Two-and-a-half cheers for Ben & Jerry’s
When it makes sense to ask the good guys to do more
To call me a big fan of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream would be a cold understatement.
The first solid food I served my daughter was a cone of Cherry Garcia. (She lapped it up, passing what my wife called the definitive paternity test.)
Every time I go into a grocery store, I check whether there are pints of long-dropped Organic Strawberry or Dastardly Mash flavors. (You never know when they’ll be back!)
And I appreciate their attempts to marry bad puns, cultural icons and seemingly incompatible flavors to make such memorable concoctions as Americone Dream, Phish Food, and Wavy Gravy.
It’s been a cherry on the top that Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield and company have gone out of their way to be socially responsible citizens. From their early guerrilla marketing schemes decrying “monopolistic business practices” to highlighting concerns about growth hormones in milking cows, the company has been at the forefront of good corporate citizenship. Heck, they even call themselves an “aspiring social justice company.”
So I wasn’t surprised to read their recent announcement that their “Scoop Shops” no longer offer plastic straws and, as of today, no more plastic spoons. According to Jenna Evans, Ben & Jerry’s Global Sustainability manager, that will be 2.5 million fewer plastic straws and 30 million fewer plastic spoons to deal with annually.
And I couldn’t agree more with Evans’ big picture analysis: “We’re not going to recycle our way out of this problem. We, and the rest of the world, need to get out of single-use plastic.”
But I also noticed her admission that their pint containers are wrapped with polyethylene. That’s the same nasty-for-the-environment stuff used in most of the plastic bags you see floating around, and increasingly turning up in dead whales and other marine life.
Nobody — least of all, Ben & Jerry’s — likes to see their product in the stomach of a dead whale or the nose of a live sea turtle. The good news is that the company is indeed aware of the problem and “working…to identify and test” alternatives, albeit without a specific timeline in the United States. (To be fair, part of their challenge is the sad state of recycling in our country. Their plastic-coated cardboard is widely recycled in Europe, but isn’t here.)
I wondered, though, whether “working to identify and test alternatives” without a stated deadline is enough. Given B&J’s resources, why not act more quickly and decisively? Its parent company, Unilever, earned $11.2 billion in profits during 2018, and the company also seems to believe that Ben & Jerry’s will profit from global warming, reporting last year that “its European division benefited from strong ice cream sales in the three months to the end of September, thanks to sweltering summer weather.”
I think I speak for many of its loyal customers in saying that I’ll gladly pay a little more for the cause.
But is it right to ask champions to do more than they’re already doing? Instead, should we focus our energy on getting the worst performers to inch a little closer to the standards set by the B&Js of the world?
I think the answer is not only, “yes, it’s OK to ask for more,” but that it’s vital we do so.
Promoting social change is often a matter of moving the goalposts. Bill James once wrote that a scandal is when, for whatever reason, key members of a society decide they’re no longer willing to accept conduct that was once tacitly accepted.
We’ve moved the goalposts for what’s environmentally acceptable a long way in the past 50 years. To take a mundane example, two years ago, hardly anyone seemed to care about fast food restaurants handing out plastic straws willy-nilly to every customer, whether they wanted them or not. But now, we treat with scorn any store that tries to foist them upon us, wondering how they could be so environmentally insensitive.
What has made such goalpost-moving efforts successful have been the leaps of a few companies into the unknown, and their subsequent proof that they can make a better, healthier product and still be financially successful. Sometimes, they do it under duress from folks like me, but other times, they’re just following their guiding principles to the next level, or simply trying to get a leg up on their competition.
Whatever the reason, they set new standards by which to hold them and the rest of their industry accountable.
So, I want to give B&J two-and-a-half cheers for its latest good deed. Hooray for getting rid of the plastic straws. Hooray for getting rid of the plastic spoons. And a “hoo” for getting started on alternatives to polyethylene in their pint containers.
I look forward to adding the “ray” when they complete the job.
After that, I only ask that they bring back that chocolate-pecan-almond-raisin perfection, Dastardly Mash. A special edition sold only in Denver will be enough for three more cheers from me.
