Ben & Jerry's Co-Founder Wants to Be Set Free

I'm really excited to talk to you today.

I actually have,

I came prepared.

I bought an ice cream.

Whoa, nice.

Ice cream for breakfast.

I love it.

I mean, I know, right?

I was like, this is the earliest I've ever had any ice cream.

9:35 in the morning.

Last week, I spoke with Ben Cohen.

He's the co-founder of a pretty popular ice cream brand.

I'm Ben, the co-founder of Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream guy.

Ben and Jerry's is known for its whimsical ice cream flavors, like fish food, chunky monkey, or the one I had for breakfast, half-baked.

Yeah, what I've got here is the half-baked, which is kind of my favorite, but I don't know that I...

Might be a little too much sugar for me in the morning.

Yeah, I gotta be honest.

It is a little bit.

Chicken dough and fudge.

A little sweeter than

even I would prefer, but I don't know.

That's how the heck it worked out.

But half-baked is now the most popular flavor

on the list.

Man, I'm so mainstream.

Yes, you are.

Congratulations.

The other thing that Ben and Jerry's is known for is its politics.

Ben and his business partner, Jerry Greenfield, have always been outspoken on social and political issues, and they made sure their company was too.

One of many examples, Pecan Resist, an ice cream flavor meant to protest President Trump's policies.

Today, Ben Cohen is 74, and he isn't part of Ben ⁇ Jerry's operations anymore.

His official role is co-founder, and he acts as brand ambassador.

Jerry was the same until last month, when after nearly 50 years, Jerry left.

saying that the brand's parent company, Unilever, has been silencing Ben ⁇ Jerry's.

I talked to Ben about Jerry leaving and why Ben is

It was important for Jerry for, you know, his own sanity to resign.

And, you know, I have no problem continuing to fight for justice and, you know, to kind of do what's necessary in order for Ben and Jerry's to be true to its values, you know, especially in these times.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Monday, October 6th.

Coming up on the show, is Ben and Jerry's mission going to melt away?

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When it comes to Ben and Jerry's flavors, I'm apparently mainstream.

But Ben's favorite flavor is pretty niche.

It's called Mocha Walnut.

That's my all-time favorite flavor.

The company hasn't made it for, you know, about 43

years.

What would you say was the worst or the flavor that you really didn't like or maybe regretted making?

Well, in the early, early days, we were making our ice cream in kind of a giant rock salt and ice freezer in the window of the original ice cream shop.

Wow.

And then there was another guy making chocolate chip.

Well, he was making chocolate chip something or other.

And

they got together and they came up with a flavor called lemon peppermint carob chip.

Okay.

And it was a disaster.

It was bad.

Carob, if you didn't know, is kind of like chocolate, but a bit sweeter.

Ben and Jerry have been friends since junior high school.

They founded their ice cream business in a gas station in Vermont in 1978.

We were both very aligned on what we wanted the company to be and, you know, about the about the social mission of the company.

And you know, at the very beginning when it started, we had no intention of becoming a big ice cream company.

We were planning on becoming the little homemade ice cream shop in the old gas station in Burlington, Vermont.

Their ice cream, with its unique combinations of ingredients, became a hit.

The company grew and went public in the 1980s.

And almost from the get-go, Ben and Jerry infused the brand with their personalities.

They were playful, using puns in naming their flavors and referencing jam bands like the Grateful Dead.

They also used the brand to speak up on issues they cared about, like in 1988 when they launched Peace Pops, a chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick, as a way to advocate against U.S.

military spending.

I mean, Ben and Jerry's is an ice cream brand.

It makes products with names like half-baked and chunky monkey and fish food.

Why is it so important to you that the company is vocal in social issues as opposed to just you speaking out or Jerry speaking out?

Well, I think it's become clear that business is the most powerful force in our society.

You know,

originally, the most powerful force was religion.

And

then the most powerful force came to be nation states.

And today it's business.

And

the big difference between those other two formerly most powerful forces, religion and nation states, is that at least their purpose was to improve the quality of life for people.

But business has never had that as its purpose.

Most business schools have been teaching that the only legitimate purpose of business is to maximize profits.

But we realize that business

is

exceedingly political.

Mainstream business determines who gets elected by campaign contributions.

It determines what laws get passed through lobbying.

And it determines the information we get through ownership of the media.

So, what we learned at Ben ⁇ Jerry's is that as a business, we have a platform that business has some form of, I don't know, credibility or whatever it is,

such that the media people are interested, the public are interested in what business has to say.

More so than you or Jerry as individuals.

Yeah.

By the 90s, Ben ⁇ Jerry's had become one of America's most recognizable brands.

And in 2000, they were acquired by one of the world's biggest consumer goods companies, Unilever.

The deal gave Ben and Jerry's a chance to expand globally and grow its sales.

Ben was against the deal, but had limited power to stop it since the company was already public.

Both Jerry and I were opposed to that deal with Unilever.

We did not want the company to be sold for this very reason, that we were concerned that if the company got sold to

another company that did not share the same values and the same social mission, that the social mission at Ben and Jerry's would die.

And that's the reason why

written into that acquisition agreement was a very unusual governance structure.

That unusual structure allowed Ben and Jerry's to have an independent board.

that would have the right to make decisions about the brand's social mission and marketing.

Unilever also couldn't fire that independent board.

And you said that you and Jerry were opposed to the acquisition at the time.

At the same time, I mean, once it went through, you got this independent board, and I imagine you made quite a bit of money.

It was, what, a $328 million?

Because of the sale.

I mean, you know, the company was sold.

You know, Jerry and I, you know, didn't own that much of the stock, but we certainly got a heck of a lot more money than we ever thought we'd ever get.

It wasn't all bad, maybe?

I

know, I wouldn't say that.

I mean, you know, the period during which

the company was

being sold and the period after it got sold, I would say was

some of the worst times of my life.

You know, the

Yes, I got a bunch of money out of it that I didn't expect to get, but I wasn't looking for that money.

It was not, you know, for me.

And I think for Jerry.

It wasn't about money.

I mean, you know, we wanted to get a decent salary, wanted to have enough money to live, but

the purpose of us going into the business was

not to make a bunch of money.

It was to have a job that we enjoyed doing, to be working together with each other, which we really enjoyed doing,

and to

turn out some, a product that we could really be proud of, and to run the business in a way that we could really be proud of.

And

that's what it was about.

For years under Unilever, Ben and Jerry's did direct its own social mission.

Like in 2009, when the brand released Yes Pe Can, a pun on Barack Obama's Yes We Can campaign slogan.

Or in 2015, when it introduced Save Our Sworld to support climate change action.

Ben and Jerry's board also made public statements.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the company called for the urgent need to, quote, dismantle white supremacy.

And the other really wonderful thing about it for me was that I had nothing to do with it.

It was the company itself and the independent board that worked together to come out with that statement.

And that was

a symbol to me that

Jerry and I had been successful in our effort to integrate these values into

the fabric of Ben and Jerry's and not have it be

about the value of Jerry and

the values of Ben, but that the company had embraced them.

Right.

Like the company understood what the mission was, didn't need you to direct them.

Right.

They took ownership of it.

They, you know, they felt it as strongly as Jerry and I did.

Then in 2021, Ben and Jerry's made another big statement on a controversial issue.

And this time, Unilever intervened.

That's after the break.

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In 2021, Ben and Jerry's decided to stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested East Jerusalem.

At the time, the company said that selling in those settlements was against its values.

Those settlements are considered illegal by much of the international community.

I wasn't really involved in those decisions and those discussions.

And

I'm incredibly proud of the company taking that stand.

Personally,

I was kind of appalled at the way Israel was treating Palestinians in the occupied territories.

At the time, Israel's ambassador to the U.S.

condemned Ben and Jerry's position as anti-Semitic in a capitulation to the global pressure campaign against Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

In response, the co-founder said, quote, as Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, we fundamentally reject the notion that it is anti-Semitic to question the policies of the State of Israel.

Unilever went over Ben and Jerry's head and continued selling ice cream in those territories.

After that point, Unilever started censoring, Musliming Ben and Jerry's, refusing to allow them to speak out on a whole range of issues.

Before that time, you know, the Ben and Jerry's folks would let Unilever know if they were going to put out a post on something that might be somewhat controversial

so that it was

a heads up.

And that changed after 2021 to approval

and rejection.

Ben ⁇ Jerry's later sued its own parent company, alleging that Unilever had violated the acquisition agreement.

In a legal filing, Unilever said the decision not to sell in Israel led to severe consequences for the company.

The relationship between Unilever and Ben ⁇ Jerry's began to melt down.

In the last few years, there have been multiple lawsuits, fights about politics spilled into the public.

And when the brand's chief executive left, Ben ⁇ Jerry alleged in a lawsuit that Unilever fired him without consulting the board.

Unilever said it had tried repeatedly to engage with the board to discuss the CEO's employment.

Unilever also said that it had worked for more than two decades with the board to support the brand's social mission, but but that in recent years, Ben and Jerry's has sought to advocate for, quote, one-sided, highly controversial, and polarizing topics that put Unilever, Ben and Jerry's, and their employees at risk.

It was after all this that Jerry Greenfield, Jerry of Ben and Jerry's, decided to leave last month.

He'd been with the company for 47 years.

How did Jerry tell you he was leaving?

Was it a surprise?

No, it wasn't a surprise.

We had discussed it and knew that it was coming.

And, you know, the deal is, is that Jerry has a really, really big heart.

And he just, he has very deep relationships with people at the company, all over the company, from the head office to the people that are making the ice cream and the plants.

And

he has relationships with

people at Unilever.

And, you know, it was just kind of tearing him apart.

And each one of us has a particular tolerance for conflict.

And Jerry's is on the lower end, and mine is on the higher end.

And I mean, on that note, Jerry has said that publicly, right?

That he felt that Unilever, which is the parent company of Ben ⁇ Jerry's, in his words, was silencing or silenced the brand.

Yeah, I like to use the word muscling, but

whatever.

Unilever's ice cream unit, the Magnum Ice Cream Company, said, quote, we disagree with his perspective and have sought to engage both co-founders in a constructive conversation on how to strengthen Ben and Jerry's powerful values-based position in the world.

Now, Unilever is spinning off the Magnum Ice Cream Company into an independent business.

That would include Ben and Jerry's.

But Ben doesn't want that and has a different idea.

You've been looking for investors to help take ben and jerry's private oh yeah yeah yeah absolutely i mean when unilever announced about a year ago that they're looking to sell or spin off the company uh jerry and i were very public about saying that well as long as unilever is selling the ice cream business selling ben and jerry's anyhow Why don't you just carve out Ben and Jerry's separate and sell it to a group of investors that are aligned with the mission of Ben and Jerry's, so that Ben and Jerry's can go and be Ben and Jerry's, and Unilever can go and be Unilever, and Magnum can go and be Magnum, and let's not fight with each other.

And, you know, so as a result of making those public statements,

yeah, a bunch of socially aligned investors contacted us

and

they're ready.

The only problem is that

Unilever slash Magnum doesn't want to sell.

Unilever says Ben and Jerry's is an important part of the ice cream business and isn't for sale as a standalone brand.

And if Unilever Magnum ultimately won't agree to a sale, what would that mean for Ben ⁇ Jerry's?

I think that the brand will be, you know, kind of destroyed.

I think that existing customers will be unhappy, upset, pissed off.

The brand itself is built around taking stands on issues that not everybody agrees with.

If you want to take a stand on an issue and everybody already agrees with it, you don't really need to take the stand on the issue.

So, you know, the norm in business is, well, we don't want to offend anybody.

We don't want anyone not to like us for any reason.

And so we're not going to

address anything that we think somebody might not agree with.

And if we're not successful in acquiring Ben and Jerry's,

the company will no longer take stands that not everybody agrees with, and it'll just become

another part

of the corporate mush,

which we have available at the supermarket.

How does that make you feel?

You know,

I'm kind of in the here and now.

So

I'm here doing everything I can to help Ben and Jerry survive as a values-led company.

And what I'm feeling is that, you know, that's where I'm at.

That's where I'm putting my full energy in.

And

I'm...

planning on succeeding.

So how likely is it that you're going to be able to do this thing?

I believe that we will win.

So, you're saying that you're here to stick it out, to win.

You know, you've mentioned this, you're not on the company's board anymore.

You're not the CEO.

Jerry left.

Like, why are you still here?

Why is it important for you to be the person waging this battle?

Well,

I think Jerry and I both agree on what needs to happen, you know, and

Jerry's

personality and his tolerance for conflict does not allow him to continue to, you know, be front and center in this.

And

mine does.

So I'm just continuing.

Was it more important for you to be remembered for your ice cream or for your activism?

You know, it's interesting interesting that I guess when you get old and bald and gray enough, people start talking to you about your legacy.

Legacy.

You know, I mean,

and for me, it's the same.

Yeah.

I don't care about my legacy.

I care about doing the work.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time.

It was lovely speaking with you.

Yeah, it's fun talking to you, Jess.

Thanks.

that's all for today Monday October 6th the journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal additional recording in this episode by Amy Look and Natasha Kahn

thanks for listening see you tomorrow