A “Certified B Corporation”—equally dedicated to social welfare as well as business growth—and possibly the nicest guys on the planet, Ben & Jerry’s is one of the miniscule number of companies to receive a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign.

Renowned for its delicious ice cream flavors (usually given names with absurd puns, like their eternal favorite “Cherry Garcia”), the company was founded by (and named after) two childhood friends from Long Island, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who had moved to Vermont. In 1978, after taking a correspondence course in ice-cream making, the duo opened their first store in an abandoned gas station in Burlington. Cohen suffers from a medical condition where his sense of taste is severely limited, and must rely on texture—inspiring the wide variety of chunks that usually pack th...