Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand, has stepped down from the company he started 47 years ago citing a retreat from its campaigning spirit under parent company Unilever.
Greenfield wrote in an open letter late Tuesday night — shared on X by his co-founder Ben Cohen — that he could no longer “in good conscience” remain an employee of the company and said the company had been “silenced.”
He said the company’s values and campaigning work on “peace, justice, and human rights” allowed it to be “more than just an ice cream company” and said the independence to pursue this was guaranteed when Anglo-Dutch packaged food giant Unilever bought the brand in 2000 for $326 million.
Cohen’s statement didn’t mention Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza, but Ben & Jerry’s has been outspoken on the treatment of Palestinians for years and in 2021 withdrew sales from Israeli settlements in what it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Hopefully, they will build a successor to the brand. (Un?)fortunately, B&J’s Cream probably isn’t in the cards.
Setting aside the puerile humor, Greenfield & Cohen’s, perhaps?
They should be able to afford the bagel oven now.
I met Jerry during the Bernie campaign. He was serving ice cream to campaign volunteers. He’s a nice man.
They both came to the Occupy camp I was at and handed out free ice cream.
Unfortunately all good things come to an end in America. They get bought out by a company who only cares about the rich and their shareholders and hate their customers.
We are all stuck in a cycle that will never change unless a giant meteor hits or something. No good deed goes unpunished in a capitalist country.
Unilever has owned B&J’s for quite some time now.
I just looked it up, Unilever bought them in April of 2000. That’s over 25 years ago. Part of that merger was an agreement that B&J’s could still be vocal about things, and it looks like Unilever has tried to go back on that several times.
Important caveat: IANAL.
I’ve seen elsewhere the response to the Ben and Jerry’s news hitting basically boiling down to “fucking cry about it sell outs, you got into bed with Unilever”. Which, sure, fine if that’s your (general “you”, not you specifically OP) perspective, far be it from me to yuck your yums. That being said, according to the AP article I read, they carved out (or attempted to) the right to continue to manage the social justice aspect of the Ben and Jerry’s brand without interference, in perpetuity, as a condition of the sale. As I understand it, Unilever has done a number of things to erode those carveouts, basically by repeatedly spinning off portions of the business into new companies, which they argue are not beholden to that agreement. For example, despite Ben and Jerry’s public support of Palestine and objection to their products being sold in Israel, Unilever simply licensed the product to Israeli manufacturers who sell it under their own brand names. Additionally, and this is what appears to be what precipitated this departure, they are now spinning all of their frozen confectionary brands off into something like Magnum Foods (because the two things I want to have on my mind while looking for ice cream are guns and condoms).
Like, I understand anyone who looks at the hundreds of millions that these guys received in 2000 and has difficulty mustering sympathy for their plight. That being said, I don’t begrudge them their pay day. They said, at the time, that the partnership would enable them to extend their social justice campaigns beyond what they could do as independents. From what I’ve seen, they’ve largely lived up to that over the ensuing years.
Yeah. They tried to have it both ways, though, and a corporate giant like Unilever was never going to let that go on forever.
Dabbling in stocks and as I grow older and working longer under a corporation, I realised it’s hard to be ethical in a capitalist system.
A capitalist system is designed to prevent from acting based on ethics.
Yup. Chase what’s right and moral or chase money. They don’t overlap often.
Why are so many people here mad at Ben and Jerry while they tried to do the best they could?
The decision to sell sounds a lot more grey than comments are playing it off as. If people want to debate if they ever should have taken the company public that’s one thing, but B&J seem to have tried to make the best of their financial and legal situations while being beholden to shareholders, and laws that would have helped prevent being sold to Unilever didn’t exist in Vermont until over a decade after the sale.
Instead of being forcefully bought out, removed by Unilever, and had all their social agendas canceled immediately, they made a deal to continue to be able to serve in some capacity after the acquisition. They remained active with the company for 25 years, so they seemed to do a lot with their “empty promise” they were given by Unilever.
This is the summary I read on the story of their sale to Unilever. It doesn’t really support one side or the other, so take what you will from it, but treating them like jerks really doesn’t feel called for.
Did you even read the article you linked? It literally argues against your point.
The literal first sentence of the article is:
Contrary to myth, the sale of Ben & Jerry’s to corporate giant Unilever wasn’t legally required.
And further down:
This article aims to dispel the idée fixe that corporate law compelled Ben & Jerry’s directors to accept Unilever’s rich offer, overwhelming Cohen and Greenfield’s dogged efforts to maintain the company’s social mission and independence.
Yet in the end, Ben & Jerry’s directors chose to accept a generous offer, even at a cost to the social mission, rather than allow the company’s defenses to be tested. Anti-takeover protections are only as effective as the people positioned to use them.
I did, and that was why I felt it was a decent source.
The article is dispelling the part of the mythos, created by the public with some help from Ben and Jerry, that the sale was purely a legal issue of that they were forced to sell due to (mistakenly, according to the author’s take) believing they had to do what the majority of shareholders wanted them to do, which was to sell to Unilever, as their stock had lost 50% of its previous value.
That may be true or not, I’m not a business lawyer. But the law itself wasn’t so much the interest I had in this source. With it being written as a legal paper, I’m going to lean that the background they are giving is pretty impartial facts on what actually did take place. The history of the sale and why it occured is what is relevant to the point I’m attempting to make here, disagreeing with people say Ben and Jerry deserved this treatment from Unilever for being sellouts. That’s a moral and ethical argument, not a legal one, so all the legal stuff here is moot to the conversation I’m having.
The Ben and Jerry’s shareholder and Unilever prior to the buyout both wanted to ax the social missions of the founders to keep those profits for themselves. In response, they reached what they felt was a deal beneficial to all 3 parties, themselves, the shareholders, and Unilever, who was going to buy the company one way or another. In return for cooperation, Ben and Jerry ensured their social programs lived for another 25 years. My thoughts are that is a positive accomplishment and that rather than being greedy stakeholders, they extended their contributions to the betterment of society, while making Unilever do that, the exact opposite of what they would have done on their own. You guys want to crap on them, but they did an additional quarter century of good, at least partly at the expense of a megacorp that would not have done so. This is the kind of thing all you guys cheer here, but when executives do what you talk of doing, you still badmouth them.
Leftists have no bigger enemy than gatekeeping leftists. Ben and Jerry have given over $70,000,000 away, and I’m sure a good chunk of that was taken out of Unilever at this point. How’s that a dick move on their part?
I mean, the first mistake was trusting a pinkie promise from a megacorp like Unilever. Maybe they shouldn’t have sold their brand?
Yeah. This is surprised Pikachu material.
They should’ve made the company into a worker owned cooperative, but they prioritized personal profit.
Exactly.
They maximized profit just like all the other corporations. They’re nothing special and neither is their ice cream.
Now announcing Unilever™'s Ben & Jerry’s newest ice cream
Double-Tap Flavor Bomb! Vanilla swirled with Caramel and Salty Crunchy Peanut Clusters
It’ll be unveiled to the Palestinian people in Gaza in the middle of that big clearing surrounded by IDF soldiers with guns
And we’re going to have Sugar Bombs coming to a store near you!
Given it’s soap company, Tide Pod flavor makes sense.
Hello kiddo!
Yom HaZikaron!
It’s a fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-Flavour Bomb!
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He should haven’t sold the company. Even if that was guaranteed as part of the sale, he is looking at a decade of legal battles.
They sold out. They can wipe their tears with cash.
With a net worth of 150 million dollars, maybe he could go make his own ice cream store and campaign from that platform? And then not sell out to a giant megacorp and act surprised then they do mega corpo stuff.
It’s likely that the sale included clauses that they could not make a competing ice cream brand. That kind of stuff is common for brands that are based on personality or name recognition like Ben & Jerry’s.
Yeah you’re probably right. Bad move on his part if he wanted to avoid this.
Unilever the never-left-russia-still-there-today Unilever?
You didn’t have to sell it to them asshole
Fuck Ben & Jerry. They were bankrolling campaign against supply of military equipment to Ukraine.
I don’t agree with it, but it’s a pacifist viewpoint consistent with free speech.
There is nothing pacifist with letting russians genocide Ukrainians freely. We already saw what happens when USA stops military aid, russia goes on offensive emboldened by such actions.
This post’s comments showcases the bad part of the left. The part thats no difference from MAGA, ugly and pointing fingers at something for a distraction. But instead theyre MALA, make America left again with even more political correctness.
I feel it more wanting to see it as a black and white issue than something with a ton of nuance. This deal had to have been complex, and for whatever reason they willingly sold to Unilever, I doubt any of us commenting here will ever understand. I wouldn’t want to be in their situation.
If people want to point out areas where they think they could have done better, let’s discuss it. But all we tend to get is “rich people bad.” I won’t totally disagree with that statement, but it seems like they have also done a lot of good for Vermont and beyond. They’ve given over 70 million in grants, but so what, right? Why not 71 million?!
I just think we’ve got better people to be mad at now than some hippies that went corporate. To just write off what they did because they got personal benefits as well is likely hypocritical. I never see these screen names talking about what direct action they’re part of or what solutions they’ve got. A little funny how that is.
If they want to complain or downvote, that’s their prerogative, but I bet it won’t accomplish as much good as what Ben and Jerry have done. 😉
Companys that were evil back when they sold didnt seem as evil compared to nowadays. I think thats the missing nuance. But i agree wholeheartedly with you.
