"We were not constrained by established business rules, because we didn't know what they were. It was hit and miss, trial and error," Greenfield recalled on the phone from Ben & Jerry's headquarters in Burlington, Vt., recently.

"We put our ice cream parlor in a place with a very cold climate with a very short season—you can only sell ice cream about three months in Vermont. When September came along, out of desperation, we began selling to restaurants." And when that wasn't enough, to mom and pops and supermarkets, despite an attempt by competitor Haagen-Dazs (then owned by Pillsbury) to keep them out. Their "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" protest campaign made them famous, although Greenfield says inventing chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream sealed their success.

Greenfield and partner Cohen will be in West Chester Friday to talk about their unconventional path to becoming cover boys of the freezer case (Greenfield's the beardless one on the pints). The highlights include naming Cherry Garcia in honor of their Deadhead days, making the company's annual meeting a picnic highlighted by a sledgehammer-your-partner's-stomach carnival trick Greenfield learned at Oberlin, and, wackiest of all, donating 7.5 percent of pretax profits to charity.

"The conventional wisdom is that you can't be socially responsible and still make money. But the more we supported good causes, the more financially successful we became," Greenfield said.

So financially successful, in fact, that the funky little company was gobbled up by megacorp Unilever in 2000 for a cool $326 million. Given that, do they still have credibility to talk about social responsibility on Friday? Greenfield says yes. The sale was regrettable, he says, but unavoidable considering they were a public company receiving a very generous offer shareholders went for. And so far, at least, Unilever continues to buy growth-hormone-free Vermont milk and cream and to fund Ben & Jerry's nonprofit foundation as much as before.

But what about the ice cream? And the future of fun protests and contests (like 1994's leader-seeking "Yo! I'm Your CEO" essay)? Unilever employee Greenfield won't answer and when pressed on changes will only say, "Even in the old days we looked at financials. But I don't believe we sharpened our pencils nearly as finely."