MFM Mini - How Ben & Jerry’s Turned Misfortune Into Fortune

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
I was at an event once, and Ben, I think it was Ben, Ben from Ben & Jerry's was there. And he was talking about the story of Ben & Jerry's, you know, the ice cream brand. And he was talking about the beginning. All right, so I have a bunch of notes from it, because I had never heard this anywhere. So let's rewind the clock, 1978 You know, a gallon of gasoline is like 79 cents, a pound of bacon is $1.20. Kobe Bryant is born, it's 1978 You know, ultrasounds are used for the first time. You know, tweets were just a sound that birds used. And this is when an ice cream revolution was born. All right, so here's the story of Ben & Jerry's, as told to me by Ben himself. And okay, so these two guys became friends back in school. He told the story, he's like, it was PE class, and everybody had to like, you know, run the mile. And he's like, I was a terrible runner. And so, you know, this was sort of like a daily ritual of humiliation for me. I would just be at the very back while everybody else ran way further ahead. But so was Jerry, Jerry was there too. And that was like where they formed their bond was just walking behind a whole bunch of other people running. And so they became friends kind of like in their teens or whatever. And they got reunited because Jerry was trying to apply for medical school. And I think it was rejected like 20 times from applying to medical school. And every time you apply, you have to wait like another cycle to reapply. And so in between cycles, he reconnects with Ben. And these two guys basically said they have nothing in common except for they both worked as ice cream scoopers while in school to earn a little bit of money.
And so even though they're ice cream scoopers, they knew nothing about ice cream.
But they decided like, what if we opened up an ice cream shop? Our own ice cream shop instead of med school. And so they enrolled in a class called ice cream making. It was a correspondence course at Penn State. It was $5 to attend the course. And by the way, they didn't even order two seats. They bought one, they split the bill, 250 each. And that was the only formal training that these guys ever had before building like a multi-billion dollar brand of ice cream. So like any entrepreneurs, they get started, they make their fair share of mistakes. So they get 12 grand from kind of friends and family-ish, and they buy an ice cream shop in Vermont. But it's the middle of winter and it's Vermont, and so it's freezing cold. So nobody wants ice cream.
So they open up and nobody's coming in.
And so they start brainstorming. And this is where their real genius is in the marketing. And so they create this campaign called APOPCDBZWE. This is a long acronym. What does this stand for? It's stood for a penny off per Celsius degree below zero winter extravaganza, right? So for every degree below zero, you would get a penny off your ice cream. And it was just sort of this goofy marketing campaign that kind of spread a little word of mouth. And it was just enough to get them through the winter season.
But that still didn't make it, of course. It got a little bit warmer, but their equipment was shitty. Sales were slow and most of the ice cream was just melting in the shop basically every day.
And so they needed to come up with a plan. And so Ben said, you know what? Ben loved to drive. That was like his favorite thing. Get in a car, drive, pop the cassette player in and listen to music and drive. And so he said, look, give me some of the ice cream. I'll go sell our melting ice cream to restaurants and convenience stores nearby. I'll just put them in little pint jars or whatever and I'll sell the ice cream by the pint if you can see where this is going. And so, and that demand was actually pretty high. So nobody wanted to come to their shop, but restaurants wanted their ice cream. They liked it.