Ben & Jerry's chunky ice cream owes its texture to a founder who cannot smell
Ben Cohen has severe anosmia, meaning almost no sense of smell, so he judges food by how it feels in the mouth. That preference gave Ben & Jerry's its trademark lumps of cookie, brownie and candy. The two friends had originally planned to open a bagel shop but found the equipment too costly.
Cohen and Jerry Greenfield grew up together in Merrick, New York. Greenfield finished college but failed to get into medical school, and Cohen dropped out. After abandoning the bagel idea in 1977 they took a correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State's creamery, and on 5 May 1978 they opened a parlour in a converted petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, with 12,000 dollars. A year later they celebrated with a free cone day, which became an annual tradition.
Growth came quickly. In 1980 they began packing pints in an old spool and bobbin mill, the first franchise opened in 1981, and a Vermont-only share sale in 1984 raised 750,000 dollars. When Häagen-Dazs tried to squeeze their Boston distribution, they sued its parent Pillsbury with a campaign asking what the Doughboy was afraid of. A factory at Waterbury followed in 1985, and it still runs public tours. Cherry Garcia, named for the Grateful Dead guitarist, arrived in 1987, and in 1988 President Reagan named the pair Small Business Persons of the Year. There were mishaps too: a converted mobile home handing out free scoops burned out near Cleveland in 1986, which Cohen likened to a giant baked Alaska.
The company made social causes part of its brand, setting aside 7.5 percent of pre-tax profit for its foundation, opposing a milk-boosting hormone in 1989, and even building a 900-pound baked Alaska outside the US Capitol in 2005 to protest drilling in an Arctic refuge.
Unilever bought the business in April 2000 for 326 million dollars, promising to keep its social mission, and the founders stayed on without running it. Relations have sometimes been tense; in 2025 the brand claimed in court that its parent had wrongly ousted its chief executive over activism.
Source: Ben & Jerry's
