The Scoop
Unilever is probing the finances of Ben & Jerry’s charitable foundation with a focus on its grants to progressive and pro-Palestinian groups, including to an organization with ties to two of the foundation’s trustees, people familiar with the matter said.
It’s the latest escalation of long-running tensions between Ben & Jerry’s and its corporate parent over the creamery’s progressive bent. Unilever is spinning off its ice cream division, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, into a standalone company.
As part of that process, Unilever plans to audit the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, according to a letter sent earlier this month to the foundation’s president, Jeff Furman, and seen by Semafor. The results “will inform decisions as to future funding of the foundation by Unilever and, post-separation, by” the new company, called Magnum.
Unilever has given the foundation between $1 million and $6 million annually since it bought Ben & Jerry’s in 2000. The nonprofit funds hundreds of left-leaning groups.
Unilever executives have privately identified a series of grants to the Oakland Institute, a nonprofit that promotes global aid and is critical of the World Bank and Israel, the people said. One Ben & Jerry’s Foundation trustee, Anuradha Mittal, is a salaried employee and founder of the Oakland Institute, which has received more than $200,000 from the foundation since 2016, according to tax filings. Furman, the foundation’s president, is an unpaid adviser to the institute, other tax filings show.
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Step Back
Ben & Jerry’s independent board members, including Mittal, filed a lawsuit in November accusing Unilever of silencing the ice cream maker’s statements in support of Palestinian refugees. Additional court documents allege that Unilever muzzled Ben & Jerry’s social media posts that mentioned President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Nelson Peltz, the billionaire investor and Unilever board member who introduced the president to Musk.
The animosity between the two sides goes back to at least 2021, when Ben & Jerry’s said it would stop selling its products in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory in protest of Israel. Unilever sold the regional Ben & Jerry’s license in response.
Unilever declined to comment. A lawyer for the board did not return requests for comment.
Liz’s view
Technically, this is a fight about the fine print of a merger agreement signed a quarter-century ago, before the culture wars came for commerce. The deal included legal protections for Ben & Jerry’s social mission and set up independent board members to safeguard it from corporate interference.
This was a bad idea, allowed to fester by lax oversight. Setting aside that merger agreements are a bad way to protect mission-driven organizations — just ask The Wall Street Journal committee meant to guard the newsroom against meddling by Rupert Murdoch — Unilever simply never paid much attention to what Ben & Jerry’s was actually doing with its money until it became politically problematic.
That makes its reaction now appear punitive, and has echoes to the frantic backpedaling that other institutions like Columbia University or elite law firms are doing now to stay out of the right’s crosshairs. Semafor reported last week that the White House plans to pressure university endowments — and potentially pension funds and other nonprofits — over their investments, with the looming threat of yanking their tax-exempt status.
Ben & Jerry’s wanted to have its ice cream and eat it too. Unilever thought it could share in a bit of the reflected do-gooderism, while mostly churning out profits. Neither can get what it wants, which is why this fight should end where it started — with a buyout. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have been talking to investors about raising money to repurchase the company from Unilever. ESG may be on the wane, but there is still plenty of socially conscious cash out there to get a deal done.
Notable
- Charitable giving has gotten some corporates in trouble before. McDonald’s settled litigation over its HACER scholarship, which was disbursed to more than 17,000 Hispanic college students over nearly four decades.
- Ben & Jerry’s has been outspoken about political issues in the past: its founders voiced their opposition to the Iraq War, briefly sparking a patriotic alternative to their frozen goods.