No introduction. No mutual friend. No plan for what I’d say if he actually answered.
That call turned into a business relationship that put Rachel’s Brownies inside Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops for the better part of five years.
And it started because I didn’t know enough to be scared or intimidated.
I was 26 years old, running a brownie company out of Pennsylvania, and I picked up the phone and called Ben Cohen in Vermont like it was the most normal thing in the world. Pre-internet, email, smartphones. Faxing and beepers were just coming into vogue.
A Brownie Guy With a Wild Idea
The year was 1980.
My wife, Rachel (now known as Ra El), and I were heading to the New York Gourmet Specialty Food Show in Manhattan. We didn’t have a booth. We were going to walk the floor and decide whether exhibiting the following year made sense.
A month earlier, I’d had an idea I couldn’t shake. What if Ben and Jerry made an ice cream with chunks of our brownies? At the time, that felt like a reasonable thing to attempt. I didn’t know it was supposed to feel impossible.
My instinct was that a collab with a more famous brand like Ben & Jerry’s could help Rachel’s Brownies grow.
So, I called their corporate office in Vermont, told the person who answered that I was Jeff Slater, president of Rachel’s Brownies, and asked to speak with Ben about an idea.
They put me through.
“You Guys Make Rachel’s Brownies.”
Ben Cohen sounded exactly like the regular guy from Vermont I had seen on TV. He just happened to be running a big, growing multi-million dollar ice cream company.
No airs.
No handlers.
Just Ben.
When I explained who we were, he cut me off. It is so cool you guys make Rachel’s Brownies. I eat those on People Express Airlines all the time. We ought to make an ice cream together.
I froze, somewhere between a brain freeze and disbelief. A guy building one of my most beloved ice cream brands in the country already knew our little brownie business and he pitched me on the idea I wanted to pitch him about.
Sometimes when you knock on a door, it isn’t locked but waiting for the right person to open it.
The Sushi Problem
Ben said he and Jerry were going to be in New York for the food show, and Ben suggested we should grab lunch to talk it through.
The day before, the phone rang at my parents’ house in New Jersey. It was Ben, with directions to a little lunch place near the New York Public Library.
“You guys eat sushi, right?” he asked.
I said, of course we did.
We had never eaten sushi in our lives.
Ra El and I were not exactly food rookies. We’d eaten escargot in Paris. But raw fish for lunch in 1980, with two people we’d never met, in a restaurant we couldn’t find on a map, was new territory. We figured we’d pick at the tuna and call it an adventure.
Since we’d never met Ben and Jerry in person, I had a small problem: how would I recognize them? So I raided my mother’s freezer, ate a pint of coffee Ben & Jerry’s, and cut the photo off the lid, just in case.
I’m not clever enough to make that part up.
Lunch With Two Guys Who Met in High School
We met on the library steps and walked to a restaurant that would have failed a health inspection if the inspector hadn’t been paid to look the other way.
Ben showed up in his trademark hat, talking a mile a minute. Jerry was quieter, more observational, content to let Ben run the conversation.
They’d met in high school gym class and later took a correspondence course on making ice cream. That’s the entire origin story of a company that would go on to define an industry—two friends who decided to try something.
The sushi arrived looking like nothing I recognized as food. Rolled, raw, strange. We nibbled our way through a California roll, the training wheels of the sushi world, and did our best impression of people who knew what they were doing.
Underneath the nerves, I remember thinking how strange it was to be sitting across from two future icons, eating something I’d never tried, over an idea I’d cooked up a month earlier on a whim.
What Happened Next
That lunch turned into a real business relationship. We shipped sheets of Rachel’s Brownies to Vermont. Ben & Jerry’s froze them, cut them into irregular chunks, and folded them into vanilla ice cream for their scoop shops. Rachel’s Brownies Ice cream was sold at their stores for about five years.
They tried to get it into pint containers for grocery distribution, but our brownies were too thick and too irregular to survive the pint production line. It stayed a scoop shop exclusively. Eventually it faded out, the way most co-branded products do.
What This Taught Me
I’ve told this story for years, mostly because it still holds up. Not because I was smart. Because I was young enough not to know that founders don’t just call other founders out of the blue.
Being naive isn’t a weakness. It’s what let me skip the version of this story where I talk myself out of calling. Experience teaches you all the reasons something won’t work. At 26, I didn’t have that education yet, and it worked in my favor.
Three Key Takeaways
- Naivety can be a genuine business asset. The less you know about why something shouldn’t work, the more likely you are to try it anyway. Early-stage founders often have more access than they realize. The barrier usually isn’t on the other side of the phone. It’s the story you tell yourself before you dial.
- Founders like talking to other founders. Ben Cohen didn’t need a formal pitch or a warm introduction. He needed to hear that someone was building something small and real and wanted to build something with him. That founder-to-founder honesty still opens doors that org charts and gatekeepers usually close.
- A partnership doesn’t have to last forever to matter. The Rachel’s Brownies and Ben & Jerry’s collaboration ran for five years and then quietly ended. That’s not a failure. It gave both brands a halo they didn’t have before, and it gave me a story I still tell more than forty years later. Not every partnership needs a permanent home to be worth doing.
I did become a sushi person, but that is a different story.
But I’ll always be the guy who cold-called Ben Cohen, faked his way through a California roll, and came away working with some icons in ice cream history.
Some cold calls turn freeze and just become an ignored voicemail.
That one turned into Rachel’s Brownies Ice Cream and a valuable friendship.
A version of this post was originally published on January 23, 2011
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