Business Reimagined: Should Firms Have a Purpose Beyond Profit? (Ben & Jerry’s Ben Cohen)

Radical with Amol Rajan

BBC

Society & Culture

4.5 • 919 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amol is back from his stint in the Celebrity Traitors castle. He speaks to Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, about what took the ice cream company from a single store in rural America into a billion-dollar business.

Ben Cohen argues that most corporations have trained people to believe profit and purpose are from separate worlds – while he says that a company’s values should be as important to its mission as making money. Cohen makes the case that consumers are not just shoppers – they are citizens with wallets.

He criticises companies that pay lip-service to that through short-term social media campaigns backing the trendy topic of the day, without embedding those values into their business model. But in an age when many companies are dropping their principles when the politics changes, can business really be a force for good – or does purpose melt away when profits are at stake?

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Episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan are released every Thursday.

Amol Rajan presents the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and hosts University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was the BBC’s media editor and the editor of The Independent newspaper.

Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast. It was made by Tom Smithard and Oscar Pearson. Digital production was by Leona Gasper. Technical production was by Mike Regaard. The editor is Sam Bonham.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.7	Just before we get into this week's episode with the remarkable Ben Cohen, one half of Ben and Jerry's,
0:11.8	I want to tell you about who's coming up next week on this podcast and ask for your questions for Kate Rayworth,
0:18.8	the economist, author of Donate Economics, loads and loads and
0:21.8	loads of you have asked for her to come on as a guest and we listen to you as much as you
0:25.5	listen to us. So Kate Rayworth is coming on. Send us your questions about all manner of economic
0:30.1	issues. The number is on WhatsApp 03310-123-9480.03-3-130-1-2-9-4-80.
0:39.7	And email us on Radical at BBC.com.
0:42.2	You said you wanted her to come on, and she's coming on, so we want your questions.
0:50.3	Now, didn't they do well, as Bruce Forsyfe used to say on the Generation Game,
1:00.8	that was my childhood Saturday night, goodness me, the conveyor belt, didn't they do well?
1:04.6	The stand-ins, but they weren't stand-ins, they were just direct replacement substitutes,
1:08.7	who presented this podcast while I was in a certain Scottish
1:12.7	Castle filming a show called Traitors or Celebrity Traitors, which you'll see later this year.
1:18.5	I'm tempted to tell you what happened, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to because I'm not
1:21.8	allowed to. But I would like to say a huge thank you to Eliza Filby, Dr. Eliza Filby, to Ollie Dougmore and John
1:29.6	Burn Murdoch, because to an extent that I'm slightly disappointed and alarmed by,
1:34.4	they were absolutely magnificent. And I listened to all three of those episodes, and they were
1:38.3	really, really good. So while I hope you missed me, I hope you listened to those episodes as well.
1:43.7	Thank you to Eliza, to Ollie and torne Murdoch. Now, just before I introduced today's remarkable guest, and it's a fantastic conversation, you're going to be so into it. I just want to say something about the word radical. I think social psychologists call this the availability heuristic or confirmation bias.
2:01.6	Like when you're, I'm told when you become pregnant, if you're lucky enough to get pregnant,
2:05.5	suddenly everywhere you look, there's lots and lots of pregnant people.
	...

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