this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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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."

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[–] rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 39 points 1 day ago

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?