If you gotta buy ice cream, buy Ben and Jerry's

They are totally ABB.

I just learned that they founded TrueMajority which signs up as many as 3,000 new voters daily. They also own www.Pantsonfire.net where they have a large doll of * with pants on fire that they drive around the country. They also sell a doll like the float.

Kewl.

Especially when you got the munchies. I always knew they were into conservation and treating their emplyees right, but didn't know they still were "good guys" after they got sold out to some corporation a few years ago.

Damn ATKINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They sold the company to Unilever in 2000.

Published on Thursday, April 13, 2000 by the Global Citizen
The Globalization Of Ben And Jerry's
by Donella Meadows

So Unilever has gobbled up Ben & Jerry's. The $45 billion megacompany that rose from the British and Dutch colonial empires (turning palm and coconut oil into soap and margarine) has acquired Vermont's outrageous little ice cream maker for $326 million. The American dream at work. A couple of hippies invent wild new ice cream flavors in their garage and end up multimillionaires.

There are so many different ways to take this news:

* Well, I guess the New York Super Fudge Chunk will still taste just as good.
* Heck, why did I sell at 13? (Unilever is paying a whopping $43.60 per share.)
* Whoa, I wonder how long my job will last. (Unilever has announced its intention to shed 25,000 workers worldwide over the next five years. Ben & Jerry's CEO Perry Odak announced at the press conference that the multinational will continue to make Ben & Jerry's products only in Vermont "at least for now" and will even keep up the amazing fringe benefit of three free pints per employee per day. Antony Burgmans, a Unilever co-chair is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying with regard to Ben & Jerry's, "For two years there will be no layoffs.")
* What will happen to the Ben & Jerry's Foundation? (As a condition of the deal, Unilever will continue giving away 7.5 percent of all pre-tax profits and will contribute an up-front $5 million to the foundation -- plus another $5 million for minority-owned business startups and yet another $5 million to employees. What the Foundation will fund in the future remains, of course, to be seen.)
* So much for social responsibility (such as paying dairy farmers a premium).
* So much for irreverence (the infamous "what's the Doughboy afraid of?" campaign, making public fun of competitor Pillsbury, when it tried to use corporate muscle to push Ben & Jerry's off supermarket shelves). So much for freedom (refusing to use milk produced with bovine growth hormone in spite of Monsanto's threats). So much for fun. (Friday afternoon back massages for the staff. Free scoop days. The world's craziest stockholder meetings.) The engulfed Ben & Jerry's will still have its own board, including both Ben and Jerry, but can you imagine such unconventionality within the Unilever corporate culture?

More: http://www.commondreams.org/views/041300-106.htm