Ben And Jerry's Social Justice Values And Grassroots Business Practices

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When British-Dutch conglomerate, Unilever, bought Ben & Jerry’s (an American based ice cream manufacturer) in 2001, fear struck the business community and the Unilever acquisition became the Ben and Jerry’s sellout – the situation called the future for the ice cream company’s social justice values and grassroots business practices into question. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield built their ice cream company, which started out as a simple ice cream shop in an old gas station, upon being “…fair to its employees, easy on the environment, and kind to its cows. The company pioneers the pursuit of business with a double bottom line—profits and people—that Cohen and Greenfield called the ‘double dip’ ” (Page and Katz 39). Essentially, the business did

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