Ben Cohen (businessman)
| Ben Cohen | |
|---|---|
Ben Cohen in 2010
|
|
| Born |
Bennett Cohen March 18, 1951 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Co-founder of Ben & Jerry's |
Bennett "Ben" Cohen (born March 18, 1951) is an American businessman, activist, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's.
Raised in the town of Merrick on Long Island, by Jewish parents Frances and Irving, Cohen first met and befriended his future business partner Jerry Greenfield in a seventh grade high school gym class in 1963. In his senior year, Cohen found work as an ice cream man before heading off to attend Colgate University upstate.
Over the next decade, Cohen pursued his interest in pottery as he mixed further education - Skidmore, the University Without Walls program, the New School, and NYU - with a vast variety of menial labor - gigs as a McDonald's cashier, a Pinkerton guard, deliverer of pottery wheels, a mop-boy at Jamesway and Friendly's, an assistant superintendent, an ER clerk, and a taxi driver - before eventually settling on work as a craft teacher at a private school for emotionally disturbed adolescents. It was during his three years at the Highland Community School that he began experimenting with making his own ice cream.
Around 1977, Ben had decided to go into the food business with his old friend Jerry Greenfield, and in May of the next year, the two men opened Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream Parlor in Burlington, Vermont. The pair conceived the idea in gym class at Merrick Avenue Middle School. They had initially intended to start a bagel business, but found the equipment costs prohibitive and switched to ice cream instead, choosing Burlington as a location because it was a prominent college town which lacked an ice cream shop. In part, their distinctive style of ice cream was developed to compensate for Ben's anosmia - his loss of smell and near-loss of taste - as Ben kept adding larger and larger chunks to the ice cream to satisfy his need for texture in food.
...
Wikipedia