Cold as Ice (Cream): Ben & Jerry’s Founders Sue Unilever for Booting Activist CEO

Looks like Ben & Jerry’s has a rocky road ahead of it. Or Unilever might — in court. 

The corporate parent of the notoriously political ice-cream maker fired CEO David Stever earlier this month. This punctuated years of legal battles over control of the brand’s political activism with the original founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenwood. The two sides have spent more time in court than in the ice-cream parlor for the last few years, as Unilever has tried to scale back the hard-Left activism of the brand.

According to a lawsuit from the subsidiary, Unilever fired Stevers for refusing to dial down criticism of Donald Trump and advocacy for the Palestinians in Gaza. Their suit alleges that the move violates an agreement that prevents Unilever from removing Ben & Jerry’s executives without approval from the board:

In an amended complaint filed in the Southern District of New York late Tuesday, the ice cream brand known for its outspoken views on human rights and the environment, said that UK-based Unilever’s dismissal of Stever violated a merger agreement which prevents the unilateral removal of Ben & Jerry’s CEO.

 The 2000 agreement stipulates that the CEO’s removal can only occur “after good faith consultation with, and the participation in the discussion of, an advisory committee of the Company Board,” according to the Vermont-based company’s complaint. The independent board, it says, was established for communicating the brand’s social mission and brand identity. 

Ben & Jerry’s independent board and Unilever have consistently clashed over the brand’s public stance on social matters. In 2022, Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever for stopping the company from halting sales of its products in the occupied West Bank. A federal judge later rejected the request.

This lawsuit treats the resolution of the 2022 dispute as a separate agreement. It’s not clear that is the case; the NBC report on it at the time covered it as a straight loss for Cohen and Greenwood. This lawsuit claims that the 2022 resolution affirmed the brand’s right to assume “primary responsibility” over its social-justice messaging. However, the suit makes clear that Unilever certainly didn’t see it that way:

One instance marked out in the lawsuit is in May 2024, when Unilever stopped the Ben & Jerry’s European social team from publishing a statement advocating for Palestinians affected by the war to have safe passage out of the war zone.

The lawsuit says Peter ter Kulve, Unilever’s president of ice cream, wrote Ben & Jerry’s board chairwoman Anuradha Mittal on July 1, 2024, to express concerns that the message’s timing coincided with an Iranian missile attack on Israel.

“When the matter was escalated to me, I expressed concerns about the continued perception of antisemitism that is a persistent issue,” ter Kulve’s message said, according to the suit.

The suit says Mittal was disturbed by the “false equivalency” and asked Kulve whether he had any data to support his opinion, “such as a market study or third-party evaluation. “

“To this day, Mr. ter Kelve has never provided any such evidence,” the suit says.

Er … riiiiiight.

The big lessons here are obvious for both sides. Hippies should never sell out to corporate America and expect to remain hippies — and corporate America should refrain from doing business with hippies. And on that point, Cohen and Greenwood want a do-over:

Last month, founders Ben and Jerry reportedly started looking into how to buy back their namesake brand from Unilever. …

Its founders now want to team up with socially minded investors in any buyback, Bloomberg reported.

Good luck with finding enough capital on the Left for that purpose. First off, the radical-Left messaging that Ben & Jerry’s uses has become much less popular of late — which is why Unilever wanted to curtail it. It might have seemed fresh and marketable in the 2010s, but it’s getting old and stale with American voters and consumers. Capital has rediscovered capitalism these days too; there aren’t many aging hippies out their with several billions of dollars to float Cohen and Greenwood back into control of their brand. Even with the bad publicity, it will cost a lot more than the $326 million the founders got in 2000 from Unilever to buy it back.

But who knows? Maybe DOGE hasn’t entirely drained the gravy train to progressives, and a couple of billion dollars will drop into the founders’ laps. But it will take a lot of ice cream to make up the debt of a buyout that would put them back in full control of the brand — and these days, radical progressivism isn’t selling like it used to.