Ben Cohen

And, you know, they hired these diversity officers and and then Trump comes into office and he says, DEI bad.

And they all got rid of their diversity programs.

And it's because it's not part of their mission.

What I say is that you can do both.

You can serve the needs of the community and make great ice cream or mayonnaise at the same time.

And, you know, I mean, Gerry and I have always said, you know, we found a method of doing business together.

that both serves the needs of the society and makes money.

And that's the way we like doing business.

Other companies, they don't really care about the needs of society.

And if they want to do business like that, they can, but consumers can vote with their wallets.

And do you want to support a company that doesn't really care and that is essentially

part of the general economic machine that is shoving more and more dollars up to the top 1%?

Or do you want to buy from a company that is trying to solve some of these social problems?

That kind of gets to this issue of the independent board of directors.

When Ben & Jerry's was acquired by

Unilever and I want to be clear that Jerry and I did not want the business sold.

We wanted to keep it independent.

But, you know, according to SEC rules, Unilever was offering so much money for the business that the board of directors had to recommend the sale.

Uh...

Yes, we thought that when we went public, we thought that we had legal, what they call poison pills that would prevent the company from getting acquired, but they didn't work.