Growing up in a low-income family in Jackson Heights, Queens, Jeff Furman never intended to manage one of the biggest ice cream companies in the world. After dropping out of an engineering program at Cornell University, he enrolled in NYU, finished an undergraduate accounting degree, and finally graduated from NYU School of Law in 1968.
He met Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen while working as a bus driver at a school for struggling teens after graduating from NYU. Cohen recruited Furman as a legal expert at the ice cream company. Furman served on the corporate board for over 40 years, providing legal advice, management tips and social initiatives.
Despite the company’s vast commercial success, Furman left Ben & Jerry’s and continued his passion for social causes after stepping down in 2018. At 82 years old, Furman has been serving at the Oakland Institute which works to defend environmental rights for small farmers, indigenous communities and individuals who live in heavily forested areas.
In an interview with WSN, Furman shared his experience in helping to build Ben & Jerry’s and how his friendship with the founders catapulted the company to success.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: What was the biggest challenge you faced while managing the company?
Furman: The biggest sort of challenge was to figure out what we were. We had crazy ideas and it would never work — and we didn’t care. It was sitting around with friends and really running your business from your heart. The bigger we got, it got even more complicated to do. It got more formal and we had to have a general manager and get money to build a plant, the pressure of stockholders and everything else. But we were straight-up about what we were doing, what kind of company we wanted to be.
In the early years of Ben & Jerry’s, the company was a small shop selling ice cream to Vermont locals. As their products got more popular, the company tried raising money through a public offering of stock, but quickly realized it was not a viable long-term solution. In 1984, they became “customer-owned” as a publicly listed company exclusively available to Vermonters.
When the company was sold to Unilever in 2000, Furman said that the Ben & Jerry’s board was able to ensure a list of promises that would preserve the company’s founding values. These included respect for workers’ fair wages by ensuring that the top salary never exceeded five times the lowest paid salary.
Furman said that he was inspired to propose this salary ratio after seeing a company in Spain implementing a similar policy. Furman vowed at the time to take legal action if Unilever did not follow this rule.
WSN: How did you balance between selling the company and maintaining its founding values?
Furman: That was something that was important for me. Every year, when you raise the starting wage, you have to raise the people who’ve been there for a year. We’re very clear that the reason that Ben and Jerry’s became so financially successful was because of the social mission. We weren’t interested in just making this money, and this wasn’t some kind of marketing thing.
Throughout the years, Ben & Jerry’s launched several social justice initiatives. This prominently included 1% for Peace in 1988, which advocated for the partial redirection of national defense funds to go towards peace-related activities. Ben & Jerry’s later created a Peace Pop ice cream whose sales would also contribute to those funds. In 1985, the company also established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, and allocates 7.5% of annual profits towards philanthropic causes.
Despite the pressure for the company’s board of directors to put profits first, Furman consistently went against industry standards in order to help Ben & Jerry’s stay loyal to its B-Corp status — meaning a focus on corporate responsibility and giving back.
WSN: What would you like to say to young people who aspire to start their own business?
Furman: All I can tell you is working from your heart. If you’re clear on what you want as a human being and what the issues are in your life, you have to try to follow them. If you have that kind of passion for something, you have to tolerate that sometimes it might not be working out, but that’s who you are and you’re stuck with it.
There was no planning to be this multibillion-dollar ice cream company. We both agreed that we’re gonna have fun and that we’re gonna run it not like business people. Fun and smiles are as important as your latest month’s sales numbers. You have to love the process of what you’re doing.
Contact Kaitlyn Sze Tu at [email protected].
