News Release

CHAPEL HILL -- Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., will speak on social responsibility and radical business philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School Oct. 21 at 5:30 p.m.

The talk will be held in the Maurice J. Koury Auditorium and kicks off the Dean’s Speaker Series, which is funded in part by the Archie K. Davis Endowment. The series annually brings business executives to Kenan-Flagler for talks that are free to the community.

An ice cream reception will follow the Greenfield lecture in the Loudermilk Foyer of Koury Auditorium.

To R.S.V.P. to the Greenfield lecture, call (919) 843-7787 or e-mail kfbsrsvp@kenan-flagler.unc.edu. Parking will be available in the business school deck.

Greenfield also will give the keynote address for the 2004 Undergraduate Business Symposium, an annual highlight of Kenan-Flagler’s undergraduate program, on Oct. 22.

Greenfield and his longtime friend and business partner Ben Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade storefront ice cream parlor in May 1978. They since have built the business into a $160 million publicly held ice cream empire. In 2000, consumer products giant Unilever purchased Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.

The founders attribute this growth to the company’s focus on social responsibility and creative management, making Ben & Jerry’s Homemade one of the most talked-about and least conventional success stories in American business. 

  With his best-selling book, "Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip: Lead with Your Values and Make Money, Too" (co-written with Cohen), Greenfield created both a nuts-and-bolts guidebook to the promise and pitfalls of values-led business and a wake-up call about the growing international influence of the socially conscious or mission-driven corporation.

Greenfield got his first taste of the ice cream industry when he took a job as a scooper in Oberlin College’s cafeteria. After graduation, he worked as a lab technician in New York and lived with Cohen in an apartment on East 10th Street. In 1977, with Greenfield tired of his occupation as lab tech, the two friends decided to fulfill a dream they both shared – running a food business together. The two settled on ice cream and, after a bit of research (and a $5 Penn State correspondence course in ice cream-making), opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade ice cream parlor in Burlington, Vt.

Greenfield and Cohen soon became known throughout Vermont for their ice cream’s rich, unusual flavors and their own community-oriented approach to business. They sponsored a fall festival and a free outdoor movie festival and celebrated their anniversaries with a Free Cone Day.

For information on upcoming speakers, visit http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/News/Events/index.cfm.

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Kenan-Flagler contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-8951 or spurrk@unc.edu