“Perfecting Collaboration One Pint at a Time” — Ben & Jerry’s

Host: Claire Craig, Organizational Development Specialist, Adobe

Guests: Emily K. Smith, Head of Brand Innovation, US, Asia, and New Markets;
  Chris Rivard, Head of Research and Development North America

Emily Smith

I think the bedrock of great teamwork is trust. And I think to make a flavor come to life, you have to trust all of the pieces to come together, right? You can’t do something on your own.

Claire Craig 

Welcome to The Power of Teamwork. I’m your host, Claire Craig, and I’m so excited today because we are welcoming guests from Ben & Jerry’s — Emily K. Smith, head of brand innovation for US, Asia, and new markets, and Chris Rivard, head of research and development. Thank you both for being here. 

Emily Smith

Thanks for having us.

Chris Rivard

Thanks for having us.

Claire Craig 

Oh, I’m so thrilled that you’re both here. I want to hear a little bit about your journey to where you are. I mean, everyone when they’re growing up is like, “Oh, I want to be an ice cream taster, an ice cream person in general, or just eat ice cream.” So, Emily, tell me about how you got to where you are. Tell me about your role, how you got to Ben & Jerry’s. 

Emily Smith

Sure. So I’ve been in this role for about a year, so I’m newer to the team, but absolutely loving it. I mean, dream job, as you said, getting to eat a ton of ice cream. My team looks after all of our new product innovations that we launch for the US as well as what we call Asia and new markets.

We export a lot of products from the US and Europe overseas to many different countries around the world — Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Thailand. So we look after all of the new flavors that we launch, the new formats that we launch, and figure out what are the things that our fans want to see, and try as hard as we can to make that happen.

I’ve been in the consumer goods space for about 10 years, so sort of stumbled into this world just through the love of interacting with the products that you see every day at the grocery store. I kinda fell into the industry through a friend of a friend at school and my first time really learning about what it takes to get a product onto the shelves at a grocery store — all the things that go behind, the pricing behind it, the marketing behind it, the ingredients, the sourcing. It just fascinated me and being able to talk about it with friends and family through these tangible products that you know and love is, is really, really fun. 

Claire Craig 

That’s incredible. An ice cream girl to your core. I agree, I’m also an ice cream girl. We’re gonna have to dive into that more. But before we do that, Chris, give us a little description of what you do and maybe how you got to where you are at Ben & Jerry’s.

Chris Rivard

Sure. So I manage the research and development team, which is a fancy way of saying the “flavor gurus.”

So it’s the full team here that makes all the flavors. So all the chunks and swirls that put into our ice cream, we’re the ones behind how we do that andhow we design it. So, I’ve been with the company for 12 years a titch longer than Emily, and I started in food science, so I went to school here in Vermont, University of Vermont with a food science and dietetics degree focused on health, nutrition, things like that.

And eventually I decided I wanted to not stick to the healthy side and went more towards full fat ice cream — delicious indulgence and headed over to Ben & Jerry’s. It’s been a pretty amazing journey for me. I started out as a developer, so I was making flavors like the gurus were and launched some pretty cool products in the past.

So it’s been a pretty cool journey and it’s always been around food. So with a food science background, everyone on our team loves to eat food. We’re always finding an excuse to eat food and try things and make things. I’m the same way. I grew up around it and have always had a joy for it. So it’s pretty awesome to have that as a day job.

Claire Craig 

That’s pretty incredible. I also love to eat food, so I feel like we are connected in that way. I want to dig in a little bit more and let our audience get to know you both on a personal level, and I want you to tell me, I’m sure you’ve gotten asked this, but I need to know, I’m just burning to know this answer — if there was a Ben & Jerry’s flavor that described you as a person, what would it be and why? 

Emily Smith

I would say for me, if I was a flavor, well, it’s also my favorite flavor, so I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna go with that too. But it’s Strawberry Cheesecake. It’s one that doesn’t necessarily immediately come to mind when you think of Ben & Jerry’s, but the people who love it, love it. I’d say that’s true about myself too. The people love me, love me hard, but you know, I’m not famous. Like not everyone knows me. That’s okay. I’m cool with that. I think the other thing that’s great about Strawberry Cheesecake, you got like the fruit notes. It’s light, it’s not too much. You got the buttery notes of the gram swirl, so it’s like simplicity done extremely well. Maybe that’s how I try to live my life, I don’t know. 

Claire Craig

But everyone loves you and you’re elevated. 

Chris Rivard

Oh, oh, man. Oh wait, I love that. I should have started.

Emily Smith

I’m the marketing girl, so, you know.

Chris Rivard

Gosh. I’ll probably stick to my favorite, which is, honestly Phish Food. I’m a classic, pretty mediocre guy. Like nothing too crazy, but also has a lot of stuff in there that everyone likes, like marshmallow and chocolate. Who doesn’t love caramel and that sort of thing. So I have a lot of stuff that people like, but I’m pretty classic at the same time. 

Claire Craig

Listen, our bond goes even deeper. I was gonna say my flavor is Phish Food because shout out to that for getting me through every college breakup, which there was a lot, that I went through. I’m just saying. It’s my ride or die, so agreed. 

Chris Rivard

That’s awesome. So outside of that, I know you two probably collaborate a lot.

You were talking about creativity, innovation. So can you tell me how your teams work together? Emily, let’s start with you. 

Emily Smith

Definitely. Our two teams are, it’s almost as if we’re not two teams. We’re really one team. Everything that we do when it comes to new product innovation, we are working hand in hand.

So Chris’s team tends to be the more technical side of food science and the nutritionals. I’m laughing because I’m always like, “I’m not a food scientist, but what about the fat and the protein and blah, blah, blah?” You know, those are the things that they actually legitimately know about the science behind.

They kind of ground us in the reality of like, “Okay, here’s what we can do, here’s how we can do it.” Traditionally, like the brand and marketing side is like the big ideas and the philosophies and connecting it to our fans. At the end of the day, both of our teams are doing both of those things.

We come together every single day to think about what our fans want to see from Ben & Jerry’s, and how we can make that happen, and what ideas do we have. The ideas aren’t coming from just one team or one person. It’s really all of us kind of coming together and collaborating and saying, “What do we want to do? How can we do it? How can we do it in creative and different ways?”

You know, we have our different strengths and we kind of lean on each other’s teams to bring those strengths to the table. So when it comes to putting together the financials behind what the size of prize is and what the margin is going to be, and all of those types of things, my team tends to lead some of that sort of work. 

When it comes to putting together the formulations — I’m laughing, I’m imagining my team in the kitchen, putting together formulations. We would not have very good ice cream if we were doing that. So we trust each other to do what each other is really good at. But we’re also always coming together to think about the big why behind what we’re doing and collaborate on what those ideas are.

Something that I’ve learned about myself working on teams is that we are never alone. You always can get that much farther when you’ve got the power of a team by your side and you know, we can really make magic happen when we all come together. 

Chris Rivard

I always look at it as if it really is a family. A few years ago I worked with the team to redesign our lab, and so before it used to be a very, counter kitchen style booth where you’d come up and a brand would come up and they would have their opinions on our hard work that we just did in the lab for hours and hours, making flavors.

They’d have their strong opinions and we’d go back and forth. But now when we redesigned it, we wanted to have a big, giant family table. And so now we have this big wooden table made in Vermont that we all sit around. And so when the concepts start, it’s all of us together. We have a chef on our team where if we’re gonna come up with a flavor, last year we launched Dirt Cake from, it’s a top flavor and we literally talked about what is “dirt cake?” It’s a dessert. It means different things for different people. It’s different In different parts of the country. We actually would make dirt cake. So we do these things where we make things as a team and as a family cross-functionally to work on. What do our fans want? So when they pick up the pint, is it the experience they expect?

And so it always starts at that center, sort of central table. And then we, to Emily’s point, we then break apart, like we each go into our specialties. You know, my team is obviously focused on how to make it, how to take it from five pints in our lab to 50,000 in the factories. And that’s pretty challenging at times, how to do that.

And so that’s their expertise. And then to Emily’s point, she works on how to actually land it and sell it and make our fans excited for it. So it’s really started at that table, but then we always come back towards the end in making sure that we’re aligned and we’re still focused on that initial concept, that initial idea.

I really enjoy the success, so I love seeing the team, whether I’m leading it or I’m just part of the team, but I love seeing the team come together, you know, work through problems and then be successful.

Claire Craig 

Yeah, I love that. And I love that concept of family even sitting around the same table, but we probably all know with family there can be some interesting members, and Ben & Jerry’s incidentally is known for really pushing the envelope creatively when it comes to the types of flavors, but also the naming of flavors. 

When I think about some of your, your more out there flavor names, you guys really push the envelope when it comes to that stuff.

So like from Schweddy Balls to Karamel Sutra, I mean, we’re really just going for it. When you work together as a team, is there someone who pulls you back that’s like, “Oh no, we cannot go there,” or are you both at the table just egging each other on? How does that work?

Chris Rivard

A little bit of both. I mean, we, I think early on we usually do brainstorms.

It’s open to everyone. So even not beyond research and development and marketing, we invite anyone in the company often to do brainstorms around a flavor idea. So we’ll have  the flavor descriptor, what it is, and we’ll have sessions where we bring in snacks, sometimes alcoholic drinks, things like that to just kind of get things going.

Claire Craig 

So am I invited to the next family gathering? 

Chris Rivard

Yeah, sure. Come on down. And honestly, like in those sessions, like there’s no rules. It’s just crazy/inappropriate and just fun and just really a fun way to get ideas on paper. And then I think the smaller team that is working on the project specifically will then break out and say, “All right, what makes sense?”

The biggest thing for us is that we’re trying to be inclusive, like we don’t have a name that makes other people feel you know, not comfortable or things like that. But at the same time, we do want to push the bounds, especially when it’s things that we believe in or things that we really are trying to drive.

Emily Smith

Yeah. And sometimes it even comes from outside of our walls too. I mean, some of the most classic Ben & Jerry’s flavors were suggestions from fans. So like Cherry Garcia, for instance, was a suggestion from a fan who wrote in and said, cherry ice cream with fudge flakes and cherry pieces, literally the flavor itself and soup to nuts, they had it all spelled out and they said, call it Cherry Garcia, and leaned into what Ben & Jerry’s was known for in some of the early days with our counterculture, sort of hippie vibes, and it was a perfect fit and now it’s a top flavor for us, even to this day. 

And then we also get flavor name ideation too from our partners. I think a story that I love is a new flavor that we launched this year called “Lights, Caramel, Action!” It’s a partnership with Ava DuVernay, who is an amazing director, filmmaker. And when we worked with her to develop her flavor on the spot, she was like, “Lights, Caramel, Action!” Done. We’re like, “That’s brilliant!”

So sometimes things just come spontaneously, whether it be within our walls, outside of our walls from our fans, I don’t know. It’s definitely not like a scientific process. Some brands will like to go and be like testing product names and sometimes we do stuff like that. But a lot of the time it’s honestly just spontaneous and fun.

And one of the classic Ben & Jerry’s sayings is “If it’s not fun, why do it?” You know, that’s, that was one of “Jerryisms,” if you will. And so a lot of that we try to embrace day in and day out. And so you see that reflected in things like the flavor names. 

Claire Craig

I think it’s really cool because you exemplify and embody what it’s like to take risks and be bold in a space that, who knew ice cream could be bold, but here you are doing those things, but I imagine that as you go through this process, there’s got to be some failure involved with this, whether that’s putting your heart out on a line for an idea that you really love. But can you tell me about maybe your biggest fail? I want to hear a little bit more about that. 

Emily Smith

A lot of things that fail the world will never see. So like that’s a big part of innovation and collaboration too, there’s a heck of a lot of stuff that never gets to see the public light of day.

And sometimes that’s painful, like, because to Chris’s point earlier, like we pour our heart and soul into these things and it totally sucks when something gets delayed or we can’t do it or whatever. Actually that’s been a big part of our team culture too, is being like, “yeah, that sucked, that failed and we’re never gonna do it. And we really thought it was a good idea and we can never talk about it to anyone,” but like we can embrace that, right? And say like for every nine failures there will be one success. And so we have to be able to actually be okay with that. 

Chris Rivard

I think that’s key, like setting that stage for people to be okay with failing.

Just to be really creative and bold and unique, like you’re gonna fail a lot and that’s, it’s hard, but it’s just part of the process and trying to let the team know that it’s fine to do that. And it’s really kind of expected to as well. 

Claire Craig 

We’re talking with Chris and Emily from Ben & Jerry’s about how failure isn’t just something they embrace, failure is expected as part of the process. More from The Power of Teamwork in just a minute.

Claire Craig 

Now that we’ve talked about failure, Emily, I’d really like to hear from you. How does the desire to make a difference inspire teamwork at Ben & Jerry’s? 

Emily Smith

I think the desire to make a difference can inspire teamwork by giving a North Star that goes beyond what any single person thinks is the right goal. It kind of gives that equal ground of being, “No, it’s not just my idea, your idea what you want, what I want,” it’s what this greater thing that we’re all working towards. And that allows you, like when you have inevitable things that come across the path to be like, “Okay, but let’s stick in with this because we’re going towards this thing that’s bigger than any of us as individuals.”

Claire Craig 

I think that’s super powerful. 

So this is not necessarily a failure, but maybe a comeback story. So Chris, this is for you to talk about. I have heard that the Dublin Mudslide came back from the dearly depinted, as I’ve heard it’s called. Can you tell me a little bit about that coming back to life?

Chris Rivard

Yeah, it’s a pretty cool story. So I think it’s, I don’t know, three years ago now we started talking about this. And so part of our values is to really drive different types of suppliers. There is a goal about five years ago, honestly, where we started to say we need to have more values-led suppliers that we work with that have unique stories, backgrounds, ownerships, um, sourcing strategies, and things like that beyond just the normal.

And so as a brand, we’re like, “How do we do this? Where do we start to apply this?” And all of us started to think, where can we start to find these types of suppliers? We actually found a company called Wayward Spirits. It’s woman-owned, and she makes a spirit out of the way from the local cheese company where she’s based.

At the time we’re like, this is super cool, but we’re not gonna put basically booze into our ice cream. It’s just not something we can do. But we wanted to work with her and so we’re like, we’re gonna make this work. We’re gonna figure out a way to partner together. And so long story short, we ended up taking her spirit, put it into a coffee liqueur base that one of our other suppliers did for us. And it sort of evolved into “All right, let’s create a cool new flavor around this and do something unique.” And then, someone on our team who had been here for quite a while was like, “Why don’t we bring back Dublin?” Dublin has been a killer flavor. People loved it. They’re always asking for it, and it was a cool opportunity because we were able to bring back a flavor from the graveyard and put a new spin on it than what it was in the past.

So it was, it was a little bit different than what it was when it first launched. But now it had this really cool story, so it allowed us to talk about the work we’re doing in this space with these cool suppliers that we’re partnering with and also the graveyard and kinda that heritage and that sort of history that a lot of our fans had and loved it.

And so it was a really unique way for us to kind of double hat this innovation and bring back one of the flavors from the graveyard. 

Claire Craig 

That’s so cool to hear about really how you brought something back from the dead. Emily, what else did it take as a team to bring Dublin back? 

Emily Smith

That one was cool too because it sort of started from more of this supplier’s interesting ingredients, so more on the R&D side, but then we kind of saw from the marketing side, the sort of flavor story, the link for how it could work with our fans. And then that year we ended up launching a couple of different flavors that were all kinds of fan favorites returning, and so it allowed us to make a bigger story out of it when we think about bringing it to market and talking about it to the world.

That was a really cool one. The other thing that I love about Dublin Mudslide is I wasn’t on the innovation team at the time, but I was working on sales, so I knew the flavor was coming out. My fiance’s sister’s husband, so my future brother-in-law, was like, “You’re working at Ben & Jerry’s. I love Dublin Mudslide. Please bring it back.” And I knew that we were gonna be launching it and I couldn’t tell him for like over a year!

Chris Rivard

It was for him! 

Emily Smith

So when it came out, I had it sent to his house and I had his sister put it in the freezer and I called him and I was like, “Vinny, go to your freezer right now. Open it up.” And he was like, “Oh my God.” He was like, “Did you do this for me?” I was like, “Yes, I did this for you.” I had nothing to do with it. 

Claire Craig

The absolute clout he thought you must have had at that moment.

Emily Smith

I know. I was like, this is pretty cool. But you know, it just speaks to him being one of the fans who was like, “I loved this flavor.”

Claire Craig 

Fans for the win. I love that. Stay tuned for the next scoop from Ben & Jerry’s.

So we’ve had bits and pieces of this, but Chris, I really want you to walk us through from conception to completion. And Emily, please chime in here as well. What is it like to go on this flavor journey of creating something? 

Chris Rivard

Yeah, so the flavor creation, like I said, it always starts at a kitchen table, you know, it always starts with the food. It always starts with the dessert, the end result of what are we trying to deliver? So if it’s a cheesecake, what kind of cheesecake? What does it look like? Is it cherry, strawberry? Is it, you know, what’s the base? Is it really cheesy? Is it more dairy notes? And so we always start with that process with our chef and trying to have that gold standard of the food or the dessert or the recipe, whatever it is, as the guiding light for us in the innovation.

And then if there’s multiple things, the team will kind of break up, the R&D team, and we’ll actually go into our lab. So we have a lab here in Vermont where we make everything by hand. So if there’s a brownie that we want to try, we literally sometimes go to the grocery store. We have a full service kitchen and we make the brownie, or we work with a supplier to have them make it.

And so we do everything from hand, from scratch, from the beginning and we’ll come up with five different concepts. There could be 30 different concepts depending on the project, and we start tasting so we’ll start to pair them down as a team. Usually it’s just the R&D team. And what works, what doesn’t work, we’ll blend different flavors, different chunks, different swirls to kind of what gets us back to that original goal that we’re trying to do.

And then when we’re happy, that’s when we’ll invite the marketing team because you know, we don’t want them to like totally trash our ideas at the very beginning, right? 

Emily Smith

Hey, we would never! 

Chris Rivard

So we bring them in and we have, you know, a larger discussion of is this where we want to go and kind of continue to iterate?

And it often takes, I don’t know, three or four rounds on a big project. It can take more. I mean, I’ve had some where it took 15, 20 rounds to do something, but we continue to collaborate and develop that process until we’re all aligned that it’s what we want. And then we do all the more boring stuff, honestly, which is a lot of the work.

It’s getting all the documentation, making sure that it’s safe, and making sure that everything is gonna actually be made the way we want it to. So again, going from five pints in our kitchen to 50,000 pints in the factory is a huge jump and so there’s a ton of testing protocols and experience, so working together as teams of, you know, how do we actually execute that, run some trials and, you know, make it from there.

And it takes about an average 18 months is a pretty standard from concept to product on shelf, so it’s a long process. We’re always thinking two or three years out and we’re trying to find what’s trending, what our fans will relate to and connect to a year and a half, two years out. So it can be really hard sometimes knowing, trying to plan, like what is gonna be the next thing that people will wanna see in 2025.

Claire Craig 

You’re the trendsetters of the ice cream world. Stay with us when we come back more with our guests from Ben & Jerry’s.

We’re back for the second scoop of The Power of Teamwork. We’ve been talking with Emily and Chris from Ben & Jerry’s, and they’ve described how they work as a team to develop flavors we’d only find in our wildest dreams. So naturally, I wanna ask about one more magical flavor, Oatmeal Dream Pie. Can you tell us about the partnership that made that happen?

Chris Rivard

Sure. We were trying again to find suppliers that we could really connect with and partner and I actually started talking to Partake during COVID. We were gonna work together, but as we know with COVID, the world just totally flipped upside down and we weren’t able to do it. So it was the same thing where we said, you know, we want to do something together.

Partake — it’s a cookie company that everything is allergen free. They have an awesome mission around providing snacks for kids that are totally free of allergens, and we were trying to say the same thing. What flavor does it make sense? Is it a chocolate, is it a cookie? What does it look like?

And we kept going back to nostalgia because nostalgia for our fans, it’s such a unique thing. It’s very different for everyone, nostalgia’s very different. You may remember when you’re in middle school or high school or I don’t know when, when you were younger, there were these oatmeal cream pie desserts. I’m not gonna say the name, but I think we all know. 

Claire Craig

Oh I remember, we know.

Chris Rivard

You save your quarter to get it at the lunch line and you know, everyone knows that it’s super nostalgic and we want to connect that feeling that people get when they have those because it brings them back to their childhood.

And Partake was working on this cookie that essentially is an oatmeal cookie. And we said, let’s make this happen. And so we took the development from that cookie and created this really nostalgic Oatmeal Dream Pie flavor, which really delivers on that nostalgic taste and also has a mission again to it. it’s just been a really cool relationship along the way. And I know Emily and her team have worked a lot with Partake as well. 

Emily Smith

I think it’s an awesome flavor. Just launched this year. I think also for us, our non-dairy business, as Chris mentioned, is a huge part of Ben & Jerry’s too.

You know and love our ice cream, but we also have non-dairy for our fans who don’t eat dairy products either because they’re lactose intolerant or they just want something different. You don’t want that kinda heavy cream every single day, every single time you’re eating ice cream.

So we launched into non-dairy in 2016, and we have both an almond based non-dairy and a sunflower based non-dairy. With this partnership with Partake, knowing their mission around allergen friendly and just the accessibility for any kid to be able to have, you know, an amazing cookie in their lunchbox, we wanted to be able to introduce a pint that anyone could enjoy.

I think in terms of democratizing and being able to get our ice cream into as many hands of people as possible, is something that we take super seriously in our approach to innovation too, because we want to bring people into this brand and welcome them into this brand and in any way possible.

Claire Craig 

Absolutely. And what better way to welcome someone than with ice cream? It speaks to that inclusion that’s so core to who you are. So Emily, besides R&D and marketing, what teams at Ben & Jerry’s do you work with? 

Emily Smith

Yeah. Oh my gosh, so many. I was actually thinking about this coming into this conversation. It’s very cool for me and Chris to be able to talk to the closeness that R&D and marketing have, but man, it truly takes a village at Ben & Jerry’s. We have so many awesome teams of people that we get to work with. Some of them, I’m not gonna do it justice, I’m definitely gonna forget some teams, but just to highlight a couple of them, one is our consumer insights team.

We have a dedicated team that is doing a lot of the research with our fans of what do they want, what’s missing for them, what resonates with them? They’re really a core part of our team. We have our digital marketing team, our integrated marketing teams that are the ones that are really pulling together, like how we launch this with our fans, how we talk about it with our fans, all the amazing marketing campaigns.

We have our social mission team. Within Ben & Jerry’s, the brand, the company was founded on a three-part mission — so economic mission, product mission, social mission. Being able to have an amazing product, make some money while doing it, and be able to give back to the communities that we interact with and serve every day.

And we’ve got our factory team, supply chain teams. I mean, there’s literally thousands of people that go into making these amazing products. Those are just a couple. Who did I miss? I definitely missed something. 

Chris Rivard

I mean, I think super cool, which a lot of our fans would notice is our design team. I mean, so all the amazing artwork you see. Whether it’s a billboard or it’s our packaging, or it’s a little animated video you might see on our website or social media, like our design team does that, and it’s an amazing group of people. 

Claire Craig 

Okay, so you said it takes about 18 months to bring a flavor to life.

How many people would you say it takes to do that? If you were gonna guess how many people for one flavor? 

Chris Rivard

Everyone. I mean, everyone in the business touches a flavor at some point in the process. I mean, from factories, you know, we got, I don’t know, 400 people in our factories, 100 people in our office. It’s hundreds.

When there’s a flavor approved, there’s an approve and reject button on the wall that goes over the intercom of the entire building like, “Hey guys, we got a new flavor.” That’s a terrible Jerry impersonation. But you get the idea of, you know, it’s like, just kind of a way for us to let everyone know if we have an approved or a not approved flavor.

And it’s just a fun way to include people and bring that “Ben and Jerry” sense to everything.

Emily Smith

We literally use it. 

Claire Craig 

Teamwork truly does make the ice cream dream work. Okay. Last question for both of you. How would you say bringing a flavor to life makes teamwork stronger? 

Emily Smith

When I think about teamwork, I think the bedrock of great teamwork is trust.

I think to make a flavor come to life, you have to trust all of the pieces to come together, right? You can’t do something on your own. If I just decided I wanna launch a iced oat milk latte flavor, and I was like, “I’m gonna do it all myself,” it would absolutely not work. It would probably taste horrible, and yeah, it would be bad.

I think just having that element of trust is key, and so the fact that we’re able to launch so many amazing products every single year and do it so successfully is truly just representative of the trust that we all have in each other, and that’s how we can get amazing things done. 

Chris Rivard

Yeah, I would agree. I think trust is key in trusting in expertise, right? Trusting that I know Emily can do what she needs to do to sell and create a concept for an amazing flavor. And she knows that my team can deliver that, can create it and make it from scratch, and work with the factories and trust that we all can work within our own specialty with other people.

I also think for us it’s, it’s about being fun and creative. I’m not gonna lie, there’s a lot of really hard work, right? It’s like any job, there’s a ton of work and stress and things to do, but at the same time, there’s a ton of fun. So we’re always looking for ways to connect together. Like I said, I really wasn’t joking to find reasons to eat and to enjoy. 

So the R&D team especially, we’re always cooking, inviting people in, and creating that teamwork where people can just relax. They can have a stressful day and a stressful week, and then know that there’s something fun to just kind of no agenda, but just really to be together and ind of enjoy each other’s company.

Claire Craig 

Emily, Chris, thank you so much for being here. It’s crazy to think about how many hands have to touch a pint of ice cream before I take a bite. 

We’ve also learned that the flavor journey is a labor of love, and failure is a part of the journey. Don’t be afraid to take risks, have fun, and be playful doing the work. And we can’t forget about the importance of trusting your teammates. 

So whenever I go and grab my favorite Phish Food, I’ll be thinking about you two. 

I’m Claire Craig, and thanks to all of you for listening.

This is the Power of Teamwork brought to you by Adobe. To learn more about the Ben & Jerry’s team, visit teamworkbyadobe.com.