Merging business’ financial success with Spirituality w/Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream
May 31, 2013
Hosted by Alison J. Kay, PhD Holistic Life Coach, Energy Healer, India Trained YA RYT-200 Yoga Teacher, Certified Personal Trainer
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Who says money and spirituality can’t go together? That moral values and business are mutually exclusive? Pioneers in this field, Ben & Jerry split the $5 fee for a Penn State correspondence course in ice cream making, setting up their first Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor in a refurbished gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in the spring of 1978. Their product was an immediate hit. In the first five years, they also began opening Ben & Jerry’s franchises in the surrounding states. With their success gaining momentum, by 1986 they were building a manufacturing plant in Waterbury, going public and donating 7.5 percent of the company’s earnings to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, a nonprofit they formed to benefit various causes.
Throughout the 1990s, Greenfield and Cohen built both their ice cream empire and their reputations as humanitarians. In 1993 they received the James Beard Humanitarians of the Year Award and in 1997 the Peace Museum’s Community Peacemakers of the Year Award
