Corporate Activism With a Cherry on Top

real business may very well be activism. That was most recently on display with the company's June second statement made during the Black Lives Matter protests, titled we must dismantle White supremacy. Silence is not an option. The statement immediately went viral well and Ben and Jerry's approach to activism. It's also informing decisions at Unilever. That's, of course, it's parent company, and that company's CEO, Alan job has described the brand as a guide for how other Unilever properties

can marry purpose and profit. So how does Ben and Jerry's always seem to get things right while others fail. The answer, it seems it's rooted in the company's three part mission, economic, product, and social. It's also not shy about linking its product directly with its ideals. Ben and Jerry's activism team counts almost twenty full time members who meet each week and work with outside advocates. They'll often spent a year building a campaign to a specific event.

Now all of this helps the company pursue, in the words of its former CEO, a deeper bond than sugar and fat. I scream, you scream, we all scream for social, economic, and environmental justice. Ben and Jerry's Recipe for Corporate Activism by Jordan Holman and Thomas Buckley. Annorata Mittal was about to step out of her home in Oakland, California, on the last Friday of May, but first she had one

last email to send. She was on her way to one of the demonstrations that had broken out around the world five days after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Like hundreds of other protesters, she'd be praying and dancing late into the night in streets blurred by billowing tear gas and teeming with riot police. The note Mittal, the board chair of Benna Jerry's, was sending, was to the chief executive officer, Matthew McCarthy, requesting that a statement be

prepared by Monday. She wanted the ice cream brand to express support for the Black Lives Matter movement and to cry the violence against Floyd, who died while being restrained by a white law enforcement officer less than fifteen minutes after his arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes. McCarthy replied immediately to assure her his team

was already on it. Over the weekend, the CEO, who sports woodstock cheek, elbow length curls, and a straggly beard, consulted two advocacy groups the company works with, Color of Change and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for advice on how to phrase an unequivocal takedown

of racial injustice. He was one of five Bennajerry's employees, including executives with curious titles like Global Social Mission Officer, making edits to a Google doc's draft written primary early by the company's global head of activism Strategy, Chris Miller. On Monday, a final version was sent for approval to Color of Change and the in double A CP, and

then to Ben and Jerry's board. The seven for word text linked Floyd and other recent victims of fatal persecution, such as Brianna Taylor and ahmaud are very with historical ones like Martin Luther King Jr. It supported the creation of a national task force that would draft by partisan legislation aimed at ending racial violence and increasing police accountability.

It advocated for the U. S. Department of Justice to reinvigorate its Civil Rights division and reinstate policies rolled back by the Trump administration, such as consent decrees to curb police abuses. It called on the President to disavow white supremacists and nationalist groups that overtly support him instead of using his Twitter feed to promote and normalize their ideas

and agendas. And it said Congress should create a commission to study the effects of slavery and discrimination dating back to sixteen nineteen, the year the first Africans arrived in Virginia in shackles. When Ben and Jerry's posted the statement on June two to its website and social media accounts under the title we must dismantle white supremacy, Silence is not an option, hundreds of thousands of people rapidly circulated it.

It was lauded as the most detailed and powerful message from any corporation seeking to condemn the latest high profile homicide in a chain of abuse black people have suffered at the hands of white people across centuries. Other more somnambulent businesses found themselves on the defensive. Facebook saw hundreds of employees stage of virtual walkout after it refused to add labels to false or incendiary Trump posts that apparently

violated its policies. The furor prompted some of the world's largest marketers, including Verizon, Coca Cola, Lego, and Ben and Jerry's owner Unilever, to stop advertising their products on the platform for at least a month. Google, Twit, and YouTube, which have also been criticized for inaction on misinformation and abuse, were hit by Boycott's two, and the renewed attention to racial injustice led some companies and sports teams to reconsider

problematic brand identities and logos. PepsiCo and Mars said they would retire imagery associated with Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup and Uncle Ben's Rice, which both featured caricatures of black cooks. Washington's NFL franchise announced it would change its name a

racist slur against Native Americans. Mittal, a human rights and environmental activist who founded the Oakland Institute, a policy group, says Ben and Jerry's firm stance was especially motivated by the White House's response, which she viewed as fanning the crisis. I think of the killings that have happened as no

different than lynchings. It has just laid bare again how deep the racism is, says Mental, who has been on the board for almost thirteen years and was appointed chair in I think that's why I as a company, we can't wait for others to make it a tipping point. It is really for each one of us to ensure that George Floyd and Brianna Taylor do not just become

a hashtag. When this year's protests began, many companies tried to write tickets seating themselves on the right side of history, expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, which formed in twenty thirteen after the acquittal of the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a black teenager in Florida. Some businesses have come under pressure in recent years to find callings higher than driving shareholder value as shoppers turned

to brands with a more conscious approach to capitalism. A survey conducted after Floyd's killing by Morning. Consult a data analysis firm, found that about two thirds of Americans from Generation Z, the sought after cohort of high schoolers and college students, said the way corporations and their brands reacted to the BLM movement would permanently effect their future purchasing patterns.

But in the age of going viral, attempting to speak to more than four centuries of racial injustice can be perilous. Perhaps most famously, PepsiCo tried and failed in seventeen to evoke the BLM movement by airing a three minute ad that depicted Kendall Jenner, a white fashion model from the Kardashian clan, handing an ice cold Pepsi to a policeman flanked by other officers in protective gear as an ethnically

diverse crowd of actors cheered her on. Companies keep trying, though, following the Floyd protests, Righteous Gelato introduced a chocolate flavored Black Lives Matter Gelato, then quickly pulled it after an online backlash. The white designer who shepherded the branding later conceded she may not have been best suited for the task.

Pretty Little thing. An online retailer posted a photo on social media showing jet black and peach toned hands clasped above the motto Stand Together, only to be criticized for depicting the black hand in an unlo life like hugh a distillery in Bristol, England, tweeted a crass reference to its gen's high flammability, making it a favorite of looters.

Other efforts were baldly hypocritical. On Blackout Tuesday, one of the millions of social media accounts posting a single black tile in support of BLM belonged to the NFL's San Francisco forty Niners, which split acrimoniously with quarterback Colin Kaepernick after he began kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality toward black people. Washington's franchise posted a tile to Laureal, whose black square was overlaid with the words

speaking out is worth. It was criticized for insincerity by Monroe Bergdorff, a black English model who said the cosmetics company had dropped her from a seventeen campaign after she spoke out about white supremacy. The company responded by apologizing for the incident and adding her to its UK Diversity

and Inclusion Board. A McDonald's statement that each black victim was one of us prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to ask the fast food chain why it was denying hundreds of thousands of black workers access to paid sick and family leave during a global pandemic. The company offers some paid leave to workers at corporate owned locations, but

doesn't guarantee it to those employed by franchise ese. Starbucks, which posted that it stood in solidarity with black partners, customers, and communities and that it wouldn't be a bystander, also said it's baristas wouldn't be permitted to wear BLM clothing until an outcry and boycott threats led it to reverse course. Companies have to actually, truly be ready and willing to address their impact, and that doesn't happen overnight, says Rashad Robinson,

executive director of Color of Change. Robinson, who's addressed audiences at a number of leading corporations about structural racism, the deep seated influence racial bias has on power structures, and the importance of quantifying diversity, was one of the experts McCarthy called to help an Jerry's draft its response. A lot of companies say black lives matter, but Ben and Jerry's has actually put energy, time and flavor behind black

lives matter. This is not new for them. In Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield Friends since grade school completed a five dollar correspondence course in ice cream making and found it Ben and Jerry's out of a renovated gas station

in Burlington, Vermont. While most shoppers came to know the brand for a political wasteline crime such as caramel Chew Chew, it simultaneously became a committed corporate activist, campaigning for causes such as same sex marriage, criminal justice reform, and nature conservation.

It's ethos closely tracked the leninesque worldview of its creators, who often seemed more comfortable hosting their One World, One Heart music festival, a kaleidoscope of tie dyed roots, rock and psychedelic Ben and Jerry's motifs, then participating in quarterly earnings calls. Some of the company's most important and long standing commitments have been on the environmental front, and it hasn't hesitated to link its product directly with its ideals.

In the late eighties, it released Rainforest Crunch, a flavor that incorporated nuts responsibly sourced from indigenous Amazonian tribes, helping spark a national conversation about deforestation. Over time, it refined a model for activism centered on campaigns. Each week, a team meets to identify and discuss pressing social justice issues. After Ben and Jerry's decides to align itself with the cause, the team taps experts at leading advocacy groups and spends

at least a year working on persuasive language. Then it disseminates material to the company's website, social media channels, and ice cream tubs, often building up to a specific event. One of Ben and Jerry's environmental campaigns, an eighteen month initiative called Save our Sworld, culminated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where organizers wield in a giant paper mache statue of an ice cream cone with

a melting globe patterned scoop. The company's ongoing climate messaging includes a website page listing endangered pints whose supply chains are at risk of disruption by climate change Tragically. The list includes every flavor containing chocolate, as coco production in West Africa suffers from rising temperatures and lower rainfall. Related blog posts read like abstracts of essays by Sierra Club Scientific Advisors, with the fondness for exclamation points and cutesy vernacular.

Ben and Jerry's activism didn't slow through a mid nineteen eighties initial public offering or its acquisition for three and twenty six million dollars in two thousand by Unilever, the sprawling Anglo Dutch conglomerate behind Dove Soap and Hellman's Mayonnaise. Unilever is also the world's largest maker of ice cream en gelato, selling supermarket and concessionary brands such as Briar's Cornetto, Fudgsicle, Gram, Klondike, Magnum, Popsicle, Solero,

and Talenti. According to Brad Edmondson's book Ice Cream Social, The Struggle for the soul of Ben and Jerry's, the takeover agreement took about two years to negotiate, in part because Cohen and Greenfield were adamant that the business retained its own board of directors and independence over what the company calls its three part mission, Economic, Product and Social. Mittal says many employees viewed Unilever as an eight thousand

pound guerrilla moving in. Ultimately, it took charge of the economic part of Ben and Jerry's mission and left the other two to the subsidiary. At times, Ben and Jerry's activism has tested Unilever's promises. All of its current directors save for two Unilever executives, are activists or have extensive experience in the charity sector. At one point, more members of the Creamery's board had been arrested while protesting than not.

Ben and Jerry and Ben and Jerry vocally supported the Occupy Wall Street protests in twenty eleven, and when the company took a stance a decade ago against ingredients derived from genetically modified organisms and directed the first of several billboards about the cause. Then CEO Jostein Solheim got a call from case Kratoff, who headed Unilever's business in the US and served on the board of the Grocery Manufacturers

of America, which is pro gmo. Solheim referred him to the commitment to advocacy Unilever had agreed to in its ownership contract. Around the same time, Paul Polman became CEO of Unilever and began a ten year effort to turn the parent corporation into a test bed for a more socially adroit way of doing business. As he worked to cut carbon emissions at its factories and right human and

environmental wrongs in its supply chain, among other initiatives. He visited the Ben and Jerry's team in Vermont at least once a year to learn from its campaigns. UNI Leaver's current CEO, Alan Joke, pledged when he took over to consider selling off brands that couldn't operate in a manner that benefits society. He's described Ben and Jerry's as a guide for how other Unilever properties can marry purpose with profit.

One of its flagship brands, Dove Soap, followed Ben and Jerry's lead on BLM, saying it would advance its own calls for legislative action and extend its work with such organizations as the National Black Child Development Institute to address racial justice for the next generation of Americans. On the other hand, Unilever has been pilloried recently for continuing to market melanin suppressing skin whitening creams, which critics say promote

racist preferences for lighter skin in some Asian countries. The company has said only that it will change the name of its Fair and Lovely line, which generates more than five million dollars in annual revenue, to Glow and Lovely, and that will include women of all skin tones in future marketing materials. Ben and Jerry's has its issues too,

starting at the source. It makes its money from a deeply unhealthy product that's a particularly uncomfortable fact at a moment when glucose is increasingly regarded as the new tobacco, and it clashes two with the company's work and supported black Americans, who are more likely to contract type two

diabetes than whites. The company also baffled many progressive customers and dismayed some members of its own board when, despite its history of campaigning to end gun violence, it appointed Perry Odac, who would previously run a firearms manufacturer, as CEO. Odak's fractious tenure ended less than a year after the sale to Unilever, and Mittal is quick to acknowledge that Ben and Jerry's has shortcomings of its own where inclusion

is concerned. While the board's seven directors do include four women and three people of color, two of whom are black. The majority of its workforce and leadership, she says, remain all very white. In part, this reflects Vermont's demographic makeup. The state is white, so Ben and Jerry's has been seeking other ways of becoming more diverse. Mittal says the company is, for instance, examining how to source a greater

share of its ingredients from black owned farms. Ben and Jerry's long record of activism has tended to mitigate and he perceived sins, helping it avoid accusations of insincerity when it speaks out, and the company has largely managed not to be regarded as opportunistic of using social consciousness to increase sales. In recent years, keeping revenue up has become ever more crucial as it fends off a rash of insurgents from low calorie alternatives such as Halo Top two,

sheeshy probiotic choices such as Foxy's Thoughtful ice cream. Solheim says sales were never the point, stressing that Ben and Jerry's campaigns have neither hurt nor helped demand during his eight years running the company. He traces the fundamental appeal of its pints to their indulgent flavors, as well as to carefully timed price reductions and product releases. In his view, the company's expressions of principle serve rather to cement its

long term standing with socially minded fans. Loyalty is pretty valuable in this business, he says. If we share values on climate, same sex marriage rights, racism, I think that's a deeper bond than sugar and fat. These days, Ben and Jerry's activism team counts almost twenty full time members, including characters such as Dave Rappaport, the Global Social Mission officer who once spent several days in the Nevada Desert being chased by armed security forces in helicopters after he

tried to stop a nuclear weapons test explosion. It has a budget that's as large as a fifth of the marketing department's discretionary spending, which runs into the millions of dollars. The Ben and Jerry's Foundation, which the company funds, also earmarks about two point five million dollars annually to grassroots causes across the US. Running the show is Miller, whose posts on Ben and Jerry's social media accounts have helped bring more than one thirty thousand new signatories to Color

of Change petitions in the past year alone. On June tenth, the Activism Team published a blog post announcing its next project, defunding US police forces. That project, like the statement on the George Floyd killing, Miller drafted, follows from a recent emphasis on criminal justice reform, a cause Ben and Jerry's has supported since at least the late eighties, when it began sourcing the brownie bites found in some flavors from New York's Graceton Bakery, which provides jobs and training to

formally incarcerated people and those who were homeless. In twenty fifteen, the foundation brought executives and board members to North Carolina, where Reverend William Barbour's Moral Monday's movement on civil and environmental rights was taking off. Three years later, ahead of the U S midterm elections, the creamery rebranded its New York superfudge Chunk to Pecan Resist in response to Trump administration policies that threatened the civil rights of women, people

of color, refugees, immigrants, and the lgbt Q community. The pun on pe Can was more evident in Vermont than, say, Georgia, where the word is pronounced pecan. Last year, it introduced Justice Remixed, a variety that includes cinnamon bun and spicy fudge brownie chunks, in partnership with the Advancement Project, a

racial justice advocacy group. Its factories are also outfitted with art painted by former inmates, and it's brought in political figures such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the late U S. Representative John Lewis of Georgia to speak to its workforce and council management on the race related imbalances that pervade the judicial system. Ben and Jerry's social justice efforts accelerated a year after the trip to North Carolina, when its first blog post on BLM drew so much

traffic it broke its website. The more comprehensive statement the company issued in June came from a muscle that was continuously being developed from the board and management team over time, says Darren Dodson, a board member and managing director at illumin Capital Management, an investment firm focused on reducing implicit bias.

It didn't just happen. It came out of years of work and commitment of which will never stop conversations about the root causes of racial inequality and systemic abuses by law enforcement still seemed to overwhelm large swaths of the business community at times. It's challenging, Miller acknowledges, even for a company that's long tried to be a rising force

for change. He mentions a recent conference call related to their new campaign, during which the debate became so heated he had to tell everyone to park it for a minute. It felt like a conversation I would have had back in my green Piece days, he says. I made some comment that this is likely not a conversation that is happening right now at Hoggindas. And that's the cover story of Bloomberg Business Week magazine. Check that out, plus many

other stories. The magazine now on newsstands, also at Bloomberg dot com and on the Bloomberg terminal. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. Check us out every day on the radio, Bloomberg Business Week Daily two to six pm Wall Street Time. This is Bloomberg