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founded in 1978 in Burlington, Vermont with a $12,000 nvestment the pair opened an ice cream parlor in a renovated gas station in downtown Burlington, Vermont.
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In 1980, Ben and Jerry rented space in an old spool and bobbin mill on South Champlain Street in Burlington and began packing their ice cream in pints.
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In 1984, Häagen-Dazs wanted to limit distribution of Ben & Jerry’s in Boston, prompting Ben & Jerry’s to file suit against the parent company, Pillsbury, in its now famous “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” campaign.
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In 1985, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation was established at the end of the year with a gift from Ben & Jerry's to fund community-oriented projects; it was then provided with 7.5% of the company’s annual pre-tax profits.
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In April 2000, Ben & Jerry's sold the company to British-Dutch multinational food giant Unilever. Unilever said it hopes to carry on the tradition of engaging "in these critical, global economic and social missions." Many of the activities for good Ben and Jerry had engaged in fostered customer loyalty and thus increased profit, but not all did.
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In 2001, Ben & Jerry's U.S. completed transition to "Eco-Pint" packaging, which packaged all pint flavors in environmentally friendly unbleached paperboard Eco-Pint containers, a decision it later reversed. The use of brown-kraft unbleached paperboard had been a critical first step toward a totally biodegradable pint made without added chlorine
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On Earth Day in 2005, when a vote in the U.S. Senate proposed the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Ben & Jerry's launched a protest by creating the largest ever Baked Alaska, which weighed 900 pounds, and placed it in front of the U.S. Capitol Building.
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Ben & Jerry appeared on the The Colbert Report on March 5, 2007 to promote their new ice cream flavor, Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream, and their grassroots education and advocacy project
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The company renamed a flavor, Yes Pecan, in reference to Barack Obama's victory January 2009 to donate all proceeds made on the sale of that flavor to the Common Cause Education Fund.
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In March 2009, "CyClone Dairy" launched an advertising campaign and a website to promote its milk products, which purportedly came exclusively from cloned cows. On April 1, 2009 (April Fool's Day)
