Cohen speaks to students about ice cream, business, politics

Addressing issues of social responsibility and ethical business practices, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, and active founding member of Businesses for Social Responsibility Ben Cohen spoke to a packed Cohen Auditorium Thursday night.

Cohen began with a lighthearted story of his rise to success in the ice cream industry with his partner, Jerry Greenfield.

In 1978 Cohen said that there were just two food trends: bagels and homemade ice cream. After a non-lucrative bagel delivery service, Cohen and Greenfield began experimenting with ice cream. They set up shop in an old gas station in Burlington, Vt., bought used equipment, and their little enterprise was so successful they sold everything they could make.

"I ran around really fast selling everything before it melted," Cohen said.

When the duo tried to expand into the New York and Boston markets their first big city advertisement was a ten-second ad on late night television that claimed, "We may not have money for anything other than a ten-second ad but we make the best ice cream!" The ad worked and by the early 1980s the company was making three million dollars a year.

Their success led Cohen and Greenfield to realize that the business world was not what they expected.

"We weren't ice cream men anymore, we were business men. Becoming just another cob on the business machine which exploits people," Cohen said.

Cohen claimed that the today's role of business is so important and powerful, that it should be used for "the common good".

"As you give, you receive. As you help others, you are helped in return. As you support the community, the community supports your business," Cohen said.

When they needed a capital injection, the socially-minded Cohen and Greenfield decided to make the Vermont community their stockholders. "We decided to make the community own the business so when the company prospered, the community prospered," Cohen said.

Ben & Jerry's was sold in an in-state public stock offer in Vermont. Soon one out of every 100 Vermont families had Ben & Jerry's stocks.

A few years later, Ben & Jerry's was sold on the national stock market because "we needed to give away as much money as possible," Cohen said. Simultaneously, the Ben & Jerry's Foundation was created, which donated a fraction of profit to charity. It was a hit, and several organizations requested funding.

"Business itself was maybe not inherently bad - you can use it as a tool to help to repair some of the problems in society," Cohen said.

Rather than concerning themselves too much with power and profit, the two pursued tried to ensure the happiness and satisfaction of their customers.

"That's the problem," Cohen asserted. "We measure easy things like money -very finite, very exact. It's hard to measure the most important things in life - like loving, caring kindness. Let's change how we measure success and redefine the bottom line." Though Cohen and Greenfield recently sold Ben& Jerry's to The Unilever Company, this way of conducting business is still emphasized with employees today.

Ben & Jerry's succeeded in their business goals by producing unique flavors, creating business relationships with banks and charities, and using environmentally-friendly materials for production.

Cohen also went on to found TrueMajority.org, an online organization that monitors Congress and boasts 150,000 members. He went on to speak about his views of recent political issues.

Using Oreo cookies to represent the Federal Discretionary Budget, he told Tufts students of how 50 percent of the Budget is reserved for the Pentagon. "Fifteen percent of the Pentagon budget would satisfy all our needs," he said. Of the 400 billion dollars allotted to the Pentagon, if ten billion were given to K-12 education, all public schools could be rebuilt, he said. If 20 billion were given to human farm aid, the 15,000 starving children in the United States could be fed, and if ten billion were given to energy independence programs, the country's reliance on foreign oil could be close to nothing in ten years, Cohen claimed.

He told the auditorium that the United States now has the resources to finance 15,000 atomic bombs like the one dumped on Hiroshima in World War II. "If we cut the nuclear budget by two, we'd still have enough money to blow the world up four times over," Cohen said.

Cohen attacked President Bush's claims that the Pentagon budget is necessary to protect the nation from its enemies, citing that the military budgets of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea are a mere ten billion dollars.

"For years I have been working on a statue of George W. Bush with his pants on fire," Cohen jokingly claimed. "What I'm doing is a labor of love for my country-for values America stands for. [I'm doing it] for the troops dying in Iraq, for Americans suffering from poor health care, and those living on the streets. [I'm doing it] for those who hear the President's words and believe the lies."

He closed his speech by urging Tufts students to "Go out and vote in 2004. We are the last remaining superpower on Earth and we need to measure power in terms of how many people we can feed, house, and clothe - not how many we can destroy."

With a standing ovation, and bursts of laughter throughout the lecture, Cohen was well-received by the students.

"I thought it was really interesting - lots of good ideas about business. The demonstrations made [concepts] easy to visualize," said freshman Megan Haster.

Senior Josh Belkin was also enthusiastic in his response to Cohen's lecture, "I thought it was almost like two lectures - one about Ben & Jerry's and the other about social responsibility and politics. The stories were connected though, and that's what Ben & Jerry's is about."

Others were skeptical about the information Cohen presented. "He had a really good presentation, [and] had good things to say, but I would like to do a little research [on the statistics] because I know a lot of liberals and I don't trust them," said senior Mike Stevenson.

Perhaps what most excited students were the free ice-cream novelty, Peace Pops, distributed after the lecture. Cohen spoke at the University as the Fall Lecturer of the Tufts Lecture Series.