Co-founder and namesake Jerry Greenfield has resigned from Ben & Jerry’s, the outspokenly political Vermont-based ice cream firm. It’s the newest escalation in a collection of disagreements between Ben & Jerry’s and its father or mother firm Unilever.
The information was introduced in an open letter printed early on Wednesday to co-founder Ben Cohen’s social media channels. It learn partly: “It’s with a damaged coronary heart that I’ve determined I can now not, in good conscience, and after 47 years, stay an worker of Ben & Jerry’s. I’m resigning from the corporate Ben and I began again in 1978. This is without doubt one of the hardest and most painful selections I’ve ever made.”
Greenfield cited the worsening relationship between Ben & Jerry’s and its father or mother firm Unilever as his purpose for resigning. Unilever acquired the ice cream firm in 2000 in a transfer that induced some to accuse Ben & Jerry’s — which has lengthy prioritized social justice and human rights in its branding and operations — of promoting out. The merger settlement allowed Ben & Jerry’s some degree of independence, together with retaining its personal impartial board of administrators that had the liberty to pursue and assist Ben & Jerry’s social mission.
On the time of the Unilever acquisition, a assertion from Ben & Jerry’s reps promised that its social mission can be “inspired and well-funded” by Unilever. Greenfield claims in his present letter that “[this] independence, the very foundation of our sale to Unilever” is now “gone.”
Lately, Ben & Jerry’s has accused Unilever of failing to “acknowledge and respect” its social mission and model integrity. In November 2024, Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit in opposition to Unilever alleging that Unilever had failed to stick to the contractual obligations of the merger settlement, by suppressing the model’s public posts on political points together with assist of visas for Palestinian refugees and pro-Palestine campus protests and criticism of President Trump.
Unilever is within the means of spinning off its ice cream portfolio into The Magnum Ice Cream Firm in a cost-saving maneuver. Within the midst of this rearrangement of possession, Cohen and Greenfield introduced a brand new effort: Free Ben & Jerry’s, which seeks to “free Ben & Jerry’s from Magnum” by permitting it to function, as soon as once more, as an independently owned firm.
A letter from Cohen and Greenfield to Magnum Ice Cream Firm’s board members argues that whereas Magnum could also be a brand new firm, it retains the Unilever legacy and “the historical past of its actions in opposition to Ben & Jerry’s.” Greenfield’s legacy “deserves to be true to the values we based this firm on, not silenced by @magnum,” Cohen wrote in his Instagram caption. As Cohen and Greenfield write of their letter to the board, Ben & Jerry’s power “lies within the authenticity of its values and its voice, whether or not in opposing crimes in opposition to humanity, talking out in opposition to white supremacy, supporting marriage equality, demanding local weather justice, or insisting that companies have duties past profitability.” These actions, they write, are accomplished “out of loyalty to the tens of millions of people that see Ben & Jerry’s as a standard-bearer for integrity in enterprise.”
There was an outpouring of assist for Ben & Jerry’s in response to the information. One of many prime feedback on Cohen’s Instagram publish reads: “Make a special ice cream. We’ll all purchase it.”
