In the summer of 1978, two friends opened a makeshift ice cream parlor in an abandoned gas station in northern Vermont. Using a single five-gallon ice cream maker, they churned out batch after batch of wacky flavors like Chunky Monkey and Heath Bar Crunch.

In the decades that followed, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield built Ben & Jerry’s into a legendary ice cream company, with more than 600 scoop shops in 35 countries around the world and annual sales now topping $500 million.

And to think, it all happened because one of them couldn’t get into medical school, and the other couldn’t sell enough pottery.

Jerry and I met in junior high, when he fainted in gym class. It made quite an impression on me, and we quickly became friends.

Some years later, I had dropped out of college and was trying to become a potter, but nobody wanted to buy my pottery, and Jerry had finished college and was trying to go to medical school, but nobody would let him into their medical school. So, I was delivering pottery wheels and working as a taxi driver, and he was a lab technician, working on rat brains and cow livers in a research lab, and neither of us really liked what we were doing with our lives. So we decided to try to start something together.

JERRY: I guess I wanted to become a doctor. It's what Jewish kids from Long Island who were good in science did. Ben and I were very uncool. We were fat nerds. I was in the math club. Ben played the cello.

Q: How did your ice-cream business start?

JERRY: It was a bad time for us both. I had been rejected by 40 medical schools. We were clearly not succeeding in our chosen fields. So we started considering different ways to support ourselves. We wanted to live in a rural college town, do something where we could be together and that was fun. Since we love to eat, we immediately thought of food. Ice cream made sense, though we considered bagels, shish kebab, fondue. Ben & Jerry's scoop shop opened in Burlington, Vt., in 1978. Sixteen years later, Ben and I are as surprised as anyone that we're running a $150-million-a-year business, with 600 employees and 100-plus franchisees.

Q: Ben & Jerry's is considered a socially responsible business. Define that.

BEN: It's a business that cares about people, that seeks to use its power to improve the quality of life within society. It seeks profits and tries to integrate spiritual and social concerns into day-to-day activities. Typical businesses tend to do everything in terms of narrow self-interest. They want to maximize profitability and quality. We add a third factor: impact on the community, on the consumer, on our employees. We use suppliers like Greyston Bakers, which provides jobs for the previously unemployable. We buy our coffee from a rural cooperative in Mexico, helping to raise the standard of living there. We sell some of our ice cream through partner shops like Common Ground, which trains the previously unemployed. We give 7 1/2 percent of our pretax profits to our foundation, which, as far as we know, is the highest percentage of any publicly held company.

JERRY: We think making a better world increases profits. If you have a world where there are a lot of riots and disparities, that's not a world where you can sell a lot of ice cream. If you have a world where people are nurtured and their basic human needs are met, you can sell more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/when-we-were-small-ben-and-jerrys/2014/05/14/069b6cae-dac4-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/18/magazine/passing-the-scoop-ben-jerry.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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