Business Reimagined: Should Firms Have a Purpose Beyond Profit? (Ben & Jerry’s Ben Cohen)

24:48We're walking around this lake together. Bernie was a Jewish, Buddhist, nuclear physicist monk. My kind of guy.

25:03My kind of guy. Sounds radical, yeah. So we're walking around and he says, hey, I've started this bakery, Greyston Bakery, and I am in the Buddhist community. I am at the fringes of the Buddhist community because I'm looking to actually do work in the world. And there's another section of the Buddhist community that's just looking to improve their internal self. So he's at the very edge of it and he started this bakery. I'm at the very edge of the business world because I'm trying to integrate these social concerns. We find each other at the edges of our worlds, and we were just in the process of setting up a new plant to make brownie ice cream sandwiches.

25:55And I said, hey, we're looking for a second supplier because the one supplier we have is this small business. We're setting up this new plant that's based on this product. We need a secondary supplier if something else happens. And do you think you could make these thin, chewy, fudgy brownies? And he said, yeah, no problem. So I said, okay, you're hired. And we go through a lot of R &D, trying to come up with the right brownie. And finally, we come up with it. We place our first order for half a truckload, 10 ,000 pounds. You know, Bernie says, all right, it'll take me a few weeks to make that amount, but, you know, we'll make it and we'll ship it up.

26:40And so the first shipment comes and, you know, they're in these 25-pound boxes and we bring them to the line to make the sandwiches. And it turned out that all the brownies were stuck together and it was just one 25-pound lump of brownie. That'd take you a while to eat. And, you know, so the people on the line, you know, they're trying to pull these things apart and they're going crazy. And they're saying, what are you doing to us? What are you making us do? And you couldn't do it. And you pull them apart and they would break apart. And, you know, for a normal supplier, we would have just shipped it back and said, hey, we ain't paying for this.

27:22Amol Rajan:But Bernie was no normal supplier. He was no normal supplier. So we couldn't ship it back and say, you know, you got to eat the cost. they couldn't. They would have put them out of business. So we ended up, that's how chocolate fudge brownie ice cream was born. We took the little pieces that we could pick off and put them in the ice cream. And now that's their major business is providing us with these little pieces of brownies that we put into the ice cream. And it's probably my favorite flavor and my its favorite flavor and it all goes back to Bernie Glassman. We all can agree that housing is expensive.

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29:34Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Ben Cohen, one half of Ben and Jerry's, if you are, and in fact, even if you're not, but I think you probably are, which is why you've got this far. Subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. Go on, do it. It's really, really easy. You just Search for Radical with a Mulragin on BBC Sounds and you hit subscribe. That way you will not miss future episodes. And by the way, if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Thank you so much.

30:06Amol Rajan:And back to Ben Cohen. Before we get into some of the more recent disputes you've had and the kind of the messy situation, the legal situation with Unilever and Magnum. Can I, based on this remarkable experience of your early years, the partnership with first Gerry and then Bernie Glassman, the fact that fair trade is involved from an early stage, the fact that you're trying to involve the community in your growth, can I put to you a couple of principled objections to your position? Not because this is my view. Please do. This is the way we try and approach things on the BBC. It's obviously one of the central questions of our time, whether or not capitalism can win popular consent.

30:47Amol Rajan:One of the central questions of our age today in 2026 is whether or not capitalism can spread ownership rather than hoarding it. And defenders of capitalism say, if capitalism is going to be effective and popular, we need to spread ownership. And a lot of people say, you look at the American stock market today or American wealth, it's not been very good at spreading ownership. But you know, there are other people and they tend to be capitalists who say, it's not our job to spread ownership. Our job is to make profit. And we would do that if we serve customers and we deliver for shareholders. And that's good enough.

31:26Amol Rajan:Can I just put to you a first principled objection to your decades of activism, which is that the job of capitalists is to allocate capital in a way that grows it. And that the job of capitalists is to serve customers, deliver for shareholders and therefore deliver a profit what do you say to that uh i say what you get the end result is a world where all the money is at the very very top the top one percent and the society only serves that top one percent you know the reality today is that business has become the most powerful force in our society. Originally, the most powerful force was religion.

32:16And then the most powerful force came to be government, nation states. And today it's business. But the big difference is that those former most powerful forces had as their purpose to serve the benefit of the community. That's what religion is about. That's what government is supposed to be about. But business never had that as its purpose. So business is now the most powerful force and it operates only in its narrow self-interest without a concern for the effect on the society as a whole.

32:55Amol Rajan:But those who follow Adam Smith and who read his The Wealth of Nations, which goes back to 1776, the year that America was born, 250 years ago this year, would say that there's a particular kind of self-interest, which is enlightened self-interest. And that one of the consequences of successful capitalism is yes, even if those businesses are eventually about profits and growth, they only get that growth by delivering social goods. Yes, those guys make a lot of money, a few make a lot of money, but they do it by delivering for society. That's the capitalist defense of capitalism. What do you say to that?

33:30I say it's not enough. I say that's not the only way that you can run a business. You know, most people are buying products from businesses in spite of the values of the business. They don't really like corporations because they know that corporations only care about one thing, which is maximizing profits. So people have a lot more concerns than just getting a pair of sneakers overnight. and they care about social issues. And people spend a lot of time volunteering for various social service organizations. They donate money to it. What we've been brought up to believe is that it's not possible for business to act in the interest of the greater society and still make a profit.

34:22And what we've been brought up to believe is you deal with making money over there in the business world and you deal with your social concerns 180 degrees apart in the non-profit world. And all that happened at Ben & Jerry's was that we found that it is possible to combine those things. What we're doing is meeting another set of our customers' needs, the need to improve the quality of life for people, the need to make sure that our societies are equitable, that we don't have millions of people living in poverty, that people have enough to eat. You know, the amazing thing is that we didn't do it to sell ice cream, but it sure does sell ice cream.

35:10Amol Rajan:So that's a second argument against your position. And I say this, by the way, with tremendous respect for what you've achieved. We're about to get into this, what you've achieved over many, many decades, really over half a century of activism. But there's some people that say that it's all cynical. For instance, I interviewed, great pleasure to interview Greta Thunberg a few years ago, and she said that everyone wants to have a picture taken with Greta Thunberg because it makes them look like they're kind of pro-environmental because they're pictured alongside Greta Thunberg. Meanwhile, they're dumping pollution on the waters around Indonesia.

35:37Amol Rajan:Do you think that in some instances, an awful lot of ESG commitments, environmental and social good commitments or diversity commitments are just a kind of corporate window dressing and are just a way of actually, in the end, cynically trying to drive profits rather than do good in the world? You know, there's both. For a lot of companies, it's not a value of them. It's not a basic value. They're doing it because it's trendy or they're doing it because their shareholders are requiring it, but it's not something that they want to do. I mean, it's kind of like DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

36:16After the death, well, it was the murder of George Floyd, all these companies started saying, hey, we're going to hire more black people. We're going to, you know, loan to black people that we had previously been discriminating against.

36:32Amol Rajan:The one that got me was the number of companies that changed their social media avatar to a black square in this kind of, you know, 24 hours of cursory activism. By changing a little logo online. I just thought I thought that was a genuinely extraordinary thing. I thought it was actually quite a naive thing to do, if you like, that you would feel that you could dupe your customers by changing your logo for 24 hours and making a black tick or a black square or whatever. But huge numbers of people did that. Yeah, they did. And, you know, they hired these diversity officers and and then Trump comes into office and he says, D.E.I.

37:06bad. And they all got rid of their diversity programs. and it's because it's not part of their mission.

37:14Amol Rajan:See, the third principled objection, if I may say, to your position, is that some people will say, I scream, Ben, it ain't political. And I know you've had to deal with this for 50 years or more, but I'm going to put it to you anyway. There was a very famous, celebrated moment in British business a few years ago where one of Britain's most famous investors is a guy called Terry Smith, you know, big, big giant of the city and very successful investor. And he runs a fund called Fundsmith. And he had his, in 2022, he had his annual shareholder letter. And I think, ironically, it was about Unilever.

37:49Amol Rajan:He, I think, I don't want to misrepresent him here, but I think he was coming out of Unilever because he thought the company was being badly managed. And he wrote in his 2022 shareholder letter, which became a bit of a famous moment here in British business, a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellman's mayonnaise. has clearly lost the plot. And it was funny. A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellman's mayonnaise has clearly lost the plot. And he pointed out that Hellman's mayonnaise, a very famous mayonnaise brand, has been going since 1913. And he said the point of Hellman's mayonnaise is to make salads and sandwiches nicer.

38:23Amol Rajan:What do you say to that? I mean, obviously, you don't know the specifics of that circumstance, though it was about Unilever, which we're about to get to. What would you say to the people who say, the point of ice cream is to make nice ice cream. The point of mayonnaise is to make salads and sandwiches better. What I say is that you can do both. You can serve the needs of the community and make great ice cream or mayonnaise at the same time. And, you know, I mean, Jerry and I have always said, you know, we found a method of doing business that both serves the needs of the society and makes money.

38:59And that's the way we like doing business. Other companies, they don't really care about the needs of society. And if they want to do business like that, they can. But consumers can vote with their wallets. And do you want to support a company that doesn't really care and that is essentially part of the general economic machine that is shoving more and more dollars up to the top 1 %? Or do you want to buy from a company that is trying to solve some of these social problems? You know, that kind of gets to this issue of the independent board of directors. When Ben and Jerry's was acquired by Unilever, and I want to be clear that Jerry and I did not want the business sold.

39:53We wanted to keep it independent. But, you know, according to SEC rules, Unilever was offering so much money for the business that the board of directors had to recommend the sale.

40:05Amol Rajan:Is that so the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission in America, which is the regulator, right? That's correct. Was it in retrospect a mistake for you to cede financial control in that way that allowed your company, Ben & Jerry's for goodness sake, Ben, for Ben & Jerry's to have to lose Ben & Jerry's to Unilever?

40:23Yes. We thought that when we went public, we thought that we had legal, what they call poison pills that would prevent the company from getting acquired, but they didn't work. So, yeah, I would say that that was a mistake. But because Jerry and I were so resistant to the sale and because Unilever wanted it so much, they agreed to establish an independent board of directors for Ben and Jerry's. So they didn't buy a brand. They bought a company. And it was to be run as a wholly owned autonomous subsidiary that has its own board of directors. And that board of directors has legal authority over the social mission, the quality of the ice cream, the use of the trademark, and a few other things.

41:17And really, the only authority that Unilever has is over finance and operations. How does Magnum come into this picture? Maybe it was two years ago Unilever announced that it wanted to sell off their entire ice cream division. It's about 100 brands all around the world. So when that happened, Jerry and I went to them because we had been having conflicts with Unilever and said, well, as long as you're getting rid of your whole ice cream business, why don't you separate out Ben and Jerry's? so that we can get it sold to some socially aligned investors. And Unilever refused to do that. Eventually, what they did was they spun off their entire ice cream operation to the Magnum Corporation.

42:09So the Magnum Corporation is now the owner of Ben & Jerry's.

42:14Amol Rajan:I'm going to put to you in a moment what Magnum's saying. Just before I do that, I could see the sort of smile and the glint in your eye when you were talking about you and Jerry setting up this filling station nearly 50 odd years ago in Vermont, selling, you know, first you thought about bagels, but it turns out they were too expensive to make. It must be a source of sadness for you, you know, despite all the activism you do, and we're about to come on to what you're doing in Trump's America. It must be a source of sadness to you that the ice cream which you set up as a community-minded thing in Vermont 50 years ago has come to this.

42:48Ben and Jerry's, you know, doing stuff that hasn't been done before, going against the mainstream has always been a struggle. There have always been obstacles to overcome. When the business first got sold to Unilever, it was an incredibly difficult, depressing time of my life. But it's the joyful journey for justice. I mean, there are battles that you encounter. There are victories that you encounter and there are losses. I mean, it's an adventure. I mean, things go up, things go down. Some things work, some things don't. It's the journey, not the destination, right? Yes. There's this great

43:34Amol Rajan:Bob Dylan line where he says, I don't know if Bob Dylan was an influence on you, but Bob Dylan has this line where he says, the artist is always in a state of becoming. It's this sense of it's always, it's about the movement rather than where you get to. Let me put to you, if I may, Ben, what Magnum say. Magnum say, it's a Magnum Ice Cream Company statement. Not often I've read out statements from Magnum Ice Cream Company, but I do so with relish now. Recent steps to update Ben and Jerry's corporate governance are wholly aligned with the merger agreement and standard corporate governance across the organisation.

44:02Amol Rajan:Nothing more than that. Suggesting our actions are anything more is just not true. They are not and never have been. We remain committed to having a board led by an independent director to continue its role of helping guide the social mission and brand integrity alongside Ben & Jerry's CEO. You're smiling, but what of that do you disagree with? That it's not true. You know, the reason why Ben & Jerry's has become so successful is because of this independent board of directors, which has guided the company to become this international, global, billion-dollar brand. And the key to that is the independence of this board of directors.

44:48What Magnum did, I mean, as soon as Magnum became the owner of the company, they fired the CEO who had been a 30-year employee who worked himself all the way up from tour guide to the very top because he was abiding by the independent board, the direction of the independent board. And then they stopped meeting with the independent board. They refused to meet with the independent board and they claimed to have illegally removed all of the independent board members. Saying that they can appoint an independent director is kind of an oxymoron. The whole idea is that the board is independent of Magnum.

45:34Amol Rajan:So when they say that they're fully committed to Ben and Jerry's continued success and its three-part mission, economic, product and social, you just fundamentally think they're not? That's correct. Is your position now that you think, because you're a champion of ethical capitalism, are you saying to people who are listening to you now, who look up to you, don't buy Ben and Jerry's? Are you asking for a boycott of Magnum products? There's like 130 ,000 people that have signed this petition to ask Magnum to sell Ben & Jerry's to this group of socially aligned investors. You think that that's the way forward rather than a boycott of Magnum products?

46:15Well, first of all, when people first hear about it, they say, well, I should boycott Ben & Jerry's. And, you know, we've been saying, no, Ben & Jerry's is the victim here. If you do want to boycott something, other Magnum products, that would be the thing to stop buying in protest. You know, there's more and more people asking us to start a boycott. And we've been kind of resisting that, hoping that Magnum is going to see the light. But it's harder and harder to hold back that impetus. And, you know, my guess is that a boycott is going to happen at some time.

46:54Amol Rajan:Do you feel hopeful when you look at the Democratic Party today? You were a very senior figure in the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2020. Do you feel that at the national level, the Democrat Party is getting it? No, I don't think the Democratic Party is getting it. I think that there are a few politicians that end up running as Democrats that get it. You know, there's, of course, Bernie. There's Mamdani. There's a guy, Tallarico, in Texas, and a guy in Maine, Plattner, that are running on platforms that are about justice and running the country in a way that benefits the huge majority of people in the country instead of just the donors.

47:48I mean, the politicians in general in the country don't represent the people. They represent the money. That's a huge problem.

47:57Amol Rajan:Outside of Mandani, who's a very particular case in New York, or your friend Bernie Sanders, is the kind of politics which you espouse, given that i don't know if it was nearly 80 million people voted for donald trump in his second term is there an electoral winning strategy with the right leadership for the kind of liberal or more socialist politics which you would like to see in america can you become president on that platform i think you can you know it's it's interesting i was recently reading a book of quotes from Robert F. Kennedy called, Make Gentle the Life of This World. Looking at those quotes, what he was focused on was pretty much the issue of poverty and racism.

48:45It was beautiful to read what he was saying about how in our country we can't have people that are hungry, that we can't have people that can't afford a decent place to live. You know, he was running for president and as his campaign involved him visiting all these places of poverty. And so all the cameras came and, you know, reported on that and let the rest of Americans see how so many of their fellow Americans are living.

49:22Amol Rajan:So I have a weird thing, which is I'm obsessed with great political rhetoric and I spend the waking hours when I'm not feeding my children watching on YouTube videos of old speeches, people like Joel Halneru or Churchill or great reforming politicians in the post-war years. But I think possibly my favorite is the concession speech at the 1980 Democrat convention by Ted or Teddy Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's brother, of course, JFK's brother as well. And this was when he failed to become the Democrat candidate in 1980 to take on Ronald Reagan when Reagan got his first term. And he ended with the words, for those whose care has been our concern, something to the effect of the work goes on, the cause endures and the dream shall never die.

50:10Amol Rajan:And with that, he left the stage. I get emotional just thinking about it. It was one of the great speeches and it put poverty front and center. And I've always wondered why no one else tried to run on that ticket, putting poverty front and centre. And then Mamdani did it. And what's interesting is that Zoran Mamdani, when he started out, 1 % of people were voting for him and no one backed him. And he talked about affordability, very effective social media campaign. And he won. I mean, he actually won, which is a very, very striking thing. Can I ask you the final question? Advice to the future Ben Coens.

50:40Amol Rajan:I mean, you look, except for your crutches, you look very fit and healthy. You've got many years of activism ahead of you, thank goodness. But for people who are thinking about, I don't know, setting up their own company, for instance, or try to become entrepreneurs or ethical capitalists, what have you learned that you want future activists and founders and capitalists to know about how they can really bake ethical values into their corporate machines? I think that you need to make the values part of the mission of your company. The idea that there needs to be this separation between nonprofits and for-profits, I think is untrue.

51:23The reality is that you can make just as much money, maybe more, by serving those other needs of society at the same time that you're making whatever product or widget or service that you're providing. You know, businesses have advertising and marketing budgets and PR budgets. And the purpose of those things is to make customers feel good about your company. I think the reality is that just by serving the needs of society, by addressing social problems that people want addressed, what you create is this values alignment. this relationship with your customers based on shared values, that's the strongest possible relationship you can create with your customers.

52:22And it's very, very durable, you know, versus the advertising mode, which is, oh, let's come up with a funny ad, let's come up with a cute ad, let's come up with an emotional ad. And it gets the customer to laugh or to, you know, maybe, maybe feel good about the company, but it's ephemeral. It's not a deep connection. And shared values is an incredibly deep connection. And the other thing to understand is that you act on your values and not everybody agrees with it. You know, I've always said that there's no sense taking a stand on something if everybody already agrees with it. You don't need to take that stand.

53:12Business people, you know, traditional business people are always concerned, well, I'm going to offend somebody. You know, the reality is that your business is never going to get 100 % market share. You know, Ben and Jerry's might have 5 % of the population that consumes our products. That's enough. You know, that's a billion dollar corporation. That's amazing. So you're not going appeal to everybody but those people that you do appeal to have this incredibly strong connection

53:46Amol Rajan:with your brand it's this idea that people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it and they're going to be much more motivated by the why i mean it's both i mean yeah don't don't get me wrong yeah it's gotta be great ice cream it's not it's going to be otherwise people exactly um you know our customers are our listeners and they've sent in lots of questions which you're very kindly going to stick around for our bonus episode and answer. Before I put those questions to you, I just want to end with this. I mentioned at the beginning, there's a lot of despair around and I can sense that you feel some despair at what you see around the world, but what gives you hope?

54:21I'd say Mom Donnie and Bernie. And I think that people in general want to care about other people. People in general don't want to kill other people. I think What is absurd is that our leaders are saying that we can provide security for you by threatening to kill millions and millions of people and having lots and lots of wars. And that's going to create security. It's bullshit. There's enough money to go around. I mean, if we just used our money to meet people's basic needs, everybody would be taken care of. It's amazing. And that would be true security. Instead of this idea that, well, we need to take half of our expendable income and spend it on war and threatening to kill literally millions of people.

55:27and that's going to give you true security.

55:32Amol Rajan:Crazy. Ben Cohen, it is such a pleasure and a privilege talking to you. Thank you so much for giving us some of your very precious time. Great to be here with you, Amol.

55:48Amol Rajan:Look, as you may have noticed from the previous 49 guests, and Ben Cohen is, yeah, he's guest number 50, I'm a sucker for life stories and nostalgia And I do just think there is something incredibly romantic about these two mates from high school who are kind of basically hippie dropouts in their mid-20s who decide to buy a filling station, a gas filling station. That's what we would call a petrol station for about$6 ,000 in the mid-1970s. They were going to do bagels, but bagels are too expensive. Hence, they did ice cream. And I had no idea until I read the brilliant brief from Oscar for this conversation.

56:23Amol Rajan:Oscar, who's on the other side of the glass over there, that the reason Ben and Jerry's ice cream is so delicious is it's so full of contrasting textures. And the reason it's so full of contrasting textures is because Ben Cohen doesn't smell very well. And so for him, food is not about smell, which is a big part of taste. It's more about textures. And that's why we have fish food and chocolate fudge brownie and so on. I just think there's something quite sweet about that. But moving away from the sweetness, no pun intended, it was really interesting. Here's someone who's thought very hard, not just about capitalism, but about human history.

56:55Amol Rajan:And his idea that there were these three big stories that define, if you like, modern history. One was religion, God. Two is the nation state and government. And three is corporate power, business, money. And he argues that the first two were there because they wanted to give life meaning and serve the people. Nation states obviously took that to a terrible extreme in the 20th century. but that corporate profits and money are not about the people. They're about the owners. And I think that's an interesting story. I think that's an interesting, if you like, sort of third arc to modern history. Obviously, people who are defenders of capitalism and defenders of business would take very strongly against that.

57:35Amol Rajan:And they would say that the bigger the company, the more it's successfully served people and monetized their demand for certain things. But he has an interesting idea, Ben, which is that actually in the end, capitalism isn't serving the people. which serving an ever diminishing number of people. And it's just true to say that if you look at ownership in parts of this country, if you look at ownership in America, corporate profits are often, certainly big corporations, being concentrated in ever fewer hands. But it's really interesting that he has himself given up on the Democrat Party. And okay, I mean, I don't want to reduce Ben Cohen's complicated worldview to a single word of socialism or liberalism, but he's on the sort of left of the Democrat Party.

58:16Amol Rajan:He worked with and for Bernie Sanders. And though he takes great hope from Zoran Mamdani, he's someone who basically thinks the Democrat Party has abandoned the causes or the mission which he has espoused for 50 odd years. And what I would just put to him, which I think you heard there is, I'm not sure at the moment that there is a national figure in American politics or maybe maybe British politics who, through socialism, is able to achieve an electoral majority. That's, I guess, one of the questions that we're going to find out an answer to in the coming years. So whether you agree with his analysis of capitalism or not, I just think it's quite interesting that he sees the profit motive as the third of these three great narrative arcs, these three great stories, these three massive fictions, if you like, which motivate human endeavour.

59:06Amol Rajan:that is it for this episode I wasn't Ben Cohen interesting to make sure you don't miss future conversations including Ben Cohen answering your questions on Monday please do subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan and it will be Amol Rajan for the immediate future on BBC Sounds I'll speak to you very very soon thank you for your time and goodbye

59:32Amol Rajan:This is a nightmare. I need to get out of here because I do not want them to see me. A search across borders in some tricky situations. Shoot, there's a boat in the back of that car. Yeah, there is. No, no, no, don't get out. Watching smugglers who bring thousands of people to the UK. They have guns, they have knives. They have no shame. And at the top, a man who keeps his identity well hidden. If they know I'm talking about him, they come tonight, they will kill me. Pop, pop, pop, pop. Can we find out who he is? From Radio 4, this is Intrigue to Catch a King. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Live BBC Radio is now available on BBC.com and the BBC app.

1:00:17Amol Rajan:Get global perspectives, rich conversation, and immediate reaction to breaking news stories wherever you are. Listen to the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 stations 24-7. Visit bbc.com slash audio or download the BBC app to start listening.