Ben & Jerry's co-founder quits, claims Unilever 'silencing' activism

(Sharecast News) - Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield quit on Wednesday, citing interference from parent company Unilever over the famous ice-cream brand's social activism and criticism of Israel's killing of Palestinian civilians. In an open letter published on social media by his business partner Ben Cohen, Greenfield said the company was no longer independent under Unilever, despite a "unique merger agreement...that enshrined our social mission and values" in perpetuity.

"It is profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone," he said. "If the company couldn't stand up for the things we believed, then it wasn't worth being a company at all."

Greenfield and Cohen have had a fractious relationship with the FTSE 100 consumer giant and clashed in 2021 when they said Ben & Jerry's would halt sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The brand has since called Israel's actions in Gaza a "genocide".

They claimed at the time that the sale of Unilever's interest in the ice-cream to an Israeli licence holder was in breach of an agreement signed when the conglomerate bought the ice-cream brand in 2000 for $326m.

Cohen last week said the brand had attempted to engineer a sale to investors at a fair market value between $1.5bn - $2.5bn amid tensions with Unilever but the proposal was rejected.

The Magnum Ice Cream Company, a division of Unilever that has been hived off to be separately listed in November, said it disagreed with Greenfield and had sought to engage both founders on the matter.

Ben & Jerry's was founded in 1978. The duo met while at school in Merrick, on Long Island in New York and opened their first store in a renovated petrol station in Burlington, Vermont and became famous for the names they gave their ice-cream flavours such as Cherry Garcia, after the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com