Ben And Jerry's

Economies of scope within Ben & Jerry’s can also be identified in their large variety of flavours. They currently offer 55 different and unique flavours (benjerry.com, 2015) which give them a competitive advantage in the market as they are relatively hard to imitate and they appeal to a large array of customers. Nevertheless, ice cream is not the only product Ben & Jerry’s offer, an additional part of their product portfolio consists of sorbet, frozen yoghurt, ice cream bars, milkshakes, smoothies and sundaes. Therefore, Ben & Jerry’s products fall under the category of related diversification since as previously mentioned regarding ice cream and sorbet, “the joint production of two goods is less costly than the cost of producing those two …show more content…
Subsequent to this, problems arose when the firm began growing at a fast rate, almost too fast for them to cope with, which pushed Ben & Jerry’s into an imbalance with the workflow and their sales. It was even stated by Ben Cohen himself that “Growing is dying” (Entrepreneur, 2008). In 1986, Ben & Jerry’s was struggling to keep up with the demand for their premium ice cream, and as a response they decided to outsource some of their ice cream production and distribution to Dreyer’s ice-cream (Richards, 2015). When Ben & Jerry’s were struggling with financial issues, the distribution agreement between Dreyer’s and Ben & Jerry’s was terminated during the late 1990’s after Dreyer’s behaved opportunistically and made a failed attempt to buy out Ben & Jerry’s (Johannes, 1998). The aforementioned challenges within Ben & Jerry’s were some of the main factors that led Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to sell the company to Unilever. As a result, Ben & Jerry’s became a subsidiary of the British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever (Caligiuri, 2012) and thereby part of Unilever’s diversification strategy (Unilever (They own Ben & Jerry’s!),