Ben And Jerry's Essay

In this case we are introduced to an ice cream company named Ben & Jerry’s. Founded in 1978 in Vermont, this once small time ice cream shop has developed into one of the world’s largest ice cream producers with sales in excess of $237 million as of 2000. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield’s unique relationship has proved successful for the past 30 years in part because of their social consciousness and their down-to-earth attitudes.
This article is divided mainly into two parts; first the author summarizes the social consciousness of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade and how it has led to their success in their industry. Secondly the author goes into detail about the offers that have been made for the ice cream giant by numerous companies and investment
firms that were in the running to buy out Ben & Jerry’s Homemade.
We begin by discussing the social responsibility that Ben & Jerry’s has been known for over 30 years now.
Their three-part mission statement focuses on their product as well as the economic and social impact of their company, not only locally but also nationally and internationally. It becomes apparent that founders Cohen and Greenfield worry about more than just their bottom line. In an interview Cohen was quoted as being indifferent about the company’s stock prices and how the market had treated Ben & Jerry’s as a whole: “I think the stock market goes up and down, unrelated to how a company is doing” (Bruner 43). This laid back attitude describes Cohen and Greenfield’s philosophy in a nutshell. It seems that they believe if you run a business efficiently and ethically, profits and success will soon follow. This has certainly been the case in spite of all the money the company donates and gives back to the respective communities in which the businesses thrive. They use cause-related marketing to show consumers that what they are doing during the production of their product is helping reduce their impact on the environment. It is one thing to “greenwash” and act as if the company really values these environmental issues, but according to this article Ben & Jerry’s Homemade has really taken these issues to
heart.
The second part of the article focuses on the tender offers made to purchase Ben & Jerry’s Homemade. The article describes four main players in the potential purchase of the ice cream company. Included are Dreyer’s-Grand, Unilever, Meadowbrook Lane Capital and Chartwell Investments. Althought the article does not say if any of these proposed deals panned out, it did go into detail about some of the numbers in the deals. At the time of the offers Ben & Jerry’s Homemade was selling for about $21/share. Offers ranged from a $31/share stock purchase to a $36/share cash buyout, both well over the $21/share that the shares were selling for before the offer announcement. We are left with a scene of Henry Morgan, a member of the board of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, during his flight to Vermont for a board meeting to discuss the future of the company. In the meeting the board of directors would undoubtedly decide the fate of the independent company and try to figure out if accepting one of these offers would in fact create shareholder value which the company had not previously been doing according to their average return on shareholder’s equity.