Opinion: Ben & Jerry’s woke chickens are coming home to roost

financialpost.com:

Ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is perhaps the world’s most aggressively “woke” brand. By running campaigns on international geopolitics, immigration policy and culture war issues, Ben & Jerry’s has made a name for itself as a taboo-smasher willing to serve dessert with a side of aggressive virtue-signalling.

But now Ben & Jerry’s chickens have come home to roost. Unilever, the British food giant that is Ben & Jerry’s parent company, is disowning its rebellious child — announcing it is carving off its ice cream business from the rest of the company and signalling it is open to a sale. Naturally, some commentary claims this is a business-only decision and that Ben & Jerry’s relentless progressive campaigning played no part in it. That’s hard to believe given the way Ben & Jerry’s seems willing to prioritize its politics over its bottom line.

Anuradha Mittal, Ben & Jerry’s board chair, is also executive director of the Oakland Institute, a left-wing think tank and pressure group. The resulting conflict of interest between business and politics is clear. Mittal seldom resisted the temptation to use her mega-famous ice cream brand to promote her think-tank’s campaigns.

Tensions between Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever have often boiled over into public view. Unilever investor and board member Nelson Peltz told the Financial Times just this year: “Ben & Jerry’s job is to sell ice cream, not to make political statements. And these people use anything for a soapbox that they have no right to do.” Ben & Jerry’s decision to pull sales in “the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories” even led to a legal battle when Unilever tried to block it.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the business relationship between Unilever and Ben