What is Ben Cohen’s net worth and salary?
Ben Cohen is an American businessman, activist, and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $150 million. Cohen is best known for being the co-founder (with Jerry Greenfield) of Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company. They started Ben & Jerry’s with $8,000 in savings and a $4,000 bank loan. Since opening its first store in the late 1970s, Ben & Jerry’s has expanded to more than 600 stores. Today, Ben & Jerry’s earns nearly $700 million annually. In 2000, the company was bought by the food giant Unilever for $326 million. At that point, annual profits were $237 million.
Cohen resigned as the company’s CEO in 1996 and has not been actively involved with Ben & Jerry’s since it was acquired by Unilever in 2000 for $326 million. He is involved with the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, a social justice organization created “to fund organizations here in Vermont and across the country that work for progressive social change.” In 1988, Ben and Jerry was named the Best Small Entrepreneur in the United States by the US Small Business Administration, and in 2000, the New York Open Center honored Cohen for “his leadership in socially responsible entrepreneurship”. Ben and Jerry have published “Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book” (1987) and “Ben & Jerry’s Double Dip: How to Run a Values Led Business and Make Money Too” (1997).
previous life
Ben Cohen was born Bennett Cohen on March 18, 1951 in New York City. He was raised in a Jewish home in Merrick, New York, with his mother, Frances, and father, Irving (an accountant), and attended summer camp at Back Rock Performance and Creative Arts Camp in Connecticut. Ben met Jerry Greenfield in the gym class in the seventh grade, both of whom attended Sanford H. Calhoun High School. As a senior, Cohen worked as an ice cream man. After graduating from high school, Ben attended Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, but dropped out in 1972, and Greenfield later moved to live with him. Cohen found work as a taxi driver, McDonald’s cashier, emergency attendant, and Pinkerton bouncer before taking a job as a craft teacher at Highland Community School. Around this time, he began learning how to make ice cream, and in 1978, Ben and Jerry took an ice cream making course at Penn State University.
career path career path
Cohen and Greenfield opened Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor in May 1978. Their first location was in Burlington, Vermont, a college town that did not have an ice cream shop. They initially wanted to open a baking shop together, but after realizing that the equipment was too expensive, they decided to focus on ice cream instead. Cohen and Greenfield each put in $4,000 to start the business, and they also took out a $4,000 bank loan. In 1980, Ben & Jerry’s began selling pints of ice cream in grocery stores, and by 1987, the company was valued at $30 million. The first Ben & Jerry store opened in 1981 in Shelburne, Vermont, and as of 2019, there were 615 Ben & Jerry locations. Best known for flavors like Cherry Garcia, Half Baked, Chunky Monkey, Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream, and Phish Food, the company uses non-GMO, fair trade certified ingredients and from certified animal-free farms. In 2021, Cohen spoke to “Delish” about Ben & Jerry’s dedication to the business, saying, “The traditional business model is to screw up the consumer, spend a lot of money on advertising and PR to make yourself look good and move on. Ben & Jerry just says, “Instead of spending a lot of money trying to make ourselves look good, let’s just… be good.” We get it so people buy ice cream and enjoy it more because they agree with the values of the people who make it. There is no relationship. Really stronger.”
Alex Wong / Getty Images
personal life
Ben is passionate about philanthropy and social causes, and the Ben & Jerry Foundation has supported organizations such as the Denver Homeless Out Loud, The Anti Displacement Project, and The Street Vendor Project. Cohen oversaw the nonprofit organization Business Leaders for Reasonable Priorities and the progressive advocacy group TrueMajority, and supported Democratic presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards and Barack Obama. In 2012, Ben co-founded the Stampede Stampede campaign to get money out of politics, and in 2016, he and Jerry were arrested at a Democracy Awakening rally in Washington, DC. After the arrest, Ben & Jerry released the following statement: “Jerry, Ben and hundreds of others felt they had to do more, once the rallies and speeches were over. As Ben said, there is a strong legacy of work in this country…sometimes, when something Really important, you have to put your body to the test. You have to take a stand.”
In July 2021, the duo announced that they supported a boycott of ice cream sales in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank. During the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Cohen became an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders, and in January of that year released an ice cream called Bernie’s Earning under his own label, Bean’s Best. He released another Bernie-inspired flavor, Bernie Buck, in 2019, which was awarded to 40 competition winners rather than sold in stores. Since childhood, Ben has suffered from a loss of smell, which has limited his taste and smell, and in a 2021 interview with “Delish,” he said, “When Jerry and I first started making flavors [in the 1970s]He was giving me something to taste. He would say, “Well, how do you like that?” I said: It’s good. But I can’t decide on the flavour. So he was going to keep adding more flavors so I can guess.”
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