I have a question for Ben (Cohen) and Jerry (Greenfield), the men who came up with “ice-cream with a conscience”: cool idea, guys – so why did you ever sell up in the first place? If campaigning for social justice was a main aim of your business, why offload it?
The founders of Ben & Jerry’s have written a furious open letter to investors and the board of the Magnum Ice Cream Company, which is in the process of being demerged from Unilever, the London-listed consumer products giant that bought the brand 25 years ago. The newly independent company will have its shares listed in Amsterdam as the parent reshapes its portfolio. That’s where Ben & Jerry’s – which was founded by a couple of hippies in 1978 in Burlington, Vermont, and sold in 2000 for more than $300m (£221m) – will reside in future.
“We are deeply concerned that the commitments made to us, our employees, and our customers are being eroded. For several years now, the voice of Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced by Unilever, particularly when the brand has tried to speak out about social justice and unjust wars,” says the zinger addressed to Magnum’s board.
“That is not the Ben & Jerry’s that we founded, or the one that we envisioned when we agreed to join Unilever 25 years ago. We no longer believe that Ben & Jerry’s belongs under the umbrella of a corporate entity that fails to support its founding mission, and which is reducing the company’s value by undercutting one of the critical reasons why customers love and support the brand.”
Cohen has suggested that the pair would give back the money they received in the sale if it meant the brand could again be independent.
There is also a website – freebenandjerrys.com – so customers and anyone else with an interest can join the campaign and stay in the loop.
Magnum’s bosses must be cursing Unilever’s failure to gobble up GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer healthcare business a couple of years ago. Had the bid succeeded, they could have asked for a job lot of painkillers to be included as part of the corporate divorce settlement. This promises to cause them a major – and ongoing – PR headache.
The background to this is that when the famously progressive “hippy capitalists”, with their quirky flavours (Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, Phish Food, etc) and fondness for campaigning, sold out to Unilever, they extracted some rather unusual concessions from them.
Among them was that the Vermont-based ice-cream maker (the state’s senator Bernie Sanders is a fan) would be run as a semi-independent part of the group with its own board and the ability to speak out on social causes.
There were also provisions concerning where ingredients would be purchased (milk and cream from the St Albans farm co-operative in Vermont, for example) and some other bits and pieces.
You do rather wonder what Unilever was thinking when it signed up to all that. You could see trouble brewing a mile off in 2000, let alone today. True, it seemed to work at first. Unilever also likes to be seen as cuddly from a corporate perspective, an exemplar of a better sort of capitalism, although whether that’s more than just PR positioning is one for another day.
But make no mistake, the capitalist part is in the driving seat there. Just as it was at Ben & Jerry’s when the $326m sale of the company was agreed (it’s roughly double that in today’s money). If they’d wanted to run the business as an adjunct of, say, the Stop the War coalition, well, they shouldn’t have agreed to the deal. It’s no good crying after the fact.
If they want to “free Ben & Jerry’s”, the best way to do it is to find backers to fund a buyout. Efforts to do that have so far proved unsuccessful. Hence all the noise.
But was it ever really credible to have an ice-cream maker serve as an engine of social justice in the first place? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve indulged in the past and I will do so again. The strawberry cheesecake flavour – a delightful, if rather sickly tub full of icy goo – is a treat.
There’s a reason Ozempic and its weight-loss jab competitors are all the rage right now: the University of Colorado at Boulder says obesity boosts risk of death “by anywhere from 22 per cent to 91 per cent – significantly more than previously believed”.
Here’s the clincher, for those interested in genuine social justice as opposed to the performative variety you’ll find on TikTok. A recent report from WHO/Europe found “alarming disparities in the health of young people across the WHO European region, with those from less affluent families disproportionately affected”.
I could probably fill an entire book with citations like those. Suffice it to say, if progressivism is your thing, you should have the makers of high-fat, high-sugar, unhealthy foods in your sights. Companies like Ben & Jerry’s.
It is a tragedy that children are dying in war zones at this moment in time. Ben and Jerry aren’t wrong on that matter. But it’s no less awful that they are also dying as a result of the complications from obesity.
Perhaps they might like to think about that.
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