Ben & Jerry’s founder launches marijuana brand, will donate all profits

While it likely won’t be as tasty as Ben & Jerry’s, one of the company’s co-founders has scooped his way to a marijuana business venture, with plans to divide its profits among organizations that advocate for racial equality and support those imprisoned for cannabis-related offenses.

Ben’s Best Blnz, also known as B3, is a nonprofit cannabis brand introduced by Ben Cohen that offers full-spectrum vapes and pre-rolls with low THC levels. According to Fast Company, Cohen aims to use the brand’s platform as a conduit for what he calls “social benefit,” much like his ice cream-related ventures.

“The idea came about when I was on a camping trip with a friend of mine, sitting around a fire, smoking a joint,” Cohen said, Fast Company reports. “And we were saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have pot like the old days?'” 

Ben & Jerry’s co-founders Ben Cohen (right) and Jerry Greenfield (left) serve ice cream in Washington, D.C., in 2019 following a press conference announcing a new flavor, Justice Remix’d. Cohen recently launched Ben’s Best Blnz, or B3, which is a nonprofit cannabis brand that offers full-spectrum vapes and pre-rolls with low THC levels. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Ten percent of B3’s profits will go to the Last Prisoner Project, which works to free people imprisoned due to cannabis prohibition, and the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance — whose goal is to, in part, “provide security for American Descendants of Slavery” — also will receive 10 percent. 

The Drug Policy Alliance, the organization Cohen says aims to close the enormous wealth gap between generations created due to systematic discrimination against Black people in the United States, will manage the remaining 80 percent.

“The average Black family has 1/10th the wealth of a white family,” Cohen said, Fast Company reported. “I feel like business ownership is one of the best routes to generational wealth.”

Cohen created the company’s visual identity, including the packaging, website and merchandise, in collaboration with Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and Jack Collins.

As a Black designer aware of the cannabis industry’s whitewashed makeup, Opara was mindful of including other Black creators in developing the brand’s visual language.

Opara hired Dana Robinson — whose Ebony Reprinted series transforms 1950s and 1960s magazine advertisements into monoprints — to produce a fresh piece for B3 using a suit ad set in an ice cream shop, a nod to Cohen’s roots. The new piece graces the packaging of one of the cannabis products.

Opara also produced a work of art available for purchase on the website, showing a Black man donning an orange prison jumpsuit who has purple hyacinths for hair and other flowers for his face. The designer says the hyacinth is a flower that “symbolizes a sense of forgiveness, innocence, joy, and beauty,” and he wanted that to be featured on a Black male.

Activist Angela Davis, who is a proponent of prison abolition, and the late, great former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, have quotations printed on the tins for B3’s low THC pre-rolls, featured on both the website and product packaging. Opara says the “authentic embossing” and the strength of the quotes together produce “something to treasure, something you remember.”

The slogan on B3’s HiTest Bud jars — “Take Pot Off Schedule 1, or Put Beer On It” — alludes to marijuana’s designation as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

Cohen refers to former President Richard Nixon’s anti-drug campaign, which disproportionately targeted Black people and contributed to the nation’s present problem of mass incarceration. Historically, Black people were arrested for using cannabis at four times the rate of their white counterparts.

As the brand aims to eventually bring other Black artists into the fold for packaging and merch, B3’s products have evolved into mobile campaigns for decarceration, expungement and de-scheduling to, as it says its mission, “sell Great Pot and use the power of Business to Right the Wrongs of the War on Drugs.” 

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