The Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield has stepped away from the ice-cream brand after nearly 50 years, claiming it has lost its independence and accusing its parent company, Unilever, of having “silenced” its social mission.
Greenfield said in a letter posted by his co-founder, Ben Cohen, that he could no longer “in good conscience” remain an employee of a business that he argued had been muzzled by the UK-listed Unilever, despite an agreement protecting its social mission when it was taken over in 2000.
“It is profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone,” he said. “If the company couldn’t stand up for the things we believed, then it wasn’t worth being a company at all.”
Greenfield, who along with Cohen has no control over operations but had remained an employee to help maintain its founding social mission, called it one of the “hardest and most painful decisions” he had ever made.
Greenfield’s resignation is the latest development in a bitter dispute since Unilever backtracked on an agreement allowing Ben & Jerry’s to not sell ice-cream in occupied Palestinian territories, which had been heavily criticised in Israel.
Unilever subsequently sold Ben & Jerry’s Israel division to a local operator, prompting the ice-cream maker to sue its parent company before reaching a settlement in 2022.
Last year, Ben & Jerry’s launched a legal action against Unilever, accusing it of threatening to dismantle the board and sue directors over their public statements in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
The letter comes as Unilever prepares to spin out its ice-cream division, Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC), which also includes Wall’s, with a main listing in Amsterdam and secondary listings in London and New York.
Before the new business’s first capital markets day last week, Cohen and Greenfield published an open letter to the board and potential investors, calling for the brand to be “released”.
The letter also argued that Unilever’s move to dismantle Ben & Jerry’s social mission had devalued the business.
Cohen and Greenfield have been looking for investors to help them buy the brand back, but Unilever has insisted it is not for sale. Cohen said that, amid tensions with Unilever, the brand had tried to engineer a sale to investors at a fair market value of $1.5bn-$2.5bn (£1.1bn-£1.8bn) but the proposal was rejected.
“The problem is that Unilever and Magnum don’t want to sell, so they are not allowing any of these potential investors to see the financials,” said Cohen.
A spokesperson for TMICC said it would be “forever grateful” to Greenfield for his role co-founding the company, but that the business “disagreed with his perspective” and had sought to engage both co-founders in a “constructive conversation” on how to strengthen the brand.
In May, Cohen was charged with “crowding and obstructing” others after he was arrested while protesting against the Gaza blockade during a US Senate hearing.
Video footage recorded at the hearing and posted by Cohen on social media showed him being hauled out of the committee room, handcuffed and escorted away.
Ben & Jerry’s was founded in 1978 after the two friends took a $5 correspondence course in ice-cream making.
The pair – who met while at school in Merrick, on Long Island in New York – opened their first store in a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, with a mission to “advance human rights and dignity”.
They chose fun, hippy names for their flavours, such as Cherry Garcia, after the late guitarist Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead – and even Cool Britannia.
The company, which from 1985 began donating almost 8% of its annual pre-tax profits to charity, grew to become one of the biggest in the US.
Its transition to mainstream international commercial success attracted the attention of then Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever.
In 2000, Unilever struck a $326m deal to buy the business, a move that at the time reportedly did not please Greenfield, with stipulations including the creation of the brand’s own independent board to allow it to continue to take progressive stances on social and political issues and uphold its core values.
“However much a [formerly] independent company will try to retain its identity and ethos, the corporate [buyer] will invariably call the shots in the long run,” said Nick Stockley, a partner and dispute resolution specialist at the law firm Mayo Wynne Baxter.
