General Information: Overview: Press Clips:: Greyston Bakery Part I: When Bernie Met Ben & Jerry

Newsday
March 2, 2004

When Bernie Glassman met Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, it was the beginning of a high- caloric connection.

They met in 1987 at a lakeside conference in Colorado , attended by dozens of business executives who were planning a network of "socially responsible" companies.

Cohen and Greenfield , the co- founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream company, were also taking care of business - looking for someone to bake a really thin brownie for a new ice cream sandwich.

Glassman, a Buddhist priest and founder of the Greyston Bakery in Yonkers , was looking for anyone who wanted to buy a lot more baked goods - so he could expand his inner-city business and offer more jobs to people trying desperately to find work.

"So I ended up meeting Bernie, this Jewish-Buddhist, former nuclear physicist-monk from Brooklyn ," Cohen recalled in a recent phone interview from his Vermont office.

"He was easy to talk to," said Cohen, who grew up in Merrick . "And somehow or other, we fell into a conversation as we all walked around the lake." During the stroll, Glassman mentioned the bakery and his plans to employ the supposedly unemployable.

"Well, that's amazing," Cohen said, "because we're looking for some thin, chewy, fudgy brownies. Do you think you can make them?"

"Sure, I can," Glassman replied, and the link between baker and ice cream- makers was established. Soon after, the first shipment of brownies was trucked to Vermont .

There was one dark moment, when that first batch of Greyston brownies arrived. Because of a temperature failure, they had solidified into massive, 50- pound blocks of chocolate fudge cookies, Cohen said, and attempts to pry them apart resulted only in many small bits of cookie.

In a desperate experiment, they tried putting bits of cookie into batches of chocolate ice cream - and Ben & Jerry's chocolate fudge brownie ice cream was created. Today, Greyston is still making thousands of pounds of brownies every day for three of Ben & Jerry's flavors, and across the country, chocolate fudge brownie ice cream remains in the company's top 10 list of most popular flavors.