Ben Cohen -- Co-Founder Of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream

Bennett Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1951. He grew up and went to school in Merrick, Long Island. It was there he met Jerry Greenfield, in junior high school. Ben and Jerry both attended and graduated from Calhoun High School in Merrick.

Ben’s memories of his childhood include watching his father put away an entire half-gallon of ice cream at the dinner table, eating directly from the carton with a soup spoon. Ben also recalls creating his own ice cream concoctions by mushing up his favorite cookies and candies into his ice cream.

Ben’s first professional contact with ice cream came in his senior year of high school, when he worked as an “ice cream man,” driving a truck, ringing bells, and selling ice cream pops to kids. He was promoted to the position of “boxman,” meaning he worked in the freezer and distributed ice cream to other ice-cream truck drivers.

Ben enrolled in Colgate University and dropped out after a year and a half, going back to being an ice cream man. He then attended Skidmore College and there studied pottery and jewelry making, eventually enrolling in the University Without Walls. During this period, he held various jobs, including cashier at McDonald’s, Pinkerton guard at the Saratoga Raceway, night mopper at Jamesway and Friendly’s and assistant superintendent at Gaslight Square Apartments.

After his stint at Skidmore, Ben moved to New York City to further his pottery studies and supported himself through such jobs as pottery wheel delivery person, pediatric emergency room clerk on the night shift at Bellevue Hospital, and taxi cab driver. He also enrolled in courses at the New School in experimental sound recording, and at NYU in art therapy. Ben interned as a craft therapist at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx and at the Grand Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side.

Eventually, Ben dropped out of the University Without Walls and moved to Paradox in the Adirondack Mountain region of New York State in 1974 to become a craft teacher at the Highland Community School, a small residential school for emotionally disturbed adolescents on a 600 acre working farm. Ben was there for approximately three years, building his own house and working as the school cook in addition to teaching pottery, stained glass, photography, film making, and the yearbook. It was there that Ben also started experimenting with ice cream-making with the school’s students.

In 1977 Ben left the school and decided to go into the food business with his childhood pal, Jerry. The two settled on ice cream (as opposed to bagels due to the expensive machinery needed) and started performing research. They chose Burlington, Vermont as the second-best place to start their ice cream venture, mostly due to the fact that it was a great college town in desperate need of an ice cream parlor, and because their first choice --Saratoga Springs, New York-- already had an ice cream parlor.

Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream Parlor opened for business in May, 1978, in a renovated gas station on a busy streetcorner in Burlington, Vermont. Ben & Jerry’s soon became known throughout Vermont as much for its rich, unusual flavors as for Ben’s and Jerry’s community-oriented approach to business, whereby good will, good times, and good ice cream were shared through a variety of events, such as an autumn “Fall Down” Festival, a free outdoor movie festival, and a celebration of the business’ 1-year anniversary with a Free Cone Day (an anniversary celebration still observed, now with free cones served all day at every Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop nationwide.)

As the business has grown, Ben’s jobs have included scooper and taste-tester, truck driver, marketing director, salesperson, president, CEO, not-CEO, and Chairperson of the Board. He’s also had to learn all sorts of new and critically-needed skills on demand over the years, like plumbing, roof-repair, belly-bouncing, dangerous carnival acts, and the art of samurai pint-slicing. In 1987 he even wrote a book with Jerry called “Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book.”

Ben and Jerry have been recognized for fostering their company’s commitment to social responsibility by the Council on Economic Priorities, which awarded them the Corporate Giving award in 1988 for donating 7.5 percent of their pre tax profits to nonprofit organizations through the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, and by the U.S. Small Business Administration, which named them U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year in 1988 in a White House ceremony hosted by President Reagan.

Ben is on the boards of various organizations, and is an active founding member of Businesses for Social Responsibility, an organization that works to promote socially responsible business practices. He’s also in great demand as a speaker, appearing several times a year at various colleges, universities, businesses and non-profit organizations.