Entrepreneurs: Peace, love and ice cream: Two hippies hope to melt British hearts with dairy products plus social commitment

JUST as Britain's mass-market ice cream-makers have seen one threat recede with a Monopolies and Mergers Commission report concluding that their business practices did not operate against the public interest, another is appearing on the horizon.

Last week saw the arrival of a new player in the 'superpremium' market - rich, flavoursome, but highly fattening ice cream sold at fancy prices - hitherto dominated by Haagen-Dazs.

Although the Grand Metropolitan operation with the unpronounceable name and notoriously sensual advertisements is the main target for Ben & Jerry's, it is not inconceivable that the US company could win customers who have so far failed to lap up a product that puts the traditional vanilla block in the shade.

For, while Haagen-Dazs could be said to sell sex with its ice cream, Ben & Jerry's - as befits a company founded by a pair of unreconstructed hippies - identifies its produce with 'peace and understanding'.

In the United States, where its sales of more than dollars 130m (now pounds 87m) in 1992 gave it 40 per cent of the luxury ice cream market (Haagen-Dazs has just about all the rest), the New England-based company distributes 7.5 per cent of pre- tax profits (nearly dollars 1m in 1992) to charities through its Ben & Jerry's Foundation.

It also campaigns on a range of social and environmental issues and obtains its dairy supplies - at premium prices - from family-run farms and co-operatives.

In introducing such flavours as 'chocolate chip cookie dough', 'New York super fudge chunk' and 'rainforest crunch' to stores in London and the South-east over the summer, it aims to replicate that policy in the UK.

Although it is originally set to sell only about 700,000 pint pots (compared with US production of 12 million gallons) at about pounds 3.50 each, it plans to donate 7.5 per cent of profits made in this country to British charities, and is currently identifying appropriate causes. Tudor Dairies, owner of Loseley Dairy Ice Cream, which will distribute the product, will donate 1 per cent of its profits.

Now publicly quoted, the company has come a long way from its roots nearly 16 years ago, when childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took a dollars 5 correspondence course in ice cream-making and, with dollars 12,000, opened an ice cream 'scoop shop' at a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont.

But although the enterprise has since ballooned to more than 400 employees, and made Ben and Jerry rich men, they have stuck to their principles and fashioned their own version of 'caring capitalism'.

As the Wall Street Journal has noted, there is more than whimsy to this. Describing the company's decision to accompany the annual report with bumper stickers reading 'Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty' as 'trademark eccentricity', it said: 'The fact is that, as capitalists, the management team at Ben & Jerry's is pretty savvy.'

Indeed, in 1992 - when tough economic conditions might have been expected to make life difficult for a luxury product - sales grew an unprecedented 36 per cent. And with demand outstripping supply, Ben & Jerry's has been able to commission a new plant - which will provide the capacity for expansion into the UK and other parts of Europe.

The company already has a joint venture in the former Soviet Union - conceived as a step towards greater understanding before the end of the Cold War - and a licensee in Israel. Having expanded throughout the US largely through franchising, it is on the lookout for like-minded companies in order to assist its international growth.

'There aren't many. But there are a few, and you only need one in each location,' said Mr Cohen, co-founder, chairperson (he insists on the PC label) and chief executive. (Jerry Greenfield is vice-chairperson, monitors sales and distribution, and runs the charitable foundation).

While some who are wedded to good causes can put off supporters, Ben & Jerry's seems to win fans through a light-hearted approach. It has long sponsored film and music festivals, and its Waterbury factory has become Vermont's most popular tourist spot. Inside the factories, teams of workers known as 'joy gangs' organise pranks and jollity to brighten the working day.

But there are more positive, and potentially far-reaching, effects of the policy. For instance, nobody in the company - including the founders, who are still on salary - is paid more than seven times as much as the lowest paid.

While this is seen as a good motivator for the more junior employees, it has been regarded as a bar to recruiting top-level executives. Mr Cohen prefers to see it as a way of 'pre-screening' applicants. It reduces the size of the pool, but makes it more likely that applicants will share the company's values, he says.

Equally, the 1992 annual report included - for the fifth time - a comprehensive 'social assessment' by an independent consultant that looked at such issues as treatment of employees and effects on the local community and the environment. It was generally complimentary of the company, which claims never to have made staff redundant - at slack times, employees are kept on the payroll and seconded to local not-for-profit projects.

But Mr Cohen is not satisfied. Believing that the organisation has achieved much in recruiting women to senior positions, he is anxious that Ben & Jerry's - even though it is located in a rural part of the North-east with few minorities - should better represent the people it is selling to.

One initiative demonstrates its unusual approach. Having pledged last year to examine some of the processes that its workers were required to carry out, it has stopped making one of its best-known products because it could not find a safer way of doing it.

There were protests from customers about the disappearance of the 'brownie ice cream sandwich'. But according to Mr Cohen, until there is a machine to replace the repetitive motion that threatens to injure operators' arms, continuing production is 'not an option'.

(Photograph omitted)