This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Shen Tong: For over 40 years, Jeff has helped to build what is probably one of the best known, and certainly one of the most authentic, food brands—Ben & Jerry's. Until very recently, Jeff has been the chairman of the board of both the company and the Ben & Jerry's foundation, trailblazing in many aspects of social justice and environmental work. For me, one of the most amazing things about being in the impact business space is the opportunity to work with people like Ben [Cohen] and Jeff. It's truly an honor to have Jeff as a partner here in this space, and as a business force for good—a true social activist.
There is quite an incredible journey we can about—all of the unique things that Ben & Jerry's has done, and continues to do, under your leadership. But every great journey has a beginning, so I'll start with that. As our followers know, we probably learn more from failure than from success. As successful as Ben & Jerry's is, both in its social mission and in business, can you share with us some stories of the founding days? What were some of the most challenging moments?
Jeff Furman: First, I'd like to extend my congratulations to the graduates [of the latest FoodFutureCo Cohort]. Graduation, in particular, means a lot to me because I was not allowed to attend my high school graduation. That's a long story, but I'll just tell you that 54 years later, I was invited back to be the keynote speaker at [that high school]. And, as a surprise, after I spoke and walked across the stage, they called my name. And on my diploma, it said, "never too late."
Eventually, I ended up getting two degrees—a degree in business and a law degree. I was a terrible student, but I got through it. I took a job as a bus driver at a small school in the Adirondack mountains, and that's how Ben and I met. (I had to explain to my parents that my career path had gone from being a business and law school student, to being a bus driver in a school that had 25 students in the middle of the woods.) Ben came [to town] to be a potter—he was a fabulous potter—and we became friends. I met Jerry through Ben, and they wanted to open an [ice cream] store in Vermont and they asked me to help them. I told them that I didn't know anything, and I got for them a copy of a plan for a pizza parlor. That’s what we used—we had to white out the word "pizza" on the plans and put in "ice cream."
ST: Ladies and gentlemen—this is the first business plan for a Ben & Jerry's!
JF: Yes, made up from a plan for a pizza place! So the number of "slices" became the number of cones. "Ovens" became freezers. We had no plan—there was never a plan to be anything but one store. Ben and Jerry did not even know how to make ice cream! They had to take a course to learn to make ice cream at Penn State. They split the cost of $5 course, $2.50 each, to learn to make ice cream to open up an ice cream store in a cold climate. [Laughs.] We had no strategic plan. It was just going to be one store, that's all it was going to be. The store lasted for about two or three years, and Jerry actually decided to sell it. He was planning to leave Vermont and move to Arizona with the woman he was with (who became his wife later on) where she was going to get a degree. As they were going to sell the company, Ben changed his mind—in the middle of the sale! So they got sued, and they lost the lawsuit—the judge really hated them. The lawsuit was for about $100,000, which was about all the money we had in the bank. The judge was ready to tell the sheriff to go and hold the money, and so I ran to the bank. I got there ahead of the sheriff, ran upstairs to the president of the bank, and got him to give me [the] $100,000 in cash. They were literally counting the money while the sheriff was downstairs. I had to put the cash in a paper bag and fly out of Vermont. (These are success stories!) So I flew home, and when I got home, my partner at the time asked me, "How was your trip?" I replied: "I brought you something, honey," and I pulled out $100,000. (We ended up getting married, it's a wonderful story.)
ST: Wow, it's true in the start-up world—there are moments that you feel like it's the end of road, and you need… innovation!
But it's not just building a small business—you guys have have been trailblazers when it comes to local sourcing and social justice issues. You also did your IPO Vermont only! You, personally, have been credited with the creation of a benefit corporation. (A number of our companies are a benefit corporation or are B-lab certified.) So what do you think of the state of social entrepreneurship today? Is this force for good? Have we come a long way positively, or are there areas we are wrong?
JF: Well, I have been traveling a lot recently, and I've been to several countries. In Argentina, I was with 1,200 people who are doing B corps. In Guatemala, the concept of social mission in small companies was beautiful. The way that people felt about their companies, how they felt about the people that work for them and their responsibility to the people who work for them, how they felt responsibility to the indigenous communities—I wanted to take all of that and bottle it up for every board of directors of every corporation in the world. That way, they could see what it means to try to [take into consideration] this world situation, the crisis that we have going on, (in addition to issues that have been going on for hundreds of years), and [add] social justice issues to the business .
I feel so hopeful around what is emerging—that people are trying to do this everywhere. There is an energy that is really exciting to see around the world. It's particularly exciting for me to have real one-on-one conversations with the people who are doing [social entrepreneurship], because you can feel it in their hearts.
ST: It's interesting that you ended with that note, because while there is a lot of [positive] emergence and signals, there is also a lot of noise. There is "black washing" about healthy soil, or "blue washing" or "pink washing" about a company's supposed impacts. It has now become strategy to label a business as "social entrepreneurship," in order to market the company as an impact company. So how do you tell the difference? In your experience, how do you truly build an authentic alignment? What is your foundation, as a business brand and as an impact organization?
JF: You know, I get asked a lot for my advice in this area. And there is a difference you can tell. When someone says: "We have to show that if we do this, it will improve our business," I say: "So you do something for the world if it helps you?" That is a very different consciousness than I felt that we ever had at Ben & Jerry's, certainly in the beginning. I said over and over again, and if we didn't have a social mission, we'd be irrelevant. This is just who we are. The world does not need another ice cream company, or any company, but it needs real people who are doing this because it's a real passion. Not because you need to show it might help your bottom line.
There are a lot of folks that want to engage for good but you have to sort of prove it. If you do it only for what it's going to do to your bottom line, your customers will eventually see through that. At Ben & Jerry's, we never felt we had to prove it. It was just going to be part of who we are. So we've taken risks—we have been willing to do things that we knew we'd get boycotted for, or we would get push back for. But we felt that we had to use our voice— we had to speak up. Real motivation will come through eventually to the people who will [encounter] your product.
ST: You are very vocal opponent of GMO, which must have some impact on your product, and even on the day to day operational decisions, whether it's a fair wage living wage or product sourcing. Share with us a couple stories about that.
JF: At the same time, Ben & Jerry's decided to go 100% Fair Trade and 100% GMO-free. Our most popular flavor at that time was Heath Bar crunch. I remember being at the board meeting when we were informed that we could not get Heath Bars to be a GMO-free. And I will tell you that the decision to stop making Heath Bar Crunch flavor was made under 10 seconds. Everyone there agreed that if we were going to be real, if we were going to be honest, we had to stop making it. So you cannot buy Heath Bar crunch anymore—we took our number one flavor out of the marketplace. Our ability to be transparent and honest with our customers, in the long run, far exceeds that flavor.
We also have a strong commitment to paying a living wage. Even when the company was sold to Unilever, we put in a binding agreement that Ben & Jerry's employees will be paid a living wage to start and their wages will go up according to our formula. This agreement goes on in perpetuity, and I have the rights to sue Unilever personally if they don't adhere to it. This is the first agreement of its kind. If you started Ben and Jerry's today without any skills, you started $17.80 an hour, and you get full health insurance. We feel as an organization that these are the risks we will take. Recently, we put out some flavors that we knew that we were going to get pushback for, for what was on the packaging.
ST: It sounds like there is a lot thought and hard decisions made in how you take care of your own people. From building the board to providing a living wage, there must be so many of those hard decisions, and longterm change probably comes from within. Would you mind sharing some personal stories about integrity, and how you align your values?
JF: Well, I grew up in the sixties. I'm 76 years old, and in the 1960s, I lived in the village. (That's when I supposed to be in law school.) I had strong anti-war values, as well as civil rights values. That became part of a Ben & Jerry's. Ben and I started an organization called 1% for Peace, which was an attempt to get 1% of the defense department's budget, which was $300 billion at that time, to create alternative ways to achieve peace besides building more weapons or going to war. Everybody said we were crazy to be doing this—the United States government wasn't going to give Jeff and Ben and our friends $3 billion dollars. But we began it anyway, because these were our values. We actually took out ads against the Iraq war—full page ads in the newspaper. We came out with packaging for product that demonstrated what you could do with the $900 billion if you weren't spending it on weapons. And then as a company, we have consistently taken a very strong stand on racism. One of the things that I've learned, and felt as the chair of the board, is that I can make things happen. But I can't make them happen well, unless it was internalized in our organization. My task was to get the [whole] company to yearn for a just world. [The values] werent just board, but it was inside the company. And that, and that to me felt very important to do. Employees were interested in mass incarceration, so we began to take employees to the South. We went to Oakland with 25 employees, from all different rungs of the company, so that learning and awareness was experiential. It wasn't just reading about it or seeing a video—it was about trying to engage with the employees.
ST: So how difficult is it to combine being an activist and a businessman?
JF: You know, it works because we're making a difference. I think that we've demonstrated that you can stand for these issues and implement it. We've done this work, and I can say that the company has been very successful financially (although that's never been the reason that we did this work.) There are some folks give us credit for kind starting the B Corp idea, the social enterprise world. We are one of the people that really began it, so I can feel pretty good about it. I think one of the advantages [Ben and I] had is we didn't know how to do anything so we could create it—we could create a company from our heart. Looking back, I feel that I have been so blessed to be able to work from my heart my whole life, it is such an amazing gift.