The ice cream is sweet, but the fight is bitter
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is the very first lesson…of our next 500. How about that, and thanks to all of you who watched us on the live stream last Saturday. We posted the audio in your Spotify and podcast feeds on Monday, but the video is posted up there at PlainEnglish.com/500, check that out if you haven’t done so already; it was tons of fun. I’m recording this late this week, on Tuesday, and I still have the lesson 500 decorations up in my office.
But no rest for the weary; JR and I celebrated a little more after the stream. You can’t just leave a partially-consumed bottle of champagne open in the refrigerator, even if it is only nine in the morning. But we’re back to work, back in our comfort zone, audio only, and this is lesson 501, and you know the deal, the full lesson is at PlainEnglish.com/501.
What is your favorite Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor? Mine is chocolate chip cookie dough. I could eat that all night—and I have! But not everything with Ben & Jerry’s is pure deliciousness, and that’s what we’ll explore on today’s lesson and on Monday. We have a phrasal verb in the second half of the lesson; we’ll use the expression “come in” to describe varieties. JR’s back with a song of the week, too. Let’s do this!
A bitter fight at a sweet brand: the back story
Years ago, ice cream in the grocery store came in three flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Often , the three flavors came side-by-side in a single container. If you were lucky, you could maybe find mint or chocolate chip. But that was about it.
Today , ice cream comes in almost as many flavors, and with as many ingredients, as you can imagine. One ice cream brand is especially known for its wide variety of flavors: Ben & Jerry’s.
“Glampfire Trail Mix” ice cream has pretzel pieces, marshmallows, and almonds. “Cherry Garcia” has cherries and fudge. Other varieties taste like cinnamon buns, cannoli, and cold brew coffee—and those are just the ones that start with “c.”
Ben & Jerry’s attracts attention with partnerships with celebrities and brands. “Netflix and Chill’d” has peanut butter ice cream with pretzels. “Mint Chocolate Chance” is made with Chance the Rapper’s favorite flavors: mint and fudge brownies. “Americone Dream” features the face of Stephen Colbert, the former host of a political satire show.
But Ben & Jerry’s is also known for something else: its social and political activism. When the company was small, it committed to operating in a way that was consistent with social values: for example, the highest-paid employee couldn’t make more than five times the lowest-paid employee. They also didn’t buy dairy from cows treated with certain hormones.
Customers liked the ice cream; they thought it tasted good and they liked the variety. Some customers also liked the company’s social mission. They felt good buying from a brand with values. As a result, consumers were willing to pay a premium for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
Fast-forward to the year 2000. Ben & Jerry’s had hit a ceiling and was struggling to grow and to be profitable. At the same time , Unilever (one of the largest food companies in the world) had a different problem. They knew how to make massive amounts of food, but they didn’t make as much profit on each sale. Unilever was looking a premium ice cream brand. Ben & Jerry’s appeared to be a good match. Unilever made an offer.
In many ways, this was a classic story. A premium brand starts small, selling out of a single location. Consumers love it and are willing to pay more for this brand than for the more traditional brands they find in the big stores.
The smaller brand expands and enjoys some success, operating with high margins and low volume. But eventually, the founders can’t make the business grow very big, so they look for a buyer.
The big boys in the industry look at the small brand with the high margins, and they think, “Wow, our massive brands have much lower margins, but we know how to scale really big. Let’s buy this premium-priced product, and just make it really big. Then we can enjoy the scale and the high profit margins.”
This happens in a lot of consumer-facing industries. But usually after the sale, and after a brand gets really big, a little of that early magic goes away. Because part of what consumers like is the exclusivity: they like buying something small from individual owners. Even if the product is identical, it’s just not the same when it’s coming from an industry behemoth.
Let’s get back to the story about Ben & Jerry’s. In 2000, the founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, agreed to sell the business to Unilever for over $300 million. But they had a strange request.
They proposed that Ben & Jerry’s be owned by Unilever, but that it maintain its own Board of Directors. And that special Ben & Jerry’s Board would have control over the brand, marketing, ethics, and social mission. Not only that , but Ben and Jerry themselves would be on that Board at the beginning, even after selling the company.
In other words , Ben and Jerry were saying: we’ll sell you the business, but you have to let us (and the people we appoint) have control over the company’s image and mission, even though we won’t own it anymore. It was a strange deal. But Unilever said yes.
And now, twenty-two years later, it has blown up in their faces. Ben & Jerry’s individual Board of Directors has sued its parent company over ice cream sales in the West Bank, territory disputed between Palestinians and Israelis. The foreign minister of Israel got involved. So did big pension funds and investors in the United States.
The warm and fuzzy Ben & Jerry’s brand that everyone liked was in the news for all the wrong reasons. That conflict is what we’ll talk about on Monday.
Growing pains
Food is funny. People like to enjoy the story of their food and drink. There’s a brand called Kind bars; they’re in dozens of countries, so you might know them. It was a similar story. They were small, done in small batches. People thought it was a craft. They are good, I used to buy them. And Mars bought the company in 2020. Now you see Kind bars everywhere and it just feels a little less special.
This happens a lot with craft beer in the U.S. Brewing is a capital-intensive industry. If you want to brew more beer, you need to buy expensive equipment and then pound the pavement to get distribution agreements, get in those big restaurants, grocery chains, whatever. It’s not easy to start a brewery, and it’s really not easy to expand beyond a local area. So a lot of small breweries start up, people like them, and then later they’re bought by a big brewer and the customers revolt—all of a sudden it’s not “authentic” enough; the owners sold out.
I never blame a company for selling to someone big. The owners created something from scratch , the world is better because their product is in it. They deserve to reap the rewards. But if they sell it, if they cash that big check, they need to let go of their baby.
Ben and Jerry didn’t want to do that. It worked for a while, but it’s a big mess now. Just wait until you hear the full story on Monday.
Great stories make learning English fun
