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How the Social Mission of Ben & Jerrys Survived Being Gobbled Up
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: August 30th, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/business/how-ben-jerrys-so...
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded their gourmet ice creamery in 1978 ... to make the worlds best ice cream, to run a financially successful company and to make the world a better place. When Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods conglomerate, offered to buy the company in 2000 for a rich 25 percent premium ... they worried that Unilever would abandon the progressive aspects of the business. But as a public corporation, Ben & Jerrys had a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. It agreed to a deal. Very quickly, some of their worst fears were realized. A production plant and a distribution center were shuttered. Sales representatives at headquarters were fired. But today ... Ben & Jerrys [remains] as mission-driven as ever. The recipe for this amicable partnership was written into the acquisition agreement. Unilever established an external board charged with overseeing Ben & Jerrys culture and social mission [that] does not report to any authority other than itself, nominates its own members, has the right to sue Unilever and will exist in perpetuity. Even with the external board in place, a question remained: How many of Ben & Jerrys ambitious initiatives could a multinational like Unilever reasonably be expected to support? The answer, it turned out, was most of them. The company now offers its lowest-paid workers more than twice the national minimum wage. It uses only cage-free eggs. And recently, Ben & Jerrys became a B Corporation, [to certify its] high social and environmental standards.
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