When Small Companies Sell Out

People start small businesses and then, once the enterprise has grown to be successful, they sell it. No need to keep knocking yourself out; you can sell the business and retire to a life of leisure and luxury.

One such business was Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Probably everyone in the U.S. knows them, not only for their premium ice cream but also because they were just general good guys. They really were two guys named Ben and Jerry. They started out by opening an ice cream parlor in Vermont with an investment of $12,000. In a David-and-Goliath battle, they twice took on giant Pillsbury in legal suits. They started a foundation to fund community-oriented projects and then funded it with 7.5% of the company’s annual pre-tax profits. They also joined with the Children's Defense Fund "to bring children’s basic needs to the top of the national agenda" (Wikipedia).

Then they sold out. Ben and Jerry's is now owned by Unilever, a (to quote Wikipedia) "British-Dutch multinational corporation that owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products." Ben and Jerry themselves no longer hold any board or management position in the company they started and are not involved in day-to-day management of the company (source: Wikipedia). However, in all fairness, in its post-independent days Ben and Jerry's has tried to use environment-friendly containers, and it (I must not say "they") launched a protest against the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling on Earth Day in 2005 (source: Wikipedia).

We might think of many health-food brands as sort of counter-culture or at least non–big business or non–big, evil, capitalist companies (that is, if you're an overage hippie like I am; otherwise you probably don't think in those terms), and more pro-consumer. However, if they ever deserved that image, many of them now belong to giant food processors. Honest Tea and Odwalla are brands of Coca-Cola Company (source: Wikipedia).

In another story a bit like that of Ben and Jerry, Kellogg also took over Famous Amos cookies. Meat-substitute maker Morningstar Farms also is part of Kellogg. (It never was a small, independent company but from Day 1 was just a brand, although not originally part of Kellogg.)

Cascadian Farm and Nature Valley both belong to General Mills. (Disclaimer, aka confession: I have not been able to confirm, in the cases of these last two, that they started as small, independent companies.)

Of course, once a giant company owns a brand, they hope that the customer/shopper will go on treating it like a small, fuzzy, green, and otherwise consumer-friendly brand. Unilever seems to have done a fair amount to maintain the aura that surrounded Ben and Jerry's; but as regards some of the other brands I have to suspect that, at best, the jury is out.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein.