Ben & Jerry’s Fudge returned to Bite Unilever

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Rola Khaleda, FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Ben & Jerry’s, the ICE-Cream brand, which is based on the company, is famous for its unilever, its strange fabrications of natural ingredients. From Cherry Garcia, the flavor called the name of the co -founder of The Grful Dead, to Feash Food, and a mixture of chocolate ice cream, caramel, caramel, they are sweet and entertaining.

Nothing is strange and distinctive, like the agreement it concluded with Utyver to maintain its independence when the British company captured it 25 years ago. The deal put the way it divides the Unilever and Ben & Jerry administrative responsibility, some precisely defined details covered with a thick layer of nonsense.

Read it now, with its references to the “social mission” of Laban & Jerry and its devotion to buy cakes from the Greyston bakery in Yonkers, New York and Milk and Cream from Co-Farm Cooperative in Vermont, it is clear that it can only work with many good intentions on both sides. This has been increasingly pressure in recent years and evaporated now.

Last week Bin and Jerry A lawsuit against Unilever Along shooting CEO David Stefer, claiming that the UK tried to stop it to talk about political issues, especially the Israeli war with Hamas in Gaza. This is the latest in a series of legal skirmishes between them, led by the managers of Ben & Jerry.

It is easy to see why these managers take their independence very seriously, given that Unilever is not only limited to a large amount to secure the approval of Ben & Jerry a quarter of a century ago, but they blocked him in a legal agreement without the sunset item. But it is also the surreal that the company that has a brand cannot launch a new product or appoint an executive president without consulting a body that no longer includes the founders.

The tensions were taken over on the head of the Unilever decision Demerge The ice cream section, including Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum, later this year, with a possible initial list in Amsterdam. Unless Unilever finds a way to amend the agreement, which seems unlikely to be due to the discontent of Ben & Jerry managers, new investors will have a lot to swallow it.

As in all family conflicts, including companies, the two sides do not agree on those who started them. UNILEVER Anwarda Mittal, the independent chairman of the Board of Directors, who claims to have taken the history of the social activist Ben & Jerry (signs the emails “Peace, Love and Ice Cream”) and in 2021 he turned it into Palestinian reasons, including call For a permanent ceasefire in Gaza in January 2024.

Metal refused this when she spoke to her this week. “I hope to get the credit for that, but it was in the company’s DNA for 50 years,” she said about the history of Ben & Jerry for peace. She cited the agreement that grants the board of directors responsible for “preserving and strengthening the historical social mission goals.” There was a large space for maneuver there.

Ben & Jerry managers suspect an other type of activist: Nelson Bilz, who join Utyver’s panel in 2022 to pay to strengthen the returns of shareholders after a faded period. Unilever’s conversation is confident of the brands led by the purpose In the heart of its strategy He calmed down and increases patience: it is Suddenly Hein Schumacher as CEO in February.

One of the lessons is to obtain buyers’ products to read the Ben & Jerry deal with care and not to sign anything like that. While Unilever is filmed as the harsh capitalist of the issue, a pair of hippiens of entrepreneurship has seen this coming. They extracted an amazing deal, although Ben Cohen, one of the participating founders, later said he regretted for sale.

The heart of the problem is that the agreement is a distinction that must be broken under pressure. The Board of Directors is the Ben & Jerry photo guard, while Unilever is responsible for its “financial and operational aspects”. But the two are intertwined, including in Their dispute On the sale of ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Consumer commodity companies should be careful not to weaken property rights in acquisitions, although it makes sense to lure the founders to stay for a period of time to protect a smaller brand and stay their face. The sensitive point for the lawyers to fix it from the beginning is that the presentation of the autonomy is not for an unspecified period: in the end, it should mean the seizure of the company.

For Ben & Jerry’s, some of their fans believe strongly on their social mission, but others buy the product because it is frozen and frozen sweets with a friendly image. An agreement that leads to continuous legal disputes while customers try to take ice cream in peace is close to the date of the sale.

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