Bennett Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream

Ben & Jerry’s Homemade ice cream has been pleasing customers since 1978. It is one of the most famous products to come from Vermont.

Bennett Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951 and grew up in Merrick, Long Island. His parents were Irving and Frances Cohen.

As a high-school senior he got a job selling ice-cream from a truck in various neighborhoods in Merrick on Long Island where he grew up.

He eventually enrolled at Colgate University, but dropped out after a year and a half. He then attended Skidmore College, where he studied pottery and jewelry making.

After leaving Skidmore, he returned to New York City and continue studying ceramics while working a variety of part-time jobs including taxi-driver, delivery person and hospital emergency-room clerk.

In 1977, Ben left the school, and decided to go into business with an old high school friend, Jerry Greenfield.

They planned make and sell bagels, but when they learned how expensive the machinery would be, Ben and Jerry decided to try selling ice cream instead. So they took a correspondence course from Pennsylvania State University in ice-cream making.

A few months later they were selling Ben & Jerry’s homemade ice cream from a converted gas station in downtown Burlington. In 1981 the company opened a larger packing facility in South Burlington as well as its first franchise store in nearby Shelburne.
Bennett Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream

Henry Parsons Crowell (1855–1944)

Henry Parsons Crowell was born on January 27th, 1855. He was the son of a Cleveland grocer and he attended the Greylock Institute (Williamstown, MA), but withdrew after contracting tuberculosis in 1873.

Henry Parsons Crowell was known internationally as founder of the Quaker Oats Company. In 1881 Crowell bought an oat mill in nearby Ravenna, Ohio, that had the latest technology for processing oats (including a patent on a device for cutting oats) so that they could be cooked in mush less time than previous methods.

The mill became the first in the world to maintain under one roof operations to grade, clean, hull, cut, package and ship oatmeal to interstate markets in continuous process that in some aspect anticipate the modern assembly line.

Another asset of the Ravenna oat mill was trademark: the figure of a man dressed in old-fashioned Quaker garb and holding a scroll bearing the word “PURE”. In 1877 it became the first registered trademark for a breakfast cereal.

Crowell liked the trademark and promptly named his company Quaker Mill. His shrewd business sense and marketing genius brought him to the highest levels in business. Crowell served as president and chairman of the board of the Quaker Mill, and its successor corporations American Cereal and later Quaker Oats through 1942.
Henry Parsons Crowell (1855–1944)

Milton S. Hershey (1857-1945)

Milton S. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, in Derry Church, Pennsylvania, into a Mennonite family descended form immigrants from Germany and Switzerland. Like many people of that time, Hershey had little formal education.

His formal education ended in the fourth grade and he became an apprentice to Joseph R. Royer, a well-known candy maker in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

At the age nineteen Hershey attempted to start his own candy business, but failed six years later.

He went to work for a caramel maker, learned the business and tried to open his own caramel store, but it, too failed.

In 1886, he opened another caramel business, Lancaster Caramel Company in Pennsylvania. One day an English importer came to town and tasted Hershey’s Crystal A milk caramels and marvel of marvels, placed an order, the first large order the company had received. His business soon employed 1100 people.

After visiting Chicago World’s Fair Columbian Exposition in 1893, he purchased some machines from Germany and began experimenting with different recipes of making chocolate. 

At first he simply chocolate-coated his caramels, then later added novelties like chocolate cigars and cigarettes.

He hired chocolate makers and in 1903, he began producing milk chocolate under the Hershey name. 

Hershey sold his caramel company to the American Caramel Company for $1 million but retained the chocolate company.

Hershey’s main products were the Hershey’s Bar, which he launched in 1900, and Hershey’s Kisses launched in 1907.

He brought Mr. Goodbar to market in 1925, Hershey’s Syrup in 1920, chocolate chips in 1928, and Crackle in 1938.
Milton S. Hershey (1857-1945)

Henry John Heinz (1844-1919)

Henry John Heinz founded and built up one of the largest food products corporations in the word, and in doing so created one of the greatest brand names of all time.

Henry John Heinz was born in Pittsburgh on 11 October 1844m but grew up in nearly Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania. Young Henry John Heinz began his food marketing career with a garden plot at his western Pennsylvania home. He was selling his produce at the age of eight and in his teens hired several subordinates to help him cultivate and distribute his products.

After some business college training, he worked at his father’s brickyard, but returned to food production in 1869.

 By the time he was in his early twenties Heinz was running a small but highly profitable business and beginning to specialize in the growing and production of horseradish.

Heinz expanded quickly into other products such as vinegar, pickles and sauerkraut and branched out as far afield as Chicago and St Louis. Heinz struggled through the depression of the 1870s, but the company he formed with a brother and a cousin had become quite healthy by the end of the decade.

The new firm invested in new food production equipment, in particular for the newly invented processes of preserving food in tinned metal containers. He reorganized it into the H. J Heinz Co. in the late 1880s. Heinz was one of the first to realize the vast potential of the newly invented process for preserving food in tinned metal containers and in 1881 made further investments in this technology.
Henry John Heinz (1844-1919)

Freddy Heineken (1923-2002)

Born on November 4, 1923, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the son of Henry Pierre and Carla Heineken, Alfred Henry Heineken was always destined to work for the company that his grandfather had started in 1863.

Entering the company Heineken on June 1, 1941, during the Germany occupation of the country, Freddy was keen in advertising the product and he did so actively and passionately.

The company was founded in 1864 by his grandfather Gerard Adriaan Heineken but his son and successor, Henry Pierre, sold the family’s majority stake in 1942. And Freddy always wanted to buy it back. This he managed in 1954 when he bought it by establishing Heineken Holdings, of which he held a majority stake and he used this to buy 50.005 percent of the shares in Heineken International.

Within ten years he was financial director and also took charge of marketing and advertising, later culminating in the hugely successful campaign centered on the slogan ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,’ originally voiced for television by Danish entertainer Victor Borge.

As chairman of the board of directors of the company from 1971 until his resignation in 1989, he helped expand the company considerably. Freddy ran the company with a beady eye for the main chance, increasing its sales dramatically both at home and abroad.

In 2002, his daughter Charlene Lucille de Carvalho -Heineken inherited his shares in the brewery, becoming the riches Dutch persons.
Freddy Heineken (1923-2002)

Kintarō Hattori (1860 - 1934)

Kintarō Hattori was the son of a trader established in Tokyo. He had both commercial and technical training.

At the age thirteen he entered a textile company and was engaged the following year by Kobayashi Denjiro, one of the main watch and clock traders in Japan who gave him technical education.

Hattori began his career by opening his own time piece shop in 1881. At that time, it operated as a trading company which imported Swiss-made watches. Seizing every opportunity that came his way, this Japanese business visionary soon moved into wholesaling, direct and tradinghouse importing, and independent manufacturing.

Hattori started making his own timepieces in 1892 by building a small, experimental production facility. The next year he geared up and built a true factory in Honjo Yanagishima and named the organization Seiko.

His watches were so well made that they were given as gifts by the Imperial Household. He named his watches Seiko meaning “precision,” a name and a reputation they have maintained.

When the First World War started in 1914 Seiko benefited greatly from the earlier dominance of German alarm clocks on the British and French markets: British and French order switched to Japan.
Kintarō Hattori (1860 - 1934)

Raymond Albert Kroc: true founder of McDonald’s

Raymond Albert "Drew Engels" Kroc (October 5, 1902 – January 14, 1984) was an American businessman and philanthropist.

In 1917, the United States entered World War I. Though he was just 15, Ray wanted to help the war effort. He lied about his age and joining the American Red Cross and trained to become ambulance driver.

The true founder of the McDonald’s chain, Ray Kroc, was originally a purveyor of the Multimixer automatic milkshake mixer. Ray Kroc mortgaged his home and invested his entire life savings to become the exclusive distributor of a five-spindled milk shake maker called the Multimixer. He had sold Multimixers to many fast food franchisee including Dairy Queen and Tastee-Freez.

In 1954 he went to see the McDonald brothers at their drive in restaurant in San Bernadino California, where, he had heard they had eight of his mixing machine in constant use – obviously indicating a large business volume. He was 52 years old.

Kroc met with the bothers and promptly proposed an agreement allowing him to sell McDonald’s franchises nationwide. The brothers agreed, with the proviso that all franchises adhere exactly to their model, a concession Kroc readily accepted.

In 1955, Kroc created McDonald’s System, Inc, and sold himself the first franchise, which opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in 1955. It was intended to be a model operation that would attract potential franchise purchasers.

Ray Kroc’s business ability made McDonald’s the largest restaurant company in the world. There are now more than thirty thousand McDonald’s restaurants on six continents.

McDonald’s made Kroc a wealthy man. Over the years, Kroc donated much money to help children and families in need. He was a major donor to the Dartmouth Medical School.
Raymond Albert Kroc: true founder of McDonald’s

Jim Clark of Netscape

Jim Clark was born in Plainview, Texas, in 1944. When he was fourteen, Jim’s mother, Hazel divorced his father.

Hazel recognized very early that Jim was bought. At the age of four, he was able to memorize very long nursery rhymes. He was suspended from high school ‘for antics such as sneaking in whiskey on a band trip’ but eventually earned a master’s degree in physics from Louisiana State University (1971) and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah (1974).

 Jim Clark was the founder of Silicon Graphics in 1982, a company that specialized in high performance computing. In 1994, he left the company. Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded an Internet company called Mosaic Communications Corporation in mid-1994.

It didn’t take long for them to create a new product which they called Netscape. Clark developed a pricing structure. Nescafe Navigator 1.0 was launched in December 1994, and at that time there was no real competition in the browser market.

When Jim Clark decided to take Netscape public just 18 months after forming the company on 1994, despite it having no profits and no revenue to speak of, he rewrote the laws of capitalist. He was the first new economy entrepreneur to show that a company’s potential for massive growth was more critical factor in its value than the need to show real or imminent profits.
Jim Clark of Netscape

Henry Robinson Luce

The last of the old-time press Barons, Henry Robinson Luce (April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) was born in China where his parents serving as Presbyterian missionaries. With a Yale classmate, Briton Hadden, Luce started Time magazine.

He spent nearly all of his youth in China – the family fled to Korea during the Boxer Rebellion and he spent a year in the United Sates as a young boy – where he imbibed his parent’s missionary ethic of service and education.

Time Inc. was founded in 1922 with a small share subscription of USD$85, 675 in order to publish a newly created magazine called Time.

Time Inc. was incorporated on November 28, 1922. Time was the first weekly news magazine of its kind. It was launched in 1923, proved enormously successful because it was the first publication to give comprehensive, of superficial, commentary on national and international news every week.

In 1930, Luce started Fortune magazine. Time Inc. enjoyed continuing financial success during the 1930s, despite launching Fortune magazine four months after the stock market crash. The company added Life to its Fortune and Time magazine roster in 1936.

After earning a fortune from these media enterprises, Luce formed the foundation in honor of his parents and to support projects in education, policy and theology.
Henry Robinson Luce

Marc Andreessen (Netscape)

Marc Andreessen was born in a small town and went to a college surrounded by farms. March was born on July 9 1971, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Marc and his family moved to New Lisbon, Wisconsin, when Marc was about two years old.

Marc was fascinated by computers from an early age. When Marc was nine, he taught himself to program computers using books he checked out of the library. Marc was a National merit Scholar in high school and knew that college was his ticket out of New Lisbon.

Marc encountered the Web shortly after it was introduced in1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. Marc is the man who invented the first widely used web browser and it was called Mosaic, which later became Netscape Navigator.

Much of the work that went into creating those browser in now present in Firefox. Marc made the World Wide Web consumer friendly, with his graphical Netscape Web browser. In the mid 1990s, he went on to challenge Microsoft for dominance on the new frontier of e-commerce.
Marc Andreessen (Netscape)

Charles F. Erhart

German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart (1821-1891) founded Pfizer in 1849.

Erhart at that time age twenty-eight together with his cousin Charles Pfizer emigrated from Ludwigsburg, Germany to the United States in 1848.

Unlike many German immigrants at the time who immediately joined the Gold Rush, Erhart and his cousin decided to stay in New York City and make living by taking advantage of the crafts that they learned in Germany. They came from well-to-do families saw America as a land of opportunity.

Charles had learned chemistry as an apothecary’s apprentice and Erhart was confectioner, a trade he learned from his uncle.

With $2,500 borrowed from Pfizer’s father and a $1,000, Erhart and his cousin bought a small brick factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, large a German neighborhood. In 1849, their first year in America, they founded a chemical firm Charles Pfizer & Company, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.

Their plant turned out additives for food, soft drinks and medicine. The company became the focal point for the mass production of penicillin, the drug that saved the lives and limbs of countless American soldiers of World War II.

Charles Erhart died in 1891 and left his interest in the partnership, worth nearly $250,000 to his son William.
Charles F. Erhart

Edward Robinson Squibb

Edward Robinson Squibb (July 4, 1819 – October 25, 1900) devoted his career to the struggle for purity and consistency in medicines. He was born on 4 July 1819, in Wilmington, Delaware, to James Squibb and Catherine Harrison Bonsall Squibb, who were devout Quakers.

Edward Robinson Squibb

In 1842 Squibb fulfilled his dram of studying medicine, entering Jefferson Medical College. He emerged three years later with an MD. In 1847 Squib became an assistant surgeon with the US Navy. After several years Squib decided to leave nary for private industry.

He formed a pharmaceutical company on Furman Street after witnessing firsthand the poor quality of available drugs while a Brooklyn Navy Yard medical officer. The US army had indicated that it would order the bulk of its drugs from him one he was open for business.

He dedicated Squibb to the production of ‘consistently pure medicines’ a cause that claimed his lifelong interest.

Only two years later he developed the first reliable ether for anesthesia, which the Union Army employed during the Civil War. The company enjoyed respectable growth and the company expanded into South America and Europe.
Edward Robinson Squibb