Ben & Jerry's to go 100% Fairtrade: We talk to Ben and Jerry

Ben and Jerry are world famous for their ice cream, a range of flavours with cutesy names and packaging ('Yes Pecan!' a new flavour created for Barack Obama's inauguration is my favourite name). Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield started the company in 1978 after taking a correspondence course in ice cream making and have always focused on making their product and practices the best possible ethically, socially and environmentally, using free range eggs, sustainable dairy farming programmes and starting initiatives like the Climate Change College. The company was taken over in 2000 by multinational corporation Unilever, to wails of dismay and cries that they were selling out, but the brand has managed to remain ethical in its operation, today announcing its commitment to go 100% Fairtrade by the end of 2011. Hippyshopper caught up with Ben and Jerry for a short chat as they launched 100 Fair trades in Leicester Square this morning.

Q: Nowadays most companies are increasingly aware of ethical issues, as are consumers, whereas previously they weren't so prevalent. When you guys started out, what made you so environmentally and socially aware as a central concern of your company?

Ben: I just think it's what we cared about as people and then as the business started becoming larger we felt like we were in danger of just becoming another part of the corporate machine that tends to exploit the society and the community and the environment and its workers. We made a very conscious decision to only continue the business if we could find a way to use the business to be beneficial to the society and the environment and its workers and that began an experiment 25 years ago. You know, socially responsible business did not exist at the time and we had no idea whether we were going to be successful at it or not.

Jerry: As Ben said it just started with who we are as people. We never went to business school, I was trying to get into medical school and never got in, Ben was trying to become a potter and nobody would buy his pottery, so we weren't really drawn to business. We opened up an ice cream shop and that's what we thought we were doing. We didn't think we were becoming businessmen. It was when we became businessmen that we started thinking about these issues.

Q: Do you feel that the success of the brand is entirely down to the product alone, or is it because of your social awareness as well? Do you think your customers buy into that?

B: It's certainly both. When our product first became available in the supermarkets it was kind of the heyday of super premium ice cream in the US and there were a whole lot of brands all mostly imitating Haagen-Dazs. It was was the first super premium ice cream and it was made in New York City and the guy pretended that it came from Copenhagen, came up with a foreign sounding name that means nothing and all these other ice cream companies in the US said "Wow, I can make a lot of money selling expensive ice cream if I make believe we came from a foreign country." All these other ice creams came out with that imitation and then there was Ben & Jerry's saying who it was and with the social conciousness that we had. All those other ice creams no longer exist and the one that lasted and survived was Ben & Jerry's. I think that it was partly because of the quality of the ice cream but all these other ice creams were high quality too; partly because of the flavours, and partly because of the social values of the company. At the time there were no other companies that were acting in that fashion except for the Body Shop here in the UK.

Q: Inevitably I do have to ask, how much pull do you have under Unilever to keep the company ethical? I've read in places that you say you basically have no real power, you're acting as figureheads...

B: Correct. We have a little influence I would say.

J: What I tell Ben, what I always say is I like to think that we have influence in that Ben and I can pick and choose what we want to do with the company. So if the company gets involved in something that we really believe in like Fairtrade, we're more than happy to go out and promote it and talk about it, because we think it's a great thing for the company. I happen to believe that our willingness to do that helps motivate people at the company to want to do those kinds of things because it will involve me and Ben, but Ben thinks that's a crock. (laughs)

Q: You started bringing Fairtrade into the products a few years ago with some flavours and ingredients but it's taken until now to make all of your ingredients Fairtrade. Would you say it's because of Unilever's involvement that you haven't been able to push that through straight away?

J: I think working within a larger organisation makes it difficult and I think big companies like Unilever don't really or don't often want to take a leadership role. Here in the UK and in the rest of Europe Fairtrade is pretty established and so coming in at this point there's no risk to it. You're really following the trend and you're doing what you should do but not taking a leadership role, whereas in the US Fairtrade is not very well developed, there's not much awareness of it. For there I think the leadership at Unilever was less willing to take a leadership position, they want to follow consumer demand as opposed to lead in educating consumers. Do you think that's a fair way to put it, Ben?

B: Yeah.

J: Yeah, so does working within Unilever slow things down, I think yeah.

Although Ben and Jerry seem restrained by their lack of power under Unilever, they are definitely committed to the same beliefs that they started with in 1978. As long as they remain involved in some capacity I think they can still be proud of their names being on the brand they sustained for so long.