Blood on the Carpet: Ice Cream Wars [BBC, 1999]

Dennis Hurley is in one of the meanest businesses on earth welcome to the jungle the ice cream business you on the outside it's fun it's it's ice cream you know everybody loves ice cream it's sweet it's kids it's happiness the reality of the business sign of ice cream is it's one of the dirtiest businesses there is his family created the mighty haagen-dazs the biggest luxury ice cream in the world his father Kevin ran the company Haagen Dazs was a steamroller it was just going and what was in its path it took care of when two hippy ice cream makers tried to take on the might of the Empire they were sucked into a David and Goliath battle for survival I think what haagen-dazs was trying to do was illegal and the question was would a small company like Ben & Jerry's be able to fight that so war this isn't about friendships it's not about respect you know what respect to the guys who ultimately win the upstarts met at school 35 years ago in New York Ben and I were not really in the mainstream of social activities in school we were not cool kids we were the nerdy kids after school they grew beards moved into an apartment with their dog Malcolm and got a succession of dead-end jobs uh I think we were the only two of our friends that did not appear to be getting anywhere in the world so to speak so I thought well maybe I could try starting my own business and maybe I could do a jury united by a love of food the hippies agreed the best conceivable business was one that involves a great deal of eating the two big things that were happening in food at the time were homemade ice cream and bagels we actually went to a used restaurant supply place and priced out equipment for making bagels and it was $40,000 and we knew that was more money that we had so we figured ice cream had to be cheaper we picked ice cream they sent off for a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making then turned an abandoned petrol station in Burlington Vermont into the town's first homemade ice cream parlor Ben and Jerry's was born Ben and I were working there all the time and people obviously figured out who we were and I think people liked the ice cream and they liked the idea that you know these were two regular guys opening up a little store and they wanted to support what we were doing so everybody came the shop was a surprise hit and became the hang out of every fun-loving eccentric in town it even had his own resident blues piano man Don rose Oh st. Paul Street off-ramp I Benin J's was on the corner st. Paul Street overpass I was just the funkiest ice cream shop I ever been in that's for sure Ben and Jerry was just you know all smiles and the ice cream was great the people that work there are great you had the smell of the big cattle of hot fudge just smoldering away there behind the counter and it's just the smells were just enough to put you in heaven Ben and Jerry made every day one big party and when today I'm gonna say master rusong the key was their unique ice cream in a world of boring old chocolate coffee and vanilla Ben and Jerry made weird flavors with lumps in nearly everything they laid their hands on wound up in the ice cream yes look at this Oh a giant salami they were the original ice cream anarchists good united by an unwavering devotion to the chunk that's a huge chunk I mean you know you put that in in your mouth you know in a teaspoon and you know you got a significant percentage of the volume occupied by the teaspoon that that is not and um you know as opposed to you know this kind of [ __ ] you know I mean this is absurd I mean ice cream companies put this in ice cream and they call it pecan no you need a big mother become how's that that first spectacular summer Burlington went Chunk crazy there was just one crucial floor in their business plan it's damn cold we're in Burlington Vermont and uh sure enough come the winter nobody was buying our ice cream we started selling to some local restaurants to try to survive and then after we bought a truck it was costing us more money to repair this old truck that we bought then we were making selling ice cream that was a really rough time bankruptcy loomed they managed to stay alive that winter by selling tubs of ice cream through local grocery stores but to be a real commercial success they'd have to start selling outside their home state all we were thinking about was what we needed to do to keep things going we had virtually no money uh I I became the salesperson for the the company and my task was to sell our ice cream to independent ice cream distributors in the neighboring states Ben and Jerry were about to feel the chill of business reality lesson number one big supermarket chains don't buy ice cream from hippies straight out of the back of pickup trucks they use a handful of specialist distributors to get onto the shelves Ben and Jerry would have to enlist the support of a middleman most distributors would view an untried product like theirs as a commercial gamble if they couldn't be persuaded to see things differently Ben and Jerry's dreams of expansion would just melt away top of their hit list was leading distributor Dennis silver one day I get to the yard loses character and the windows were all fogged up and I stop and I say jeez what's that car doing here I come into my office and later on that morning Ben Cohen shows up and he looked like he just gotten out of bed and slept in his clothes and so forth and he sat in front of me and I said jeez Ben how long you been here he said well a little while I has out my car I said was that your car out there that was all frosted up yeah that was my car he says uh I arrived here middle of night four o'clock and one and the cheapest hotel I could find so uh I just kind of went to sleep and uh I woke up when I got real cold I'd would drive there at night and get to the distributor's place and sleep in my car until until the you know until my appointment the next morning one middle man wouldn't be enough they also needed to bag the other key New England distributor Chuck green the way Ben walked in the door when you look from a standpoint of who you'd buy ice cream from or a food product Ben just didn't connote food it connote that he ate a ton of food but not that he could sell food successfully he sat in my office and after a few minutes you've got very comfortable and put his feet up on my desk and he was wearing tennis sneakers he said uh get me coffee or anything like that you know I haven't eaten in about eight or ten hours and then you know like to eat and we had he consumed quite a bit in this little kitchen that we had and he said I'm not quite ready to see Adam gonna eat a little bit and even in our environment Ben was calling the shots but Chuck and Dennis fell for Ben's charm and his chunks Ben and Jerry's became the latest entrance into the so called super premium ice cream category a market dominated by one company with more than a 70% share of all super premium sales the undisputed king of luxury ice cream was haagen-dazs Kevin Hurley was the president of haagen-dazs I had a woman telling me that it was better than sex with her husband I had another woman telling me that she knew how Haagen Dazs came to the United States that she had heard that Frank Sinatra brought it to the United States I mean you couldn't argue with these people if you would if you say to them look let me tell you the the real story they wouldn't accept that haagen-dazs was the brainchild of Kevin's father-in-law Reuben Mathers in 1959 he created an ice cream in his New York Factory that sounded like it came from much further afield Reuben always used to say you want someone to notice you take a salami and put it under your rump you know that was one of his people mark be different he always liked the Danes he loves the Danish people you know he says and I'm gonna give us I'm gonna put the Danish flag on there you know something foreign he says if I put something foreign in the ice-cream cabinet and people look at it they'll say what's that and he did by 1984 haagen-dazs had become a subsidiary of Pillsbury a gigantic food conglomerate that owned a slate of successful companies including Green Giant and Burger King Pillsbury at the time was a four billion dollar company big we didn't really talk about billions in those days by comparison Ben and Jerry were a tiny blip but they were now growing outside Vermont and were planning on moving to a new much larger factory then out of the blue their distributors received a fateful phone call Haagen Dazs gave me a call and some were in 1984 spring of 84 and suggested at that time that it was time for me to make a decision as to which product line I was gonna carry do you want to carry haagen-dazs what do you want to carry Ben and Jerry's we said it's us for that exactly right we said it's Oscar then mm-hmm we felt we needed a commitment from the distributor we were just stunned at this comment coming from haagen-dazs this huge company where we were selling trailer loads of ice cream versus this miniscule amount of Ben and Jerry's we were selling that they had made us you know they had drawn the line in the sand and said you're gonna have to make a decision when someone says to you you have to make a decision you have two children which ones you decide on do you want the one that was born first you want the baby the one was born second or how do you make that decision you love them both equally some people can't relate to that is because it's a business and you say well how do you love to ice cream product lines um it's no different it's the oxygen that we breathe as far as a company goes they were both oxygen lines coming into our company and somebody you have to snip one pi-1 off so you have to learn to breathe with one lung we didn't say to the distributor you can't carry Ben & Jerry's we said to the distributor look you know what what you're doing is you see you're you're asking us to we're asking you to make a choice you can carry Ben & Jerry's we don't have any problem with that we'll will restructure our distribution system if need be if you want to carry Ben & Jerry's that's up to you but you can't carry both brands it was not their distribution network it was an independent distribution network of independently owned companies that were delivering many brands of ice cream and for some reason haagen-dazs felt like it was their distributors as opposed to these independent business people if they were going to say that if a distributor carries hoggin dust they can't carry Ben & Jerry's essentially there was no distributors that we could sell to to get our ice cream to retail stores and so we'd be at business Haagen Dazs demanded that Chuck and Dennis sign a legal agreement promising they'd stop selling Ben & Jerry's after working so hard to grow their business the hippies knew they were on the brink of losing it all in desperation they arranged a secret crisis meeting with their distributors at Boston's Logan Airport we've met discussed for probably a couple hours what ifs what if we don't do this what if we don't do that and how could we fight off someone with the large number of resources and the funds that they have versus Ben and Jerry's which is a relatively small company didn't have any marketing funds certainly didn't have any attorneys fees or shall I say funds put aside to battle something like this they had to find a way of raising enough money to mount a legal challenge it was Ben who provided the inspiration Ben said I've got an idea he said I chide you X for ice cream how about then would think and think and said how about if I had a dollar to every pint I sell you every sleeve of pints I'd say and we all looked each other and said no here he goes again cuz he always had a different way of looking at things and he said this way for you buy more ice cream we keep putting this into a fund for a legal battle and he said I'll pay you back when we win so the legal battle they needed a lawyer they chose one because his shoes were falling apart it is true I often have holes in my shoes I actually have a hole my shoe today I saw you think I'd have fixed it by now but it must be a different pair how he threw gay had built his career defending large corporations but when Ben and Jerry approached him the urge to switch allegiance was irresistible it was really a David and Goliath story we were the small guy just asking for a fair crack at the consumer how his first move was to write a stinging letter to Pillsbury announcing his determination to defend Ben and Jerry vigorously in court it would be wishful thinking on the part of your subsidiaries officers that's haagen-dazs to imagine that it can bully Ben and Jerry's stifle its growth and cause it to roll over Ben & Jerry's is a classic entrepreneurial success and its owners are aggressive they like the taste of success and they will fight for it haagen-dazs will have to learn to compete on the merits in the marketplace that is the American Way and that is what competition is all about I think that summarized our position pretty well Ben and Jerry's these two country boys from bravado we're now gonna sue us because they wanted the right to use our distribution system to get their products to stores because they didn't want to take the time in the trouble and the effort the expense to go out and develop a distribution system on their up so they suit us odds were that we were gonna lose yeah they were much bigger than us the odds were that they were gonna beat us I mean usually that's what happens when a big company starts beating up on a little company the company wins Pillsbury's crack in-house legal department boasted 17 lawyers the Seventeenth name on the list was assigned to the task of disposing of Howie and the hippies our list is his is this the way with with law firms or law departments listed all of our attorneys alphabetically I believe starting with Carter and ending with Wegener they certainly could have asked to speak with Betsy Carter that would have been fine with me Pillsbury showed no sign of being raffled and coolly notified their distributors they have six weeks to get Ben and Jerry's ice cream off their trucks Ben and Jerry knew that have to take matters into their own hands we made a decision that if we were if we were going to go down we were at least kind of let as many people as we knew as we could know what was going on know that you know the reason why you can't find Ben and Jerry's on the Shelf is because this this big corporation is trying to prevent you the consumer from having a choice about what kind of ice cream you want to buy we wanted to make Pillsbury the target not haagen-dazs Pillsbury being the parent come and we felt like if if it was just perceived as been injuries versus haagen-dazs it was going to be seen as just one ice cream company battling another one but we wanted to you know demonstrate that it was this little local ice cream company fighting this big corporate conglomerate they took it right to the top they targeted the most powerful man within the giant Pillsbury corporation distinguishing features a fixed grin a playful giggle and a body made of flour yeast and water his name the Pillsbury Doughboy the Doughboy is the company presidents and chairmen have come and gone but the Doughboy has remained constant we just wanted to give it a black eye we wanted to paint it as a kind of an evil little creature proud symbol of the company's since the mid 60s the Doughboy looked like he'd never hurt a fly Ben and Jerry set out to betray him as the criminal mastermind behind a conspiracy to drive their business into the ground the American people loved the underdog we knew that we were the underdog there's no doubt about it and we decided to play that for all it was worth they made sure their battle cry was heard everywhere t-shirts badges even the backs of buses demanded to know what's the Doughboy afraid of they set up a Doughboy telephone hotline in return for a campaign contribution of $1.00 callers received a bumper sticker and a letter of protest pre address to the chairman of Pillsbury they promoted a boycott of all Pillsbury products which for them meant a self-sacrificing denial of their beloved burger and just in case Pillsbury tried to turn a blind eye Jerry launched a one-man picket outside their global corporate headquarters in Minneapolis we didn't really know a thing about PR we were just trying to survive uh we were just doing whatever came into our heads whatever we could do to let the public know what was going on the campaign was a public relations masterstroke Pillsbury was stunned oh I don't I don't think they were happy to see the Doughboy getting bashed I think you know that's uh you know the Doughboy is sacred the Doughboy had never been under attack in that fashion before in his career the hippies were even attracting support from some unusual quarters been obtained a photocopy of a letter sent to one of Pillsbury's board of directors there was sign Charles Pillsbury and we you know realized that you know this was Pillsbury's kid and he said you know I'm very disappointed at the actions of the company against this small Vermont company and I look forward to discussing it with you dad when when I see you for Christmas dinner that drove home to management how this whole ordeal could get twisted around in the mind of the public we had really struck a vital chord when we combined the lawsuit with what's the Doughboy afraid of campaign attacking the Pillsbury Doughboy that was like after that was like going after godmother and apple pie and look love the Doughboy himself was never was never afraid of anything what went wrong is that the publicity became bigger than the dispute itself the dispute was between Ben & Jerry's and haagen-dazs those are the competitors the personalization of the dispute on the back or on the stomach of the Doughboy was what Pillsbury was was very concerned about the Doughboy had nowhere to hide with Pillsbury reeling under the public relations battering how he decided to pounce I called Nick and I said we're going to go into court on Friday July 5 and make a motion for a temporary restraining order and we're gonna get it I said it would be better for you if you signed a stipulation that gave us the same relief but contained a sentence that said Pillsbury neither did not admit any wrongdoing because if we get a court order that will be item 1 in our press release that we will put out to the public the Doughboy campaign was constantly being broadcast and receiving additional publicity but it seemed to make sense to us to get that dispute behind us quickly your corporate situation you make decisions defensively many times you make decisions not because of the circumstance but because for the corporation it's the right decision to make at that particular time you don't always make the business decision for the business reason you make it for the for the company for the good of the company Kevin Hurley signed an out-of-court settlement with Ben & Jerry's in doing so he agreed not to coerce any distributor to drop ben & jerry's ice cream david had slain goliath to celebrate ben and jerry ended their boycott of Burger King by buying their entire staff a whopper victory tasted sweet ah to sink your teeth into a nice warm soft fluffy roll and then enter the layer of mayonnaise you know the how do you quit what what is that mayonnaise like it's like slimy slimy honey and then finally the climax of the burger I gave the burger chew you know I'm telling you you know you don't appreciate a whopper until you've been whopper deprived it was a relief to win it was it was not like oh we've conquered the world it was like oh we're gonna be able to stay in business and get our ice cream on the shelves it was uh oh it was a relief as consumers sought out the ice cream behind the headlines sales of ben and jerry's rocketed by 1992 they were turning over more than 130 million dollars and had become a serious rival to haagen-dazs the Doughboy had helped turn them into an ice cream superpower I mean no one had ever heard of Ben Jerry's before and no one would have heard for Bennett jurors for years and years so from a business point of view it moved us forward so much more even though that had never been our intent to begin with Pillsbury I'd like to thank you for all the help that you gave us by trying to defeat us and put us out of business having you guys pick on us ended up to be the best thing that ever could have happened in terms of getting our ice cream on the bat you know it's nice to us to be there on the shelf with you thank but Kevin Hurley was no longer in charge of haagen-dazs by now the ice-cream kingpin had resigned grown a ponytail and started his own business alongside wife Doris and mother-in-law rose he created mattis's low-fat America's newest ice cream company it's tough to be Goliath and then become David I think it's a lot easier to be going the other way around you're Dave and you become the Wyeth you feel good but if you once Goliath and you become David it's a lot tougher fronting the business is Kevin's son Dennis together they're still locking horns with Ben and Jerry only this time the tables have turned I think Ben and Jerry's is the establishment now I guess would be the best way to describe him you know they're not the small entrepreneur we're the small entrepreneur Denis is the man Denis is the point man fermez he's running the business day to day on the street we've given him the killer instinct and he's got the gulls maybe you know he's got a heritage behind him of success like Ben and Jerry before him Dennis's dreams of expansion have met with a chilly reception from the big ice cream companies when we first started out I don't think anyone cared if we lived or died but as we began to push our way into these supermarkets the competition began to throw up every obstacle they could think of on the street at the headquarters level these chains and ultimately it isn't gonna matter we just keep banging away despite their millionaire status Ben and Jerry clung to their hippie roots and was celebrated as ethics driven business visionaries in 1993 they raked in a hundred and forty million dollars and chose Great Britain as their first international conquest the guided tour of their production line became the single biggest tourist attraction in the state of Vermont any ice cream that we can't use we'll save that up until the end of the day then we ship that off to haagen-dazs and that's what they saw for their ice cream although no longer in the same league as ben and jerry's mantises were ready to expand their tiny Empire now they needed the support of the big distributors to go nationwide but too familiar adversaries made sure they were in for a nasty surprise when we started distributing masks one of the first customers that we got was Southland corporation which operates 7-eleven stores nationally the United States why is that Faris cast I certainly the first customers we got Southland said you know we want you in our stores nationally but you need to use existing distributors so we went to visit the dry as distributors at their corporate headquarters in California and we had we knew the people there we had a long relationship with them and they told us that they had an agreement with Ben & Jerry's and in that district distribution agreement with Ben and Jerry's because their right to distribute Ben and Jerry's Ben and Jerry's had a clause which protected which protected their right to tell dryers what kind of products they could carry Ben and Jerry's would make the determination as to what was a competing brand better I said no you can't carry their brand their competing breath they used exactly the same argument that we used against Ben and Jerry's ten years earlier that Ben and Jerry's found distasteful and tried to sue us over they used exactly the same argument they said we need the full and undivided attention of the street I call Jerry that was the argument he gave me he gave me the argument that they they needed the full undivided attention of their just tributed rise and that Madison his opinion was a competitive product which it wasn't because it was the only low-fat product on the market at the time we had a customer that wanted the product dry as told us they were willing to distribute the product and I said to Jerry hey Jerry you remember back about 12 years ago when you were standing in front of the Pillsbury building with sign saying what's the Doughboy afraid of well tell me Jerry what's Ben and Jerry afraid of what's Ben and Jerry afraid of now it was Ben and Jerry's turn to deal with upstarts trying to take a chunk of their business they specifically target their product after haagen-dazs which is you know certainly a competitor of ours and I think it's a little difficult to say for them that they compete with haagen-dazs but not Ben and Jerry's it's that why is it good now but it was it wasn't good I mean it's like so self-serving it works both ways for them the same on both once when the little guy becomes the big guy you know you know everything changed everything changed yet the problem in the haagen-dazs situation with us was that Haagen Dazs had tied up all the major distributors and said that you know you can't carry any other competitive ice creams that would prevent any competitive ice cream from getting it's a distribution with us we've picked one distributor and we've said you know we have an exclusive relationship with each other but there's lots of other options that are available to other ice cream companies mantises know they're in for a long hard fight but they say they're here to stay and they've no intention of letting two millionaire hippies get the better of them this is a rough-and-tumble business and you can't sit around and pout about this stuff you better do something about it so if Ben and Jerry's felt that they were weren't given a fair shake they certainly did something about it and and they've built the very successful ice cream business for themselves and in our own way we hope to build another successful ice cream business in Madison and you know we'll deal with whatever deck were dealt the facts with us is that we are not the bad guys I mean certainly our company is bigger than it used to be and our brand is better known than it used to be but we're not actively trying to keep competitors off the shelves I mean we're not actively trying to help competitors get on the shelves but we're not trying to keep them off either you're listening Jerry you know why stop us we're gonna be there someday anyway why not just let us it you know at least that you know they got rid of us once here we are again we're like Freddie you know they can't kill us I'm not never ever ever gonna let somebody else put me out of business so we are gonna fight to fight by the trucks brother business keep the product on the shelf without respect to Ben and Jerry's haagen-dazs or anybody else you

Channel: erana19

Views: 56,398

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Id: RkaHmD_-m3k

Length: 36min 33sec (2193 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

True story: I broke my first tooth on a piece of peanut brittle from Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

Still waiting for that compensation.

[u/pb2614z]

I'll say it, Haagen-dazs is shit ice cream.

[u/Slippery_Molasses]

A funny stylized doc about the nefarious ice cream business from the BBC. A small up & coming company Ben & Jerry's tries to fight for survival against the giant Häagen-Dazs.