US Edition 
Jerry Greenfield remembers starting an ice cream business in 1980
Jerry Greenfield, the co-founder of Ben and Jerry's, recalls being broke and not paying bills when he started his ice cream business with his friend Ben Cohen.
Ben and I met in gym class when we were 13. We were the two smallest, fattest kids in the class, which creates a certain bond, and we became best friends. We both intended to do jobs that help people. Ben [Cohen] was working in a residential school for emotionally disturbed adolescents, and I was trying to get into medical school, but I failed twice. So in 1978, when we were 29 years old, we decided we were going to start a food business instead. We picked ice cream because homemade ice cream was coming back into fashion and it was cheap to make. We took a correspondence course in ice cream making, which cost $5 – Ben and I were so broke that we split it between us – and set up a shop, which you can see in the picture, in an old gas station in Burlington, Vermont. I notice that in the photo we’re sitting underneath an umbrella that’s askew, and I think that’s so typical of the homemade aspect of Ben & Jerry’s. Nothing we did was very straight.
Ben would make crepes and salad and I would make the ice cream. We had a machine that did five gallons at a time, and I started with traditional flavours such as chocolate, strawberry and coffee. One of the biggest secrets of Ben & Jerry’s is that Ben can’t really taste, so our ice cream was very strongly flavoured with big chunks of cookies and candy, because he was interested in texture.
You can see from the picture that we looked a bit hippyish, although we worked hard. Our vision was to have a store that was central to the community around it – we would serve them. We showed free outdoor movies, gave away a lot of ice cream and sponsored local festivals, and over time we realised that we could use the power of business to try to address social issues – recently the company has been outspoken in favour of gay marriage equality. When we came up with the idea of putting chunks of brownies in our ice creams we decided to use a bakery in New York that works with unemployed and homeless people, and we still use them.
But for all our ideals we weren’t great business people. Ben and I had an agreement that because we were the bosses we didn’t have to do jobs we didn’t want to do. But neither of us wanted to pay bills, so for two months they mounted up and we had to close down. We managed to reopen in 1980 – the year of this picture – and this time made it work. It’s quite shocking to us that the company has been as successful as it has been. We’re celebrating our 35th anniversary this year, and the people who knew us at the time of this picture are probably even more shocked than we are.