Ben Cohen (entrepreneur)

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Ben Cohen

Bennett "Ben" Cohen (born March 18, 1951 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American entrepreneur . Cohen founded the American ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s together with Jerry Greenfield .

Life

Cohen grew up in Merrick , a coastal town on Long Island , where he attended high school with his future business partner, Jerry Greenfield. Although he wasn't a particularly good student, he applied to Colgate University after graduating from high school in 1969 to obtain postponement of his military service during the Vietnam War. After he was unlikely to be called up for military service, he saw no need to begin his studies. Instead, he worked as an ice cream seller at "Pied Piper" in Merrick. In 1971 he moved to Skidmore , where he took pottery courses and also worked as an ice cream seller and cleaner. He then went back to New York and became a taxi driver. In 1974 he applied to a private school for difficult-to-educate children in the Adirondack Mountains to teach crafts. He worked there until 1977 when he decided to open a shop with Jerry Greenfield. An ice cream parlor seemed the most practical, since both had already worked as ice cream vendors. He took a correspondence course on ice cream production with his partner and opened Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream Parlor in Burlington , Vermont in May 1978 . With only $ 12,000 in capital, they renovated the former gas station themselves.

When the company was acquired by the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever in August 2000 , he received $ 41 million for his share. Since then he has mainly taken care of the social projects of his Ben & Jerry's Foundation . He founded several associations such as TrueMajority , which campaigns for a change in the structure of the US government, or Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities . This association advocates cutting the US military budget by 15%.

In the 2016 US election campaign , he and Greenfield support the candidate Bernie Sanders . Sanders was Mayor of Burlington from 1981 to 1989 , where Cohen and Greenfield opened their first ice cream parlor.

Cohen himself suffers from anosmia , i.e. a loss of his sense of taste or partial loss of the sense of smell. This was taken into account during the development of the ice cream, as he was able to perceive the texture of the ice cream better by adding more and more solid components (such as cookies or chocolate pieces). However, this coincidentally resulted in the typical consistency of ice cream.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kateri M. Drexler: Icons of Business: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007, pp. 77-90
  2. ^ Brad Edmondson: Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry's , Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014
  3. ↑ Ben and Jerry advertise Bernie Sanders - no ice cream at all , Süddeutsche Zeitung from January 31, 2016 , accessed on February 1, 2016.
  4. ↑ Elizabeth Zierah: The Nose That Never Knows: The miseries of losing one's sense of smell . Slate. July 8, 2008. Retrieved July 11, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Cohen, Ben
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cohen, Bennett
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn , New York