Ben & Jerry's Misadventure:
Takin' Their Licks as Do-It-Yourselfers

When well-known maverick ice cream barons, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, expanded their business with their first new ice cream plant, they saw the project in terms of three major components: the building, the manufacturing equipment, and the refrigeration system.

They also figured they had two options to assemble a construction team. The first was to hire a company that could provide a turnkey operation. The second was to hire three contractors (building, equipment, refrigeration) and coordinate the project themselves. The obvious choice was the former. They chose the latter.

As told by Fred "Chico" Lager, former Ben & Jerry's CEO, in his book Ben & Jerry's: The Inside Scoop, the project quickly degenerated into a disaster. Of the three contractors, they hired, Ben & Jerry's sued one, one sued Ben & Jerry's, and the third overbilled them $100,000 on its fixed-bid contract with the work only 75% complete. To make matters worse, the contractor also put the account on a COD basis and refused to ship spare parts for the fruit feeder.

Haste Makes Waste

In retrospect, Ben & Jerry's would have completely engineered the process systems first, then built the building around them. To get the new facility up and running by their target date, however, they plunged ahead with the construction. Lots of change orders quickly ensued for each of the contractors and, of course, the changes for one contractor had a domino effect on the other two.

The first attempt to make ice cream at the new plant came two months beyond the target date, and it came with another rude awakening. As Lager relates, Ben & Jerry's discovered that, "Starting up a new factory was not like flipping on a light switch. Everything was new, nothing had been tested and half the stuff didn't work."

The employees worked non-stop over the next two weeks, trying desperately to get the plant up and running. Shut downs were frequent, sleep was a rarity and camping out in the factory was common.

Cost Overruns Continue to Mount

By the time they started manufacturing, $600,000 in cost overruns were in dispute and the plant was far from complete. For example, the system that allowed Ben & Jerry's to make its own base mix and go back to using 100% Vermont dairy products would not be operational for another eight months. As for the building, the roof leaked, the concrete floors were already beginning to crack, and the tile floors had been given "a Jackson Pollock grout job" and sloped away from the drains instead of toward them. (Pollock was an artist known for his technique of spattering paint on canvas.)

The crowning glory, however, was that the air intake for the HVAC system had been placed directly in front of the refrigeration plant which occasionally leaked ammonia. As you can imagine, the gas was sucked back into the building and circulated to everyone in the office.

Entrepreneurship has its learning curves, and Ben and Jerry are certainly wiser for their building experience. In retrospect, the services of a qualified construction management or design/build firm would have saved them time, money and aggravation. After all, those are our areas of expertise. As for ice cream at its hedonistic best, we'll leave that to Ben and Jerry.