Ben & Jerry’s is best known, at least in our minds, for two things: Being the only national ice cream chain brave enough to put Jimmy Fallon’s sad little face on its products, and its general refusal to toe the normal corporate “Shut up and make money” line when it comes to politics. Now, though, insiders at the company are accusing its parent corporation, the totally-not-what-we’d-name-the-evil-company-in-our-screenplay-about-corporate-robots-who-hate-ice-cream Unilever, of firing the company’s CEO over his decision to let Ben & Jerry’s speak out on progressive issues, most notably the fate of Palestinian refugees.
Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s back in 2000, at which time the ice cream maker carved out a fair amount of independence for itself, including contractual provisions for an independent board that would ensure that it could still pursue what it calls “the Social Mission.” But the company sued Unilever last year over allegations that it was interfering with said Mission, notably by stopping company representatives from speaking out on Palestine. Now, the complaint has been amended with an accusation that Unilever has removed Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever (accused of “repeatedly acquiesce[ing] to the demands of the Independent Social Mission Board”) from his position, despite claims that the company’s management can’t be shuffled around without consultation with the independent board.
Per NPR, Ben & Jerry’s has accused Unilever of repeatedly threatening “Ben & Jerry’s personnel, including CEO David Stever, should they fail to comply with Unilever’s efforts to silence the Social Mission. This month … Unilever followed through with their threats.” The complaint, which also alleges that Unilever blocked messaging around Black History Month and free speech issues, says that Stever was removed from his position on March 3 “for reasons unrelated to his job performance and without following the steps outlined in the merger agreement.” The complaint lays out a number of instances in which Stever okayed social media messaging pushed for by the board—most of it related to Israel and Palestine, but also comments from around the inauguration highlighting challenges facing America—only to have Unilever shoot it down. The two companies have been battling it out on the Middle East, specifically, since at least 2021, when Ben & Jerry’s said it would stop selling its products in Israel because the practice was “inconsistent with our values.” (Unilever ended up working around the prohibition, but claims that it was hit with major blowback from international critics of Ben & Jerry’s’ stance.) That situation erupted into a lawsuit that has since been settled, but things burst again in November of 2024.
Unilever, meanwhile, has engaged in some fairly passive aggressive returning of fire, noting, of the reveal of Stever’s firing, that “we are disappointed that the confidentiality of an employee career conversation has been made public.” It also reiterated its desire that Ben & Jerry’s shut up about Israel and Palestine, writing that “Over time, the social mission of B&J’s shifted, but in recent years it has come to a head as B&J’s seeks to advocate for one-sided, highly controversial, and polarizing topics that put Unilever, B&J’s, and their employees at risk.” Which feels like the sort of thing that was worth considering before you bought the ice cream company that’s extremely vocal about its political opinions, and which put in its contract that it was going to continue to be extremely vocal about those political opinions, but, hey, what do we know, we’re not the ice-cream hating robots here.
