\n<\/p>\n
The Ben & Jerry\u2019s 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 \u201csilenced\u201d its social mission.<\/p>\n
Greenfield said in a letter posted by his co-founder, Ben Cohen, that he could no longer \u201cin good conscience\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the company couldn\u2019t stand up for the things we believed, then it wasn\u2019t worth being a company at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201chardest and most painful decisions\u201d he had ever made.<\/p>\n
Greenfield\u2019s resignation is the latest development in a bitter dispute since Unilever backtracked on an agreement allowing Ben & Jerry\u2019s to not sell ice-cream in occupied Palestinian territories, which had been heavily criticised in Israel.<\/p>\n
Unilever subsequently sold Ben & Jerry\u2019s Israel division to a local operator, prompting the ice-cream maker to sue its parent company before reaching a settlement in 2022.<\/p>\n
Last year, Ben & Jerry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The letter comes as Unilever prepares to spin out its ice-cream division, Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC), which also includes Wall\u2019s, with a main listing in Amsterdam and secondary listings in London and New York.<\/p>\n
Before the new business\u2019s 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 \u201creleased\u201d.<\/p>\n
The letter also argued that Unilever\u2019s move to dismantle Ben & Jerry\u2019s social mission had devalued the business.<\/p>\n
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 (\u00a31.1bn-\u00a31.8bn) but the proposal was rejected.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is that Unilever and Magnum don\u2019t want to sell, so they are not allowing any of these potential investors to see the financials,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for TMICC said it would be \u201cforever grateful\u201d to Greenfield for his role co-founding the company, but that the business \u201cdisagreed with his perspective\u201d and had sought to engage both co-founders in a \u201cconstructive conversation\u201d on how to strengthen the brand.<\/p>\n
In May, Cohen was charged with \u201ccrowding and obstructing\u201d others after he was arrested while protesting against the Gaza blockade during a US Senate hearing.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Ben & Jerry\u2019s was founded in 1978 after the two friends took a $5 correspondence course in ice-cream making.<\/p>\n The pair \u2013 who met while at school in Merrick, on Long Island in New York \u2013 opened their first store in a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont, with a mission to \u201cadvance human rights and dignity\u201d.<\/p>\n They chose fun, hippy names for their flavours, such as Cherry Garcia, after the late guitarist Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead \u2013 and even Cool Britannia.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Its transition to mainstream international commercial success attracted the attention of then Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s own independent board to allow it to continue to take progressive stances on social and political issues and uphold its core values.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever 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,\u201d said Nick Stockley, a partner and dispute resolution specialist at the law firm Mayo Wynne Baxter.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ben & Jerry\u2019s 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 \u201csilenced\u201d its social mission. Greenfield said in a letter posted by his co-founder, Ben Cohen, that he could no longer \u201cin good conscience\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[11055,3967,6863,12402,2509,13449,13450,204,12404],"class_list":{"0":"post-21954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-accusing","9":"tag-ben","10":"tag-cofounder","11":"tag-jerrys","12":"tag-mission","13":"tag-quits","14":"tag-silencing","15":"tag-social","16":"tag-unilever"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}