Is ice cream the path to world peace?
Certainly Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, creators of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, have demonstrated that it's not a stretch to go from tasting good to doing good.
The social activist entrepreneurs use fair trade components in their ice cream, limit the wages of executives, practice profit sharing and pay for college for their employees.
While their wildly creative flavors, such as Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia (and the more contemporary Bonnaroo Buzz and Phish Food) helped push earnings to $200 million-plus, their humanitarian philosophy earned the admiration of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.
On Saturday, at the King Center's annual Salute to Greatness Awards Dinner at the Hyatt-Regency, the center will honor Cohen and Greenfield for their "leadership in social responsibility."
It's an honor that flabbergasts the two guys from Long Island.
"I don’t know if we can adequately express how humbling this whole thing is," Greenfield said. "It's kind of beyond words. When you think about the impact that Martin Luther King had and what he stood for, as Ben said, there’s no way we can possibly deserve this."
It's the latest in surprising developments for this pair of former hippies.
Cohen and Greenfield were born in Brooklyn and met in a seventh-grade gym class on Long Island, where neither was a powerhouse. "We were the slowest, fattest kids coming around the track," Greenfield said.
Greenfield's career at Oberlin College was undistinguished -- he couldn't get into medical school -- and Cohen's was less so. In 1978 they joined forces in Burlington, Vt., to open an ice cream shop in a renovated gas station. By 1984 they were selling $4 million worth of ice cream a year. In 1988 they were honored by President Ronald Reagan as small-business people of the year in a ceremony at the White House.
(According to Cohen, who had to borrow a jacket from a waiter for the ceremony, Reagan only said four words to him: "Which one is Jerry?")
By that year Ben and Jerry's had already begun diverting a portion of its profits to its own charitable foundation and was creating products that generated jobs in depressed areas. Two examples: Their Wild Maine Blueberry is made with blueberries harvested by Passamaquoddy Indians, and the company buys Brazil nuts collected in the Amazon rain forest by indigenous peoples for Rainforest Crunch.
The company practices what Cohen describes as "caring capitalism." Said Cohen, "Our belief about business, itself, is that business is a member of the community, a neighbor. It happens to be a wealthy neighbor and happens to have a tremendous amount of power. And as a member of the community, it has a responsibility to use that power for the benefit of all."
Such socially conscious policies won the company admirers at the King Center, which, like the ice cream men, has been vocal in the anti-war movement. If King were alive today, Greenfield said, "he’d be opposing these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’d be talking about putting more money into social needs, into the budgets of our schools and social service agencies, which are being cut to pay for these wars."
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