Ben & Jerry's ice cream founder leaves the company due to the Gaza conflict.

BarcelonaThe co-founder of the American ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry's, Jerry Greenfield, announced this Wednesday that he is leaving the company due to disagreements with Unilever, the British multinational that acquired the company in 2000, over the Gaza conflict. Greenfield accuses the London-based food giant of breaching the sales agreement that guaranteed the brand independence to defend social causes and opens a new front in the ongoing conflict between the founders and the parent company.

Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, two hippies Childhood friends raised in Jewish families on Long Island, New York, founded Ben & Jerry's in 1978. After a failed attempt at opening a business bagels, the two took a distance learning course on ice cream making and opened the first establishment in a former gas station in Burlington, Vermont, where the company still maintains its headquarters. Over the years, the company grew to become one of the most popular ice cream brands in the US, thanks to its own ice cream parlors and tubs available at supermarkets.

Throughout its existence, Ben & Jerry's has displayed activism and social awareness, from feminism to the Black Lives Matter movements or Occupy Wall Street. In this sense, the company created a foundation in 1985 to support social projects, to which it allocates 7.5% of its pre-tax profits. When Unilever, one of the world's leading food giants, bought the company for $326 million in 2000, both Cohen and Greenfield continued working in advisory roles and stepped down from executive positions (Cohen also holds a seat on the board of directors), but they ensured that the acquisition contract maintained the in.

It is precisely the agreed-upon independence that is now under attack, according to Greenfield, which is what led him to make the decision to leave the company. "What has allowed the company to be more than just an ice cream company has been the independence to pursue our values, which was guaranteed when Unilever bought the company," the executive said in a statement. "For more than 20 years under its ownership, Ben & Jerry's championed and spoke out in support of peace, justice, and human rights—not as abstract concepts, but with real-life events happening in our world," he adds.

In 2021, Ben & Jerry's announced that it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in response to the offensive against Gaza. In fact, the company described Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip as "genocide," a very rare position in the business world, where large groups tend to avoid taking part in armed conflicts, and even more so in the US, where support for Israel carries a lot of weight in public opinion.

Lawsuit against the parent company

This decision sparked a conflict between the ice cream brand's management team and Magnum Ice Cream, Unilever's global ice cream division, which controls 100% of Ben & Jerry's shares. The dispute ended with the unprecedented situation of the Vermont-based company's executives taking its own parent company to court over alleged attacks on the brand's independence guaranteed in the purchase agreement. In these two years, moreover, both co-founders have continued to openly criticize Israel, and Cohen was even arrested last May at a protest in Washington against the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

Ben & Jerry's independence "has existed in large part because of the unique acquisition agreement that Ben and I negotiated with Unilever, which enshrined our social mission and values in perpetuity in the company's governance structure," Greenfield says in the statement. "It is deeply disappointing to come to the conclusion that this independence, the core foundation of our selling at Unilever, has gone," concludes the co-founder, who assures that his departure is "one of the most difficult and painful decisions" he has made. In statements reported by Reuters, a Unilever spokesperson has said that the British multinational "disagrees with Greenfield's perspective and has sought to engage with both co-founders in a constructive conversation on how to strengthen Ben & Jerry's strong values-based positioning around the world."

Ben Cohen has published on his own account on the social network X the statement with which Greenfield announces his departure from the company. "His legacy deserves to be true to our values, not to be silenced by Magnum Ice Cream," Cohen wrote in support of his fellow founder. Cohen has also included the hashtag #FreeBenAndJerrys (Free Ben & Jerry's, in English), which he created a month ago when he accused Unilever of unsuccessfully trying to sell Ben & Jerry's to a group of investors for a price between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, an accusation denied by Magnum Ice Cream CEO Peter . The two co-founders have also been demanding since last November that the brand be excluded from Unilever's planned IPO of Magum Ice Cream.

In addition to criticizing the Israeli offensive in Gaza, the ice cream company's founders have supported progressive candidates in all types of US elections. Among them, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, currently the most popular politician on the left wing of the Democratic Party, stands out. Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington two years after Greenfield and Cohen founded Ben & Jerry's there.