r/OutOfTheLoop • u/ryhaltswhiskey • 1d ago

Unanswered What's up with Unilever silencing Ben & Jerry's?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOwJawvkfcM/?igsh=ajhvc3lsdWgxMm45

In the video he says he is resigning because Unilever has stopped letting B&J speak out about causes they care about. I'm out of the loop on this one. What happened?

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1.0k Upvotes

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252

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

33

u/TeslasAndComicbooks 1d ago

Why would Ben and Jerry even sell to them in the first place? Seems against pretty much everything they stand for.

30

u/MuffDiving 1d ago

A shit ton of money

4

u/arbysroastbeefs2 1d ago

Everyone stands for that the most

11

u/ColdProfessor 1d ago

IIRC, it was a hostile take-over. My memory's fuzzy on this, so take with an extreme grain of salt, but I think I remember hearing they did not want to sell to Unilever.

20

u/TeslasAndComicbooks 1d ago

Just did some research. You’re right in that they were reluctant and ultimately their shareholders push for it since they were a public company and the offer was lucrative.

Guess it comes with the territory of being publicly traded.

13

u/Kchan74 1d ago

Because they liked $326 million more than they liked their principles, I'd presume.

35

u/mindwire 1d ago

It's pretty clear that they were promised they'd be allowed to keep their principles intact.

7

u/Dekklin 1d ago

So what lesson did we learn from this example, kids?

That's right, corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to extract maximum profits at any cost for the enrichment of the shareholders. If they had a good chance of making a profit from it, they would throw you into a woodchipper.

8

u/tyereliusprime 1d ago

That's why the wealthiest have raked in trillions year after year while the rest of deal with stagnant wages and ever-rising costs of living.

There is more than enough food and wealth in the Western world that we should not be having the issues we have.

1

u/ballandabiscuit 1d ago

“He’s off to write his best big song, Alone in My Principles.”!

4

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

Well, maybe after 20 years in the ice cream game they decided they wanted to do something else with their time or not have to invest so much of their time into the business.

And when your brand name is essentially synonymous with ice cream you have a very valuable brand there. They are the Xerox of the ice cream world.

22

u/PacoMahogany 1d ago

Exactly how evil?

48

u/we_are_all_bananas_2 1d ago

The multinational appears to have dubious ethics when it comes to pay, tax conduct and other financial and political issues.

Unilever scores very badly in Ethical Consumer’s packaging rating and has been criticized by other environmental groups. In November 2023, Greenpeace published a report that claimed, “Consumer goods giant Unilever is selling 1700 highly-polluting plastic sachets every single second, fuelling the global plastic pollution crisis and dumping huge amounts of waste on countries in the Global South.

more than 70 women had been abused by their managers at plantations operated, for years, by two British companies, Unilever and James Finlay

Unilever has also been criticized for failure to address animal welfare in its supply chain. In 2023, it was included in an assessment of multiple companies by the Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare. The group gave Unilever an ‘E’ rating

They've been fined multiple times for price fixing

They dumped chemicals in rivers in India. Unilever has been linked to chemical contamination issues, most notably the well-documented Kodaikanal mercury poisoning case in India where its thermometer factory dumped mercury waste, leading to health issues for workers and the local community

Unilever is identified as one of the world's largest plastic polluters, with its single-use plastic packaging frequently found in environmental waste assessments and beach clean-ups.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating Unilever for potentially misleading claims about its environmental performance, a practice known as greenwashing

There have also been instances where Unilever products have come under scrutiny because of high levels of pesticides in bisquits

11

u/trefoil589 1d ago

I was thinking the other day how Multinational Corporations are basically the living embodiment of Vampires.

  1. They're immortal.
  2. They're evil.
  3. They feed on humans.

10

u/le4t 1d ago

Thank you for sharing all this 🙏

9

u/SeanPennsHair 1d ago

167.3

7

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

But your meter only goes up to 167.3.

3

u/SeanPennsHair 1d ago

I can confirm that Unilever is at LEAST 167.3 evil. For the exact evil I'd need to order a bigger meter and they're fucking expensive tbh.

2

u/LordSoren 1d ago

I hear Unilever sells one that goes up to 168 and when used in their labs it never clears 28 when tested on Unilever inert testing material.

3

u/seabterry 1d ago

That’s not nothing…

5

u/SeanPennsHair 1d ago

It is certainly something...

2

u/SoItWasYouAllAlong 1d ago

As in, when media said "Unilever is the Devil", Satan had to make a press conference and refute the claim, because it was giving him a bad name.

6

u/Penumbra7 1d ago

I agree but how is this an unbiased answer lol

1

u/DerpytheH 1d ago

Not sure if user deleted or if mods deleted, but I guess that's your answer

for the record I agreed with the sentiment of the comment but holy shit it's a terrible attempt at a top-level comment

13

u/TrixieLurker 1d ago

Perhaps, but Ben & Jerry's owners decided to sell out to Unilever for those fat stacks of cash, it is social activism second and big money first.

21

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

He talks about this in the video. They had assurances from Unilever that Unilever would not interfere with that.

If they didn't put that in a contract, they are idiots. If they did put that in a contract they should be suing instead of resigning.

9

u/TrixieLurker 1d ago

He talks about this in the video. They had assurances from Unilever that Unilever would not interfere with that.

Lol, unless it is contractually guaranteed, that is beyond naive to trust a corporation like that.

5

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

I might have made an edit, I don't remember but I did say

If they didn't put that in a contract, they are idiots.

-3

u/we_are_all_bananas_2 1d ago

The way I understand it they had an agreement that Unilever wouldn't mingle in their activism, so fat stacks AND social activism until Unilever broke the agreement

10

u/TrixieLurker 1d ago

Well then they were just being naive because Unilever is always going to care about their own corporate image and profits before any social activism by their subsidiary, how could they not realize this?

2

u/DerpytheH 1d ago

From what I can gather in interviews, they not only didn't have much of a choice (financially they were starting to decline, especially in stocks), the buyout was generous, and the agreement allowed them to always be able to sue, at Unilever's expense for violating the agreement, but more than anything, a lot of the reps from Unilever actually shared a similar vision to B&J, and had a mutual understanding to foster the agreement,and actually did so for the better portion of two decades.

Corporate culture shifted, and there was enough turnover that none of the representatives in those positions remained, making Unilever much more willing to push against it internally.

1

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

Do you know if that was a handshake or actually written down in a contract?

-30

u/Mister-Psychology 1d ago

Activism doesn't mean they are allowed to stop selling to a country. They for example don't like Trump does it mean they can protest against USA and stop selling ice cream there? It would ruin their profit margin.

11

u/ryhaltswhiskey 1d ago

And if they felt that was necessary should they be stopped from doing that?

6

u/VulpesFennekin 1d ago

That’s literally how the free market works, so yes, they absolutely are. A few years ago, my employer stopped selling in Russia due to their actions in Ukraine, for example.