Jerry Greenfield

Jerry Greenfield, 2010

Jerry Greenfield (born March 14, 1951 in Brooklyn , New York ) is an American entrepreneur . Together with Ben Cohen he founded the American ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s .

Life

Greenfield grew up in Merrick on Long Island . In junior high school he met his future business partner, Ben Cohen, while taking physical education. Both found each other immediately likeable, as they were the stoutest students in the school and together always the slowest at the lap run. In the academic subjects, however, his performance was excellent. He was the third best student in his grade at the school. He graduated from high school in 1969. Because of his good grades, he received a grant from the National Merit Scholarship Program . He applied to several Ivy League universities, but was rejected by all and finally attended Oberlin College , where he received a bachelor's degree in "Pre-Med" in 1973. He then applied to study medicine, but was not accepted at any university. He moved back to New York and worked as a laboratory assistant. At the same time attended a lecture in biochemistry to improve his chances of reapplying to a medical college.

In 1977 he decided to start a business with Ben and another friend, law graduate Jeff Furman. They initially thought of a bagel shop, but found that the investment costs for the equipment are very high. Then they decided to go to an ice cream parlor, since Jerry had already worked on an ice cream counter in the student cafeteria while he was in college. In preparation for his new business, he and Ben took a correspondence course in ice cream making offered by Penn State University for $ 5. He researched in which university town there was still no ice cream parlor, because he believed that students were his best customers. The choice fell on Burlington in the US state of Vermont , where he and his partners opened the Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice-Cream Parlor in a former gas station in May 1978 . The joint start-up capital was only $ 8,000, plus a small loan from the local bank of $ 4,000. For the first five years he often had to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet. He and his partner even ate other people's leftovers to save money. In 1981 he had enough and wanted to sell the ice cream parlor for $ 500,000. Jeff Furman persuaded him to keep at least 10% of the shares. Jerry followed the advice, which grossed $ 9.5 million in selling the company to Unilever in 2000 . He lives in Williston , Vermont with his wife Elizabeth Skarie and son .

literature

• Kateri M. Drexler: Icons of Business: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007, ISBN 9780313338632
• Brad Edmondson: Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry's , Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014, ISBN 9781609948153