Ben & Jerry's Started With a $5 Course

In 1978 Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield had been friends since junior high school, and they decided to go into business together making food. By several accounts their first idea was a bagel business. They chose ice cream instead.

They did not know how to make it. So, CNBC reports, they split the cost of a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making from Penn State.

1978: The gas station

They wanted a college town with no ice cream shop. Most of the warm college towns already had one. Burlington, Vermont, home of the University of Vermont, did not, so they went there despite its long, cold winters.

They put together $12,000, of which $4,000 was borrowed. According to CNBC, each founder put in $4,000, with Cohen getting $2,000 of his share from his father, and they took a $4,000 loan from the bank. On May 5, 1978, they opened their first shop in a renovated gas station in downtown Burlington.

The first winter was hard. When spring came, they celebrated the shop’s first anniversary by giving every customer a free scoop, a tradition the company still keeps.

In 1980 they rented space in an old spool and bobbin mill in Burlington and began packing their ice cream in pints. In 1981 the first franchised Ben & Jerry’s opened in Shelburne, Vermont.

1984: Shares for Vermonters

Growth needed a factory, and a factory needed money. The usual route was to sell a stake to investors. Cohen wanted something else.

In 1984 the company sold shares in an offering open only to residents of Vermont, using a little-known clause in the state’s securities law. According to an excerpt from Ice Cream Social, a history of the company, the minimum purchase was 12 shares at $10.50 each: $126. By the time it was done, nearly 1% of Vermont households owned part of Ben & Jerry’s. The offering let Cohen raise the money he needed while keeping firm control of the company.

The same year, Häagen-Dazs tried to limit Ben & Jerry’s distribution in Boston. Ben & Jerry’s sued its parent company, Pillsbury, and turned the fight into a campaign that asked “What’s the Doughboy afraid of?” The publicity helped the small company far more than it helped the large one.

In 1985 the new factory opened in Waterbury, Vermont. The founders also set up the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and committed 7.5% of the company’s pre-tax profits to it. In 1988 President Reagan named them U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year.

2000: The $326 million sale

By the late 1990s Ben & Jerry’s was a public company with sales across the country, and its shares were available to anyone. That made it a target.

In early 2000 several suitors circled. CNN reported that Dreyer’s had been rumored to be preparing an offer of about $270 million, and that a group led by Cohen had bid $38 a share to take the company private before withdrawing. Then Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company, made its move.

On April 12, 2000, Ben & Jerry’s board approved Unilever’s offer of $43.60 a share in cash for all 8.4 million shares on a fully diluted basis. The deal valued the company at $326 million. Ben & Jerry’s had had sales of $237 million in 1999.

The founders made clear in the announcement that they would have preferred to stay independent. As part of the deal, Unilever agreed to keep Ben & Jerry’s run separately from its other American ice cream brands, with its own independent board, and said its social mission would be well funded. On August 3, 2000, Ben & Jerry’s became a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever.

Ben & Jerry’s today

The relationship has not been easy. In December 2025 Unilever spun off its ice cream business as a separate listed company, The Magnum Ice Cream Company, and Ben & Jerry’s went with it. Sky News reported at the listing that Ben & Jerry’s accounts for about 14% of the new company’s revenue, and that Magnum has refused the co-founders’ repeated demands to sell the brand back. Jerry Greenfield resigned from the company in September 2025 in protest.

A business started with $12,000 and a $5 course now has annual revenue of about 1.1 billion euros, according to Reuters. Its founders no longer own it.

What the record shows

• Skill can be bought cheaply. The founders split a $5 course and learned the rest on the job.
• Pick the market first. They chose Burlington because it was a college town without an ice cream shop.
• Customers can be investors. The Vermont-only offering raised money for a factory while keeping control with the founders.
• Public companies can be sold. Once the shares traded freely, a high enough offer could not be ignored, whatever the founders wanted.

Other founders in this archive started with similarly small sums. Nike began with $1,000 and Spanx with $5,000. The full list is in Famous Companies Started With Little Money.