It's a conflict of interest. He would come to me with a flavor and give it to me, and I'd say, Jerry, it's a great flavor, but I can't tell what flavor it is. So he put more flavoring in and brought it to me again, and I'd say –
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Chapter 3: How did Ben Cohen's anosmia influence ice cream flavor development?
Ben, I don't know if it was you or Jerry, but one of you told Guy Raz and how I built this maybe 15, 20 years ago, that when you were applying for a bank loan to launch your ice cream business, the bankers, they weren't totally satisfied with the financial forecast that you two were projecting.
So to quote you or Jerry, you guys just made them up and you put better numbers on paper and you got the loan approved. And as you pointed out, that's like basically how business works. A lot of it, you just make up as you go along, right?
Well, I mean, this idea of projections, what's going to happen in the future? Well, to be quite frank, I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but they require projections. And, you know, so many of these businesses, you know, they base their projections off what happened last year and it didn't happen the following year. So, yeah, I mean, it's essentially...
making it up, guesstimates. We did the numbers. The numbers showed that we wouldn't make any ice cream, that we wouldn't make any money. And so we pumped up the numbers.
The numbers that we pumped up were right. It's self-fulfilling prophecy. Exactly. You were kind of, you were early manifestors is what you were saying. That's it. So Ben, we did a whole episode on our other show about fish food, which is a wonderful story.
You had to, you had years of courtship actually with the Vermont based band Fish before they finally agreed to make an ice cream flavor with you. We have a whole episode about that. What flavor besides fish food has the craziest backstory?
Well, one thing I want to tell you about fish food is that that was the last flavor that I was personally involved in. I was the guy who was bringing test batches to the fish corporate offices.
We need more pretzel.
But in terms of the backstory, I think Wavy Gravy is the flavor that had the craziest backstory. Of course, it's named after a pretty crazy guy. You know, he was the guy at Woodstock who got up on the stage and said, what we have in mind is breakfast in bed for $400,000. And, you know, Wavy Gravy, that's what he's known for is, you know, he calls himself the hippie icon.
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Chapter 4: What is the story behind the collaboration with the band Phish?
It's these tension points. You're able to pull together things that otherwise don't go together. And that tension is what leads to creativity and really a business success. So Ben, in the background of your video feed right now, we see your iconic cow who's grazing in the dairy fields of Vermont. But you were actually going to open up initially in Saratoga Springs, New York.
You ended up in Vermont almost by accident, which happens to kind of be the worst place to open an ice cream shop given how cold our winters are. But can you tell us how you ended up in Burlington, Vermont instead of Saratoga Springs, New York? Yeah, there's kind of another tension there, you know, location, location, location, and you choose the worst location.
Well, yeah, when Jerry and I decided that we were going to do an ice cream shop, we wanted to live in a rural college town. And we thought that if it was going to be ice cream, it should be a warm rural college town. You know, this was before the age of personal computers. So we sat down at a table and Jerry had the guide to American colleges in front of him. And I had the U.S.
Almanac in front of me. So he would call out the names of college towns, and I would see what the temperature was in those towns.
Charleston!
And so we combined the lists. We came up with the short list of warm, rural college towns and discovered that they all already had ice cream shops. So then... We ended up in Saratoga Springs. We decided to open in Saratoga Springs. And while we were preparing to open, another ice cream shop called Afternoon Delight opened up and we didn't want to compete with them.
And I had known about, I had been to Burlington quite a bit because I used to work in the Adirondacks across the lake from Burlington. And we went there on our days off and and there was virtually no ice cream in, uh, Burlington, Vermont. Vermont is the only state in the union that didn't have a Baskin Robbins.
And, um, the only ice cream you could get was either from the UVM dairy bar way up on the hill, or there was the Seward's guest, uh, bus station, which was a little sketchy. Um, so, so yeah, we, uh, We opened up in a very cold place.
As you were launching, you know, the mayor of Burlington was about to be Bernie Sanders. Was he involved at all in the beginnings of Ben & Jerry's? He was just a mayor then.
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Chapter 5: Why did Ben & Jerry's decide to take a political stand?
So he came up with this idea that we would announce that we would take a penny off the cost of an ice cream cone per Celsius degree below zero. Oh, boy. You know, it did get pretty cold and people did get a significant discount. I mean, when we opened up, the price of a cone was 52 cents. They hadn't retired the penny yet.
So, you know, a penny meant something. So I'm crunching some numbers here. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is give or take negative 16 Celsius. So on a zero-degree day, you were selling an ice cream for not 52 cents, but for about 36 cents. Does that sound about right? Are you covering your costs on that?
We got the math whiz here. Did you do that all out in your head or did you use AI?
No, that's not Jack GPT. That's just Jack right there. So as Nick and I were researching the Ben and Jerry story, A really wild part is what you did with the packaging to really take off. Initially, I think you were selling gallon-sized ice cream containers, but you really innovated with that packaging with, first of all, selling in the size of a pint.
I think Ben & Jerry's was one of the first ice cream brands to sell pint-sized containers. Which stopped you from handing out too many scoops at the ice cream shop, probably, Ben. I bet you were pretty generous with those samples.
Yeah, we did have a big problem with over-scooping.
Yeah.
And then also you had this great development where the bottom of the pint would be the same, but the top would be the variability. That's where you'd get the different colors, the different description of the flavors. Can you tell us a bit about the unlock when you started selling in pints?
Well, actually, there were a bunch of ice creams that were being sold in pints at the time. There was Lady Borden's. There was Haagen-Dazs. I mean, a lot of the pints were not round. A lot of them were square. So putting it in a pint was not really an innovation. But, you know, the graphic artist we were working with, who was an amazing graphic artist, Lynn Severance,
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the acquisition by Unilever?
Which led to the three-part mission that you and Jerry agreed to. First was the product mission. To make fantastic ice cream. The second was the economic mission. To make money so that the company can keep growing and making that ice cream. And the third, this is key, was the social mission. To make the world a better place.
So, Ben, we saw an interview with you just a couple weeks ago where you said, giving the company a social mission, that third part, also gave it a soul, a spirit, and a heart. And that is why Ben & Jerry's is so valuable. When it comes to creating that value, what are some specific examples where you've seen this to be true? Where creating that mission and that spirit
helped the business. What ended up happening is that because of that social mission, because we were trying to use our business to improve the quality of life for the community, as opposed to the normal business, which is trying to extract as much as it can out of the community and maximize profits. We were trying to, I mean, that was the deal talking to Maurice. It was the question of
Is it possible that business is actually a neutral tool like a hammer and you can use it to destroy things or you can use it to build things? So we started using it to build things. We started using it to support the community. You know, in the early days when we were just a little homemade ice cream parlor, we were producing these free community festivals that had still walking contests.
And we had a frog jumping contest. Jerry's wife went out and caught all the frogs. And as the business got larger, we started taking stands and positions on important issues. A full page letter in the New York Times calling on the president and Congress not to go to war in Iraq. That was the first Iraq war.
Mostly people are buying products from businesses in spite of what the business stands for. And at Ben and Jerry's, Because we stood up for things like racial justice, one of the proudest moments of my life was after Jerry and I were no longer actively involved in the company and after the tragedy of the murder of George Floyd.
the company came out with this incredibly powerful statement that we must dismantle white supremacy. And I had no idea that was happening. I had no idea that was going to happen. I saw it the same time everybody else did. And I was just so proud that it signified that Jerry and I were successful at what we were trying to do, which was to imbue
the values in the company we didn't want it to be just dependent on jerry and myself so you know the company takes these stands some of which are well a lot of them are controversial not everybody agrees with them you know i've always said you know there's no sense taking a stand if somebody already agrees with what you're standing for and
what ends up happening is that you form this relationship with your customers that's based on shared values. And that's really the deepest, strongest relationship that you can form with anybody. I mean, can an inanimate object like a business have a heart, a soul, and a spirit? I think Ben and Jerry's does. And it was because of the social mission. It's taking stands on stuff that
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Chapter 7: How is Ben Cohen trying to reclaim control of Ben & Jerry's?
They don't want to be open. They want to hide it. And because they're taking all those stands just only in their narrow self-interest. So Ben and Jerry's takes their stands overtly in the interest of the community in general. And I think there's also this issue of being tarred and feathered with the same brush.
The spokespeople for business is the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, All these business packs, whatever. And if you don't stand up and say, no, I don't agree with that stuff. As you said before, I think he who is silent consents. You know, if you don't make your views known, then you're just accepting what's going on.
And what do you think then, Ben, though, of the customer challenge? Like if you're a brand that does get political and speaks out openly like you're saying, what do you say to your fans who love your product but may be upset or offended by a side that you're taking on something and have to live with that challenge?
Well, you just say... This is honest. This is what I believe in. They're based on a set of values. And for a lot of people, I mean, most people are buying products from companies in spite of the values. You know, customers certainly have a choice. I mean, a lot of times, you know, people don't really care that much.
Have you ever encountered a customer that says, man, I, I freaking love white supremacy, but I also love half-baked and I don't know what to do.
You know, the interesting thing is that customers that love white supremacy, they usually don't come up to me.
Well, Ben, maybe to back up a little bit, to understand the current predicament that the brand you built finds itself in. Because Jack and I were talking about this. This is the crux of the interview question. And what leads us to this wild moment for you today, which is like, is it more profitable for a brand to be partisan or to stay out?
And Jack and I were discussing this for our own business too. And we were talking about how, you know, it may be industry dependent to some degree, like in ice cream. There is no gelato that has a political opinion out there, right? Like you guys have a political opinion. And that is a differentiator. It stands out. It's a competitive advantage. We're in the media industry.
And so for our podcast, if we were focused on our political opinions, we'd kind of be like every other show out there. And maybe more of the differentiator for us is actually focusing on entertainment and the business insights and not getting into the commoditized, what's your thought on this controversial issue?
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Ben & Jerry's beyond ice cream?
Yeah, it's on paper, but... You know, it's probably not going to happen. And, and incredibly enough, Unilever did abide by their word and by this written legal document and the social mission thrived.
I mean, this is, that is wild. You pulled off something that Jack and I think was unprecedented in the history of capitalism. Jack and I call this the double dip, by the way, Ben. Yeah. Thank you. Right? Because like most founders have to choose between being rich or being king. They give up control to get rich or they give up money to keep control. And you kind of got both.
You sold the company for a huge payout, but the company that bought Ben & Jerry's did not acquire control of Ben & Jerry's. We've never seen anything like it before. So an independent board... becomes the decision maker of Ben & Jerry's, even though somebody else, Unilever, owns Ben & Jerry's. Totally unprecedented. And the lawyers must have told you as much.
Totally unprecedented. And, you know, the people from Unilever who negotiated the thing, you know, they eventually left the company, you know, they moved on. And, you know, whoever replaced them, I mean, lots of them have never read the agreement.
Yeah.
And they're trying to run it like they run all their other brands. And that's creating some problems. And eventually there was some kind of legal settlement where they were required in writing to make sure that every one of their executives – read the acquisition agreement. And I mean, these executives there at Unilever are saying, whoever's came up with this was crazy.
I mean, this is horrible.
This is the worst thing we've ever seen in our lives. Was it to the detail, Ben, where it was like, they would say like, hey, we got to go with these cheap cashews. And you guys could say, no, no, no, no. We're going to do fair trade cashews from Brazil. They cost three times as much, but we're doing it. But amazingly enough,
Through all that, it still amazes me every time I say it. Ben & Jerry's has become the biggest selling ice cream in the country. It's the number one ice cream by sales in the US.
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