by Suzanne Bowdey, Washington Stand
For an ice cream business, Ben & Jerry’s political views are anything but vanilla. Since its first pint in 1978, the brand has become synonymous with hard-core progressivism — often putting them crosswise with Americans, who’ve been turned off by their decades of in-your-face political extremism. But, in a move that proves even the unapologetic leftists aren’t immune from the current crusade for corporate neutrality, “Vermont’s finest” just got a taste of the backlash.
Dave Stever hadn’t been on the job long. The latest victim of America’s consumer activists was hired in 2023, a month after Dylan Mulvaney made Bud Light a corporate pariah. And while Stever was only continuing Ben & Jerry’s long legacy of virtue signaling, the timing couldn’t have been worse for the company tour guide-turned-chief executive. Suddenly, the brand’s far-left causes were even more irritating — and not just to customers, but to the ice cream magnate’s parent company too.
Unilever, the packaged goods corporation with 400 brands under its umbrella, bought the colorful cow-covered brand in 2000 but became increasingly wary of the hippie chain’s insistence on wading into controversial issues like abortion, trans activism, and social justice. Tensions boiled over publicly in 2021 when Ben & Jerry’s announced it would no longer sell to certain areas of Israel, accusing the Jewish state of violating the rights of people in what they called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”