With great fanfare in 1989, Ben & Jerry's cofounder Ben Cohen created Community Products Inc., a company that was designed to help save the rain forest and to benefit other worthy causes. But it would all go very wrong.
Irv Deutsch landed a production job at the Ben & Jerry's ice-cream factory in Waterbury, Vt., in September 1988 at $7.40 an hour. One of Deutsch's early memories was of a companywide meeting during which cofounder Ben Cohen exhorted his workers to embrace the company's social mission. Deutsch recalls that Cohen was running into "a lot of negative sentiment" on the subject from both his board and his employees. In their minds, making money and fomenting social change didn't always mix.
Deutsch scribbled a note in response to Cohen's speech and placed it in the company's suggestion box. He reminded Cohen of the work of legendary psychologist Abraham Maslow, best remembered for his theory of a "hierarchy of needs," which holds that people must first secure the basics of food, clothing, and shelter before they can grapple with the larger questions of life. It was nice to talk about solving the world's problems, but what about the everyday concerns facing many of Ben & Jerry's workers? After all, Cohen was a multimillionaire businessman and Vermont transplant with a lengthy social agenda. His workers dwelt in the other Vermont of low wages and long winters, hidden behind the state's pastoral facade of green hills and white clapboard. With that in mind, Deutsch added this postscript: "Charity begins at home, so leave it in my mailbox."
Cohen, in a sense, called Deutsch's bluff when he picked him to be the first employee at Community Products Inc. (CPI), which Cohen founded in the summer of 1989. CPI was Cohen's new creation, his effort to push the social-responsibility envelope in even more radical ways. It would be a force for progressive change--one of its paramount goals was helping to save the Amazon rain forest--but it would also be a for-profit business. Most startling of all, Cohen ordained that CPI would donate an astounding 60% of its profits to progressive causes, and another 10% would be shared by employees. CPI would import nuts harvested from the rain forest by native cooperatives in the Amazon basin. In so doing it would aid the cause of low-impact agriculture, sustain local economies, and ultimately help preserve the rain forest. From those nuts CPI would make a nut brittle candy. Some of its production would be sold in specialty stores, and some would be sold to Ben & Jerry's as an ingredient for a new flavor of ice cream, Rainforest Crunch.
The company and its daring philosophy gave CPI instant cachet--and headline writers ample license. "Going Nuts--Rich, Buttery Brazils and Cashews Bring Crunch to Delectable Foods--And Help Save Rain Forests," chimed a headline in the Seattle Times. "Rainforest Crunch: a Sweet Way to Help Environment," echoed the Orange County Register. And the lead-in to a Journal of Commerce story caught the prevailing excitement about Cohen's new venture: "In mixing Amazon philanthropy with capitalism, Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., of Waterbury, Vt., has, as the old expression goes, 'Gone to do good and done well." Not until years later would it become jarringly apparent that Ben Cohen's aspirations far exceeded his patience with, and sense of commitment to, CPI. His pledge, however noble it may have sounded, would carry a hollow ring.
Genesis at Greenpeace Party
By the time Ben Cohen tapped Irv Deutsch to get CPI up and running, Cohen was already an entrepreneurial legend. A 1960s-era college dropout, Cohen bummed around for years, holding an assortment of jobs from pottery teacher to security guard. Then, in 1978, at age 28, he found his calling. That year he and a boyhood friend, Jerry Greenfield, started Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc. in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt. Funky and irreverent, Ben & Jerry's institutionalized the state of being different. While most CEOs worried about the bottom line, Cohen and Greenfield cared about causes like saving the family farm and keeping French nuclear testing out of the South Pacific. While most CEOs were intent on maximizing shareholder value, Cohen and Greenfield donated 7.5% of their pretax profits to a variety of progressive causes.
By dint of their maverick ways, the two hit a public-relations gusher, garnering a volume and intensity of adoring press that companies 10 times the size of Ben & Jerry's could only envy. The coverage elevated Cohen, in particular, to near-rock-star status. He played the role well, whether he was onstage at the Lollapalooza Festival throwing Peace Pops into the crowd or pressing the flesh with shareholders at the company's annual meetings, which ran for two or three days. Cohen, more than Greenfield, embodied the company's marketing flair. It was his genius for creating news that made Ben & Jerry's synonymous with everything green and clean, a corporate darling of the left.
And yet he and Greenfield also managed to take care of business, building a national franchise to $174 million in sales last year, spread across 15 countries. That earned them kudos from more mainstream quarters as well. In 1988, no less an ideological alter ego than Ronald Reagan awarded medals to Cohen and Greenfield, anointing them small-business men of the year at a White House ceremony. For that event, Cohen departed from his casual dress code and borrowed a jacket at the last minute from a waiter at his hotel.
The genesis of CPI was as serendipitous and inspired as that of Ben & Jerry's, occurring after Ben Cohen met Jason Clay in 1989 at a Greenpeace party (following a Grateful Dead concert), where Clay was promoting rain-forest preservation. The rain-forest cause was hot back then, attracting the star power of other rock notables such as Madonna and Sting. Clay, Cohen sensed, was a man in the right place at the right time. He could do business with him. As the director of Cultural Survival Enterprises, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Mass., Clay worked with indigenous groups in Third World countries to establish markets for their products in the developed world.
