I mean, the first mistake was trusting a pinkie promise from a megacorp like Unilever. Maybe they shouldn't have sold their brand?
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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They should've made the company into a worker owned cooperative, but they prioritized personal profit.
Exactly.
They maximized profit just like all the other corporations. They're nothing special and neither is their ice cream.
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Why are so many people here mad at Ben and Jerry while they tried to do the best they could?
The decision to sell sounds a lot more grey than comments are playing it off as. If people want to debate if they ever should have taken the company public that's one thing, but B&J seem to have tried to make the best of their financial and legal situations while being beholden to shareholders, and laws that would have helped prevent being sold to Unilever didn't exist in Vermont until over a decade after the sale.
Instead of being forcefully bought out, removed by Unilever, and had all their social agendas canceled immediately, they made a deal to continue to be able to serve in some capacity after the acquisition. They remained active with the company for 25 years, so they seemed to do a lot with their "empty promise" they were given by Unilever.
This is the summary I read on the story of their sale to Unilever. It doesn't really support one side or the other, so take what you will from it, but treating them like jerks really doesn't feel called for.
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.
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?
He should haven’t sold the company. Even if that was guaranteed as part of the sale, he is looking at a decade of legal battles.
They sold out. They can wipe their tears with cash.
Now announcing Unilever™'s Ben & Jerry’s newest ice cream
Double-Tap Flavor Bomb! Vanilla swirled with Caramel and Salty Crunchy Peanut Clusters
It’ll be unveiled to the Palestinian people in Gaza in the middle of that big clearing surrounded by IDF soldiers with guns
Hello kiddo!
Yom HaZikaron!
It's a fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh-Flavour Bomb!
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With a net worth of 150 million dollars, maybe he could go make his own ice cream store and campaign from that platform? And then not sell out to a giant megacorp and act surprised then they do mega corpo stuff.
It's likely that the sale included clauses that they could not make a competing ice cream brand. That kind of stuff is common for brands that are based on personality or name recognition like Ben & Jerry's.
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Unilever the never-left-russia-still-there-today Unilever?
You didn't have to sell it to them asshole
Fuck Ben & Jerry. They were bankrolling campaign against supply of military equipment to Ukraine.
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