Aleem Khan

Ben & Jer­ry's ice-cream co-founder Ben Co­hen said the com­pa­ny rose to the US$326 mil­lion val­ue at the time Unilever ac­quired it in 2001, thanks en­tire­ly to its in­no­v­a­tive busi­ness phi­los­o­phy of main­tain­ing a dou­ble bot­tom line: to sup­port the com­mu­ni­ties in which it op­er­ates and to make mon­ey.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian at the Hilton Trinidad, St Ann's, on Mon­day evening, Co­hen showed un­flinch­ing con­vic­tion that Ben & Jer­ry's be­came the in­ter­na­tion­al brand it is to­day thanks to the "ha­lo ef­fect" cre­at­ed from the phil­an­thropic way it did busi­ness, just as much as the taste of the ice-cream.

Co­hen said: "When we first opened, we opened just as one in­di­vid­ual home made ice-cream shop, and we didn't have any plans of be­com­ing any­thing more than that. At the very be­gin­ning when we opened up, we said that we don't want to be a typ­i­cal busi­ness. We'd like to be a busi­ness that cares more about the lo­cal com­mu­ni­ty. We were hold­ing com­mu­ni­ty cel­e­bra­tions and giv­ing away a bunch of ice-cream, but we didn't re­al­ly de­vel­op our phi­los­o­phy un­til sev­en years lat­er, and as the busi­ness grew, we be­gan to feel the busi­ness is es­sen­tial­ly a ma­chine for mak­ing mon­ey that we want­ed to be of as much ser­vice to the com­mu­ni­ty as pos­si­ble.

"What we need­ed to do was give away as much of our prof­its as pos­si­ble. We end­ed up giv­ing away a very high per­cent­age of our prof­its, 7.5 per cent of pre-tax prof­its. You know the nor­mal cor­po­rate do­na­tion is maybe about one per cent. We were giv­ing away a lot more and we had be­come a pub­lic com­pa­ny."

He said that as "there are just so many over­whelm­ing un­met hu­man needs, for a busi­ness to just give away mon­ey, isn't enough, and we were won­der­ing was there some­thing else we could do, and we fig­ured out that the thing that we could do more was to in­te­grate so­cial con­cerns in­to day-to-day busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ties, and so we start­ed do­ing busi­ness with a bank that was based in a de­cay­ing ur­ban area whose pur­pose was to at­tract de­posits from out­side the area, to use it to re­build that area."

Co­hen gave oth­er ex­am­ples of how Ben & Jer­ry's "start­ed to in­vest in low-in­come hous­ing, tax cred­its," and sourc­ing its in­gre­di­ents "fair trad­ed, so that the small­er farm­ers get paid a high­er price."

For a while, Ben & Jer­ry's was buy­ing Brazil nuts from the rain­for­est in an ef­fort to help the rain­for­est in Brazil re­main a liv­ing rain­for­est, Co­hen said.

"What we found at Ben & Jer­ry's is that there's a spir­i­tu­al as­pect to busi­ness, just as there is to the lives of in­di­vid­u­als. When you give, you re­ceive. As you help oth­ers, you're helped in re­turn. As your busi­ness sup­ports the com­mu­ni­ty, the com­mu­ni­ty sup­ports your busi­ness."

"We had no idea that was go­ing to be so suc­cess­ful, that was go­ing to be so prof­itable, but it was," he said. "The norm is that busi­ness­es say that it is not pos­si­ble for them to help to al­le­vi­ate so­cial prob­lems. It's not pos­si­ble for them to in­te­grate so­cial con­cerns in­to how they do busi­ness, so that they can prof­it at the same time. We found that that's just not true. We found that it is pos­si­ble to do that, and we found lots of dif­fer­ent ways to in­te­grate 'meet­ing so­cial needs' in­to our day-to-day busi­ness op­er­a­tions."

Sourc­ing in­gre­di­ents and help­ing

Co­hen said it is about "a lot more than just giv­ing away some mon­ey. It's about sourc­ing our in­gre­di­ents in such a way that we help to ad­dress so­cial prob­lems. One ex­am­ple is that our flavour, 'choco­late fudge brown­ie,' utilis­es brown­ies that are made by a non-prof­it bak­ery owned by a re­li­gious in­sti­tu­tion in an in­ner city area whose pur­pose is to pro­vide job train­ing to for­mer­ly un­em­ploy­able peo­ple: ex-drug ad­dicts, or ex-con­victs or for­mer­ly home­less peo­ple, and so, just by buy­ing brown­ies from that bak­ery, we're help­ing to solve that so­cial prob­lem."

He said Ben & Jer­ry's "in­no­vat­ed a two-part bot­tom line, so that it mea­sures its ben­e­fit to the com­mu­ni­ty, and its im­pact on the com­mu­ni­ty, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive; and it mea­sures how much mon­ey it makes. If we fail at ei­ther one of those, we have failed our man­date," he said.

There are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 300 Ben & Jer­ry's ice cream scoop shops around the world, but main­ly in the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States, he said. Some shops are fran­chised, but most be­long whol­ly to Unilever, the An­glo-Dutch glob­al con­sumer goods com­pa­ny that has an op­er­a­tion in T&T.

Asked if there might be a Ben & Jer­ry's ice-cream scoop shop open­ing soon in T&T, he said that would be the de­ci­sion of Unilever which bought out Ben & Jer­ry's on the stock mar­ket. "We were a pub­licly-held com­pa­ny and Unilever bought all the stock, so when that hap­pened, I got paid a bunch of mon­ey," he said.

The British-Dutch con­glom­er­ate Unilever bought the Amer­i­can Ver­mont-based, ice-cream man­u­fac­tur­er Ben & Jer­ry's in 2001 for US$326 mil­lion.

Mon­ey and pol­i­tics

The com­pa­ny has start­ed tak­ing some po­lit­i­cal stands, too, he said. One stand it has tak­en is on "get­ting mon­ey out of pol­i­tics," which is about de­tach­ing pol­i­tics from mon­ey, re­plac­ing the cam­paign fi­nanc­ing mod­el at the hands of which or­di­nary vot­ers suf­fer.

Lat­er in the in­ter­view, when asked if he might ever go back in­to busi­ness now that he plays no ex­ec­u­tive role at Ben & Jer­ry's, Co­hen said he is ded­i­cat­ing him­self to this strug­gle.

"Now, I'm fo­cused on a cam­paign to get mon­ey out of pol­i­tics. I'm go­ing to fo­cus all my en­er­gy on ad­dress­ing what I think is the root cause of most of the prob­lems in the Unit­ed States; and, of course, if there are prob­lems in the Unit­ed States, they would be caus­ing prob­lems in the rest of the world as well."

An­oth­er po­lit­i­cal stand Ben & Jer­ry's is tak­ing is to get politi­cians to "shift mon­ey out of nu­clear weapons and in­to ed­u­ca­tion," he said. Co­hen said one of his ma­jor con­cerns is the mil­i­tari­sa­tion of US so­ci­ety. He said: "The US spends half of its dis­cre­tionary bud­get on the mil­i­tary, prepar­ing to kill peo­ple. You know, it's ab­surd. The US spends US$700 bil­lion a year on that, and for about US$50 bil­lion a year, you can feed all the peo­ple who are hun­gry in the world."

"I've been say­ing it would make the world a lot safer place if peo­ple weren't hun­gry. You can do those things. You can do every­thing for US$50 bil­lion a year. What per­cent­age is that of our Pen­ta­gon bud­get?" he asked rhetor­i­cal­ly.

You can do it

"What we demon­strat­ed was that you can do it. You have two choic­es when you go in­to busi­ness. You can just run a tra­di­tion­al busi­ness that on­ly has a one-part bot­tom line, that is on­ly there to max­imise prof­its for the own­ers, or you can do one that has a two-part bot­tom line that makes a bunch of prof­its and helps to im­prove the qual­i­ty of life of the com­mu­ni­ty. We like the sec­ond."

Co­hen said the de­ci­sion to op­er­ate with a two-part bot­tom line was "very con­tro­ver­sial" at the start. He said: "It was con­tro­ver­sial with­in our own com­pa­ny, at the board of di­rec­tors lev­el. We were crit­i­cised by the ma­jor busi­ness schools around the coun­try. They would in­vite us to come and speak. We would tell them about it, and they would tell us, you know, we were stu­pid."

Still, he said they re­mained un­fazed and un­daunt­ed.

"We just con­tin­ued to do it and con­tin­ued to demon­strate that we were very prof­itable. We spent a lot less mon­ey on ad­ver­tis­ing and pub­lic re­la­tions. Com­pa­nies tra­di­tion­al­ly hire and man­age ad­ver­tis­ing agen­cies and pub­lic re­la­tions to es­sen­tial­ly make up a nice sto­ry about the com­pa­ny so that peo­ple feel good about the com­pa­ny, and buy their prod­ucts. In­stead, we de­cid­ed to use our mon­ey to ac­tu­al­ly do good things for the com­mu­ni­ty and peo­ple re­al­ly got to like us a lot."

Co­hen said: "It's just a spir­i­tu­al law. It's the way the world works. It's writ­ten in the Bible. As you give, you re­ceive. As you help oth­ers, oth­ers help you. As your busi­ness sup­ports the com­mu­ni­ty, the com­mu­ni­ty sup­ports your busi­ness. It's just the same. I ac­tu­al­ly think it's true for na­tions as well."

He said al­though not all the fran­chised stores are on board with the phi­los­o­phy as part of the sales agree­ment with Unilever, an in­de­pen­dent Ben & Jer­ry's board of di­rec­tors was es­tab­lished. They have re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and au­thor­i­ty over the so­cial mis­sion of the com­pa­ny. Of the five main tabs on the Ben & Jer­ry's Ice-Cream Web site, the third is "Ac­tivism," stand­ing out from among the usu­al "Com­pa­ny, Flavours, Scoop Shops, Gifts."

The ice-cream in­dus­try

Asked where he sees the ice-cream mar­ket head­ing, and what would be the fu­ture of the in­dus­try, Co­hen said he thinks "su­per pre­mi­um ice-cream com­pa­nies like Ben & Jer­ry's" will dom­i­nate.

"Es­sen­tial­ly, glob­al­ly, the two su­pe­ri­or ice-cream com­pa­nies are Haa­gen Dazs, which is owned by Nestl�, and Ben & Jer­ry's which is owned by Unil­ver, and these two go­liaths duke it out with each oth­er around the world. What it's cre­at­ed is what peo­ple call a price um­brel­la, so this very ex­pen­sive ice-cream has cre­at­ed a high price that peo­ple will pay for ice-cream, and I think that al­lows small, lo­cal, high qual­i­ty ice-cream mak­ers to go in­to busi­ness. I think what we're see­ing in the US is a pro­lif­er­a­tion of small, lo­cal, high qual­i­ty ice-cream mak­ers that are now able to com­pete be­cause they're able to sell at a high amount of mon­ey.

"The oth­er thing that has hap­pened, of course, is be­cause of that price um­brel­la, low qual­i­ty ice-creams have in­creased their prices. It's kind of like what hap­pened to Star­bucks and cof­fee."