I don't believe that the majority of Americans want Trump's version of of America.

I think Unilever has become kind of Trumpified.

If a business does not have a social mission and the current guy in the White House says DEI bad, OK, DEI bad.

Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.

I'm Christian Gurimurthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is Ben Cohen, who Co founded the ice cream company Ben and Jerry's 40 years ago in Vermont with his school friend Jerry Greenfield.

Now the company was acquired famously by Unilever in 2000, but Ben and Jerry stayed with it.

And they cut what sounded like an amazing deal to still give them quite a lot of independence and the freedom to voice their feelings about social and political justice and all the causes that Ben and Jerry's had partly become famous for helping support.

And they have run into trouble because, particularly over their their feelings and their campaigning around Gaza, they seem to have come into corporate conflict with Unilever.

And free Ben and Jerry's is a campaign that Ben started this September to convince Unilever to free the brand up for sale.

Jerry Greenfield felt he couldn't carry on anymore and has actually left Ben and Jerry's as an employee, though I'm sure he's still a friend and close confidant of Ben's, which we will try and discover in the course of this conversation.

So, Ben, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Yeah, good to be here.

How?

How do you want to change the world?

I'd like to make it a more caring place.

I'd like our governments to start spending our money on things that actually help people instead of spending, you know, in the US 60 or 70% of our budget on it's killing people.

It's really amazing that there's enough to go around, you know, for, for small percentages of the US Pentagon budget.

We could provide food for everybody in our own country and around the world who doesn't have enough to eat.

We could provide medicines that that people need.

We could make it so that in the United States, the American dream is still a reality, that people could actually afford to buy a house, that childcare doesn't break the bank, that medical debt doesn't, you know, it doesn't put you into bankruptcy.

It's, it's just incredible to me that and, and the other fact of the matter is that, you know, people in the United States, they have no desire to kill people in other countries that they've never met.

Nobody's doing anything to us.

It it's crazy.

Ben and Jerry's has always been this slight conundrum, you know, that you, you managed to marry, you know, big business, a very successful business that then sort of got into bed with corporate America through Unilever.

Yet you carried on your sense of social and political justice.

I mean, have you now hit the wall that tells you these things are fundamentally incompatible?

I do not think they're incompatible by any means.

You know, I, I think the issue for Ben and Jerry's right now is that Ben and Jerry's has a particular social mission which is as important to, to the company as a financial mission and our product mission to to make the best ice cream possible.

And you know, that was going quite well.

You know, we got acquired by Unilever, the Ben and Jerry's was a public company.

I, you know, I was, Jerry and I were both opposed to the sale, but there was nothing we could do to stop it based on SEC rules.

And but as a, you know, as a result, during those negotiations, there was a very unusual structure, governance structure that was formed for Ben and Jerry's, which was that Unilever became the sole shareholder, but an independent board of directors comprised at the beginning of former Ben and Jerry's directors was established that has legal authority over the social mission of the brand, over the product quality and over what's called the essential integrity of the brand, the marketing and how it's sold.

So, you know, that actually worked pretty well for quite a while until, you know, with the company, Ben and Jerry's along with Unilever, along with the independent board, all all decided after after years of, of research and discussion that Ben and Jerry's needed to stop selling ice cream in the, in the West Bank of the occupied territories in, in Palestine because it was inconsistent with the values of Ben and Jerry's.

Can we just sort of rewind and and go back to sort of what, what does social mission have to do with ice cream?

Where?

Where did that come from and why was it knitted into the business from day one?

Well, I mean, what does social mission have to do with anybody's life, All of our lives, You know, business is really just a combination of a bunch of people working together.

As as a matter of fact, business has now become the strongest force in our society.

You know, it used to be religion was originally the most strongest force and then it became nation States.

And today it's business.

And the difference between today's most powerful force and those other two former most powerful forces is that they were all about improving the quality of life for people.

But business has never had that as part of its remit.

And so, so Ben and Jerry sought to change that and, and demonstrate that it's it's a myth that it's not possible for business to help to improve the quality of life in the society and make money at the same time.

And how did you go about it?

I mean, what what were the sort of the policies that you put in place from the beginning and how did they develop?

Well, the first thing was to establish that mission statement, that social mission.

Writing it out in that form and and being so specific about it came from an era in the early days of the company when there was a lot of conflict between management and the board and, you know, people having having different opinions about whether business had a responsibility to help to improve the quality of life in the community.

I mean, this was back in 1978.

The words, the phrase socially responsible business did not exist.

And the norm was, you know, this, this, this quote that's actually taken out of context from Milton Friedman saying that the only legitimate purpose of a business is to maximize profit.

And so that was the predominant belief in the business community.

You know, it's probably still the dominant belief, although it's not not near as dominant as it as it used to be there.

There came a time when Ben and Jerry's was decided to come out with a chocolate covered ice cream pop on a stick.

You know, normally you'd put on the packaging, wow, you're about to eat the greatest chocolate covered pop on a stick ever.

And instead, we decided to use the packaging as media, and this was before the end of the Cold War, and called for the US government to spend 1% of its, what was called at the time, the defense budget on peace through understanding activities between the people of the United States and the people of the Soviet Union.

And we were going to call it a peace pop.

And it was incredibly controversial within the company that why should a business, you know, start talking about international affairs, that that wasn't part of what we should do.

We should stick to our knitting and we shouldn't criticize the government.

Eventually we just decided to do it, call it a peace pop.

We we actually got a lot of positive, you know, people liked it.

You know, there was positive press about it.

People felt good about it.

And were you thinking, look, you know, our customers are going to be people who agree with our values, which is obviously limiting your customer base or, or were you thinking, no, this is for everybody, but we hope they'll also read the message on the side.

Well, my understanding is that everybody's in favour of peace.

You know, people have different ways of getting there.

I mean, the idea of peace through war is absurd.

I don't think that's, I think we've demonstrated that that doesn't, that doesn't happen.

We weren't thinking about, you know, is this going to, to limit our, our customer base?

I mean, you know, the, the norm for business is I don't want to offend anybody.

I don't want to, you know, say something that everybody might not agree with.

Well, that's how you get mush, the middle mush businesses don't stand for anything except making money and, and people understand that.

I mean, they're buying products from businesses, despite what the business stands for.

And, and the reality is that business, big business, is incredibly political.

They determine who gets elected by campaign contributions.

They determine our laws through lobbying.

They determine the news we see through ownership.

You know, the, the difference is that most big businesses that are operating like that, operating in their own self-interest, manipulating government, are trying to do it covertly.

They're not, they're not shouting from the rooftops about how, hey, we just paid this congressman so much money and we've got 2 lobbyists for every, every, every congressperson in, in the building.

And that's just the weapons industry.

But, and so the difference for Ben and Jerry's is that we're taking public stands for the benefit of the community in general.

And we're not doing it behind closed doors.

We're we're being open about it.

Our stands are overt, but they're not in our own self-interest.

And and whose stances were they always going to be?

I mean, was it just literally what you and you and Jerry thought, or was there a more democratic approach to it within the company?

Yeah, that certainly came up in the early years.

At the beginning, it was my values and Jerry's values.

And then we realized that it can't, you know, that we wanted the business to, you know, last for a long time and, and, and we needed everybody bought into the, to the values and, and we made a big effort to, to do that for the company to, you know, kind of to imbue these values throughout the company.

And we, you know, it's a difficult job.

We, we, we certainly were not sure that we'd be successful at doing it.

But, you know, most of those values are, you know, they're kind of common sense in terms of what, what people want.

People would rather have better education for their kids then enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 10 times over despite the fact that they say oh a nuclear war must cannot be won and must never be fought and then they turn around and spend another 2 trillion on more nukes.

Some of the best moments of my life have been since I I'm no longer operationally involved in the company, and every once in a while the company will come out taking a stand on a social issue that I had absolutely nothing to do with that I was joyfully surprised about that.

These guys did it on their own.

The the values have been integrated into the, into the cloth, into the fabric of the company.

Let's Fast forward, I mean, to, to what's going on right now.

I mean, you, you've laid out how corporate America has always been knitted into politics, you know, and, but right now things feel different.

I mean, you know, it, it feels as though corporate America is more cravenly bowing to this administration, making payments, making donations.

Do you think things are genuinely different right now or or is it just this is the way it always worked?

I think Craven is exactly the right word.

Thank you.

It's worse than it's ever been.

What amazed me is that, you know, is after the death, the murder of George Floyd, all these businesses that had never shown a sense of social consciousness before came out with these beautiful statements.

And they, you know, they, they, they began these, these diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

And during that time is when Ben and Jerry's, like I say, as a surprise to me, came out with, I think the most powerful statement, which was we must dismantle white supremacy.

And but then Trump comes into office and all that stuff is out the window.

All these companies that made these incredibly beautiful statements about racial justice, they just threw him out the window.

Trump don't like it, OK, we ain't going to do it.

And and you know, I've, I've thought about that and, and realized that, you know, if, if you're, if a business does not have a social mission, if it's, if that's if the social mission is not, it's a part of its purpose as a business.

If its purpose is just to maximize short term profits and the current guy in the White House says DEI bad, OK DEI bad.

Yeah, and that's what's happened.

Yeah.

So where does that leave, you know, your attempt or Ben and Jerry's attempt to live with corporate America, with Unilever?

I mean, you say you were against it, you know, all along.

Is that because you you knew that this would end up happening?

Yeah, I, I actually thought it was going to happen sooner.

I mean, for, for quite a few years, the relationship between Ben and Jerry's and Unilever worked pretty well.

And then what happened was that, you know, after a lot of research and thought, Ben and Jerry's pulled out of the West Bank and Unilever got got so much pushback from from Israel that they kind of unilaterally reversed that decision and sold the rights to Ben and Jerry's to an Israeli who had been our licensee.

And he continued to sell Ben and Jerry's in the West Bank.

And and that's, you know, and that was a violation of the acquisition agreement of the powers of the independent board.

And after a bunch of negotiation, they were not able to come to terms and the independent board was kind of forced to to sue Unilever.

And after that, you know, the relationship just kind of started getting worse and worse.

And before that time, you know, Ben and Jerry's would, you know, take these positions and, and do a, a post, a social media post on it.

The procedure was that they would give Unilever a heads up.

They would, you know, if, if the post was going to be somewhat controversial, they, you know, they, the two parties felt like, well, just just let us know before it comes so we can be prepared for it.

You know, after the the West Bank incident that that was no, that became no longer a heads up, but it became approval and Unilever stopped approving, you know, posts on racial justice, on freedom of speech, on Gaza.

On Black History Month and.

How does that happen?

I mean like, is it literally you can't say that?

That's, yeah, that's my understanding.

I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not operationally involved, but that's what I'm told is that the, yeah, the company will prepare a post, send it to Unilever for what has now become approval, and it gets disapproved.

Do you think that has anything to do with principal or, you know, and what Unilever believes, or is it just about political expediency?

You know, don't rock the boat.

Don't go up against the government.

Well, I I've been wondering about that.

It's, it's one of the two.

It's either it's just expediency that we, we don't want to criticize the government that, that, that if Trump is saying DEI bad, we don't want to say DEI good.

But I to, so to some extent I, I think Unilever has become kind of Trumpified.

But I, I actually believe that there's good people at Unilever.

I think a lot of them don't agree with with Trump's, with what Trump is doing, but it appears that they've decided as a as a business not to be critical at all of what he's doing and not even to allow this supposedly independent subsidiary than in juries to operate according to the legally signed documents that they signed at the time of the acquisition.

Unilever said, you know, said in response that it was never the responsibility of the independent board to, you know, to, to take strategic business decisions, you know, that they were effectively about, you know, message rather than business strategy.

But I mean, I guess that's where the, the conflict comes about, you know, as to sort of how, how you do 1 without the other.

I mean, the interesting thing is that like, you know, the, the issues that you've talked about and the where Ben and Jerry's has come into conflict are, you know, these two very, very core areas of conflict in, in American politics and world politics at the moment, which is the diversity question that Trump has railed against.

But but bigger than that really is Israel and Gaza.

And you know that that is the, you know, the most controversial issue that you can sort of dive into at the moment.

So I mean, what?

Why is it so important to you and to Ben and Jerry's, do you think to say what you think about both Israel's behaviour in the West Bank and Gaza?

Well, it's just about justice, you know, I think there's this quote from, I believe it's Desmond Tutu that in you cannot be neutral in situations of injustice.

If an elephant is standing on the tail of a mouse and you say that you're neutral, the mouse will not much appreciate your neutrality.

I mean, I, for me personally, you know, if I'm a, if I become aware of a situation of injustice, you can, I mean, you have three choices.

You can ignore it, you can complain about it or you can do something about it.

I personally prefer to do something about it.

I feel, I feel better if I'm trying to do something about it.

And I think that, you know, the reality is that we didn't we didn't come up with this social mission to sell ice cream.

But amazingly enough, as we take more and more of these stands, we sell more and more ice cream.

You know, a, a lot of these stands are just basic human decency.

No, don't bomb women and children and people in Gaza.

Don't destroy the entire infrastructure there.

You know, I mean, this idea that if there are people who have broken the law, people who have done, you know, horrible things, find them and bring them to justice, what right do you have to to kill all their family members and their neighbors?

Because what?

Well, well, it's going to be hard to bring them to justice, so we'll just bomb everybody.

And I mean, obviously both you and Jerry come from Jewish roots.

I don't know whether you were brought up Jewish in in any way yourself or, or, or what your Jewish heritage is precisely.

But how?

How important is that in how you feel about what Israelis doing?

So I was bar mitzvahed.

I was brought up in a family that my parents would speak Yiddish to each other a lot.

I, I, you know, so to get bar mitzvahed, you have to go to temple, you know, on a regular basis.

I didn't before.

I was, you know, before I was preparing for bar mitzvah.

I didn't really go and after I was from rich that I didn't go.

So I mean, I, I regard myself as a secular Jew.

I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not particularly religious.

You know, I I'm into peace and love, which they they say that's, that's a big part of religion.

But do you think being Jewish gives you a a bigger license to say what you think about Israel's behavior?

Well, I, I think that it's, it's easier to, to criticize Israel if if you're a Jew, you run into a lot of criticism from other Jews who believe that, you know, Jews should not criticize Israel.

You know, the history of the Jews is that they were oppressed, they were slaves and, and they were, they were exterminated.

The words never again are, are a big part of, of growing up Jewish.

And you know, when I see the slaughter in in Gaza, I, I, I came to understand that well, they didn't mean never again.

They just meant never again for us.

It, I, I mean, I, I think in large part it's because of that Jewish upbringing that I have so much sympathy for people that are oppressed and, you know, oppressed because of race, oppressed because of income.

That's what my Jewish upbringing taught me.

And I I just kind of generalize it to everyone, not, not just Jews.

So.

So what do you think?

You know, big business and corporate America should be doing, I mean, I guess you could just argue, look, the, the, the role of business is to maximize shareholder value and to be focused on profits.

So they're doing the right thing.

If even if they are just pandering to Trump and the MAGA agenda, what what do you think they should be doing?

On one level, business is a member of the community.

They just happen to be a very big, powerful, wealthy member of the community.

But members of a community have a responsibility to each other.

And you know, what business likes to do is to externalize its costs.

So, you know, I'm a business.

I'm just looking to maximize my profits.

You know, what I'm doing ends up polluting, you know, the neighborhood, polluting the ocean, the seas, the skies, whatever.

But that's that's not, that's not my concern because I'm just here trying to make as much money as I can.

And and so that leaves it to the rest of us to have to pay to clean up businesses crap.

That ain't right.

The general idea of business that we want to pay our people as little as possible.

We want to provide as few benefits as possible and we want to we want to charge as much as possible and and we want to put in office people that will not regulate us and that will give U.S.

tax breaks that that's destroying our society.

You can't have the most powerful force in the society only thinking about itself and expect that you're going to have a decent society for everybody else.

I suppose there's an argument that they could say, well, look, if if we did what you wanted, you know, it's all very well for a small business to say what it thinks and to be a campaigning organization.

But we have 10s of thousands of jobs in our hands.

If we go up against the government, if we take on the Trump agenda, they can tie us up in the courts.

They can damage us with planning decisions.

They can they can take us apart if they really want to.

And that's, you know, we have a bigger responsibility to a workforce not just in America, but around the world.

What would be your answer to that?

I would say that it's business that put Trump in power.

You know, look at who's been financing his ballrooms, his, his inauguration.

I don't, I don't think that would happen.

You know, I don't, I don't believe it's reasonable.

And I also believe that if you don't do it, it's appeasement.

And our country is now on a March toward authoritarianism.

Trump has just announced that he's setting up his own federal militarized federal police force that's accountable only to him.

You know, this is how fascists come into power.

And in terms of the powerful forces in our society, business is the most powerful 1.

So you're either on the side of, you know, the dissolution of, of, of our democracy and, or you're fighting for it.

And I, I would, you know, I'd venture to say that if you fight for it, your customers will reward you.

On the Palestine issue, you've decided to go ahead and make a watermelon ice cream through your own brand, not Ben and Jerry's.

Just tell me about that and how it's going to work.

You know, I felt like since since the company was prevented from making this ice cream, you know, calling for a ceasefire, that I would make my own Ben's Best ice cream.

Which now that we more or less have a ceasefire is, is calling for the US and Israel.

Now that they've, you know, spent from their bottomless pit to, to bomb and destroy this country.

Let's find some more money from that bottomless pit to help Palestinians rebuild it as they want as they want it rebuilt.

How hopeful are you that the pendulum will swing back your way?

You know, America is obviously not in the place politically or in business terms that you want it to be right now.

And, and lots of people are predicting, well, you know, they might stay in power some way.

Trump may find a way to serve a third term.

Democracy is in peril, you know.

Are you?

Are you, are you, Are you seeing the doom?

Or are you seeing hope?

I see hope.

I don't believe that the majority of Americans want Trump's version of of America.

It, you know, it, it totally goes against the founding documents of our country, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, you know, fairness, justice, equality.

I, I believe that, you know, the, the huge majority of Americans are in favor of that.

I, I think that what happened was that, you know, both political parties are corrupt and are controlled by the moneyed interests.

And so they run the government to the benefit of the moneyed interests.

And, you know, half the population is, is kind of struggling to get by because the system has essentially been rigged.

So Trump is not helping.

Trump is hurting that.

And, you know, but his rhetoric is, oh, I'm going to help you, I'm going to take care of you.

And, and I'm, and I'm sure he's going to throw a few crumbs to the, to the bottom people on the bottom part of the economic ladder.

But in general, he's, he's making it worse for the, for the bottom half of the country.

And, and, and that's not what people want.

And I, I believe we're going to see a, a big change in, in the 28th presidential election.

And I'm, I'm hoping that we'll, we'll even see some decent changes in the, in the 26 midterm.

Well, Ben Cohen, thank you so much indeed for your time.

It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Thanks for sharing your ways to change the world.

You can watch all of these interviews on the Channel 4 News YouTube channel.

Until next time, bye bye.