Jason Clay has worn many hats throughout his professional career, but perhaps none of them is more important than the one he wore as a kid growing up on a farm in Missouri.
“I grew up on less than $1 a day for 15 years as a farm kid in the U.S.,” he recalled. Growing up in rural Middle America made him a conservationist. “I hunted three days a week from the age of 7. I knew which animals to shoot and which animals to leave to reproduce so we have more in the future. You know that stuff instinctively.”
Fast-forward several years to the late 1980s when the farm kid from Missouri met a man named Ben at a Grateful Dead benefit concert. The two exchanged ideas on environmental conservation and within a year the Rainforest Crunch ice cream flavor was in grocery store refrigerator aisles throughout the U.S. The nuts that went into the ice cream were sourced from the Brazilian Amazon as a way to demonstrate that tropical forests can be more valuable as standing sources of food supply than as deforested pasture land. Ben was, of course, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.