2020 Social & Environmental
Assessment Report

Welcome to Ben & Jerry’s Social and Environmental Assessment Report (SEAR) for 2020. For many, 2020 offered time for internal reflection. We thought about what we value, the sustainability of our economic system, and the changes we want to see in ourselves and in the world around us. Here at Ben & Jerry’s, we also took time to reflect on our Social Mission at the heart of our company and the north star that guides how we use our Brand in innovative ways to make the world a better place. We always want to know if we are still on the right track, so we sought feedback internally and externally from stakeholders representing Ben & Jerry’s functional departments, industry and supply chain partners, and non-governmental leaders on our Social Mission strategic priorities, impacts, and transparency.

What we learned is that our stakeholders hold us to high standards for the impacts we have on the world and for our transparency about those impacts and our business practices. They want to know if we are ‘walking the talk’ on topics that we are publicly vocal about, such as antiracism, dairy agriculture sustainability, and climate change. They want to know about the impacts of our global activism and our relationship with Unilever. And while they are eager to learn about our successes, our stakeholders also encouraged us to be open about our challenges.

The content and format of this report, our 32nd annual Social and Environmental Assessment Report, reflect this feedback and aim to increase openness about our efforts and outcomes. We discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our Social Mission work. We set out to clearly articulate our goals, where we have them, on racial justice at Ben & Jerry’s, equity in dairy and non-dairy ingredient sourcing, global activism, climate, animal care, and packaging. Where we’ve fallen short, we describe our plans to improve. We anticipate that this journey to deeper transparency around our Social Mission will take some time, and we welcome you to join us as we work to deliver the type of reporting leadership you’ve come to expect from Ben & Jerry’s.

From a first-in-a-century pandemic to the murder of George Floyd and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, the events of 2020 not only reshaped the world around us but also changed the way we do business.

Despite many advances and challenges in 2020 across our company, I am most proud of the incredible resilience and compassion of our teammates at Ben & Jerry’s and the endless ways they rose to meet the unprecedented challenges that 2020 brought. From re-thinking our ice cream factories to support physical distancing and keep people healthy, to the Herculean efforts of independent owners of Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops all around the world, our work was upended by the year that was 2020. I am so incredibly proud of and grateful for the people who work day-in and day-out to make sure that when our fans open the freezer door of their local store, they can grab a pint (or maybe 2) of their favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor.

Our annual Social and Environmental Assessment Report (SEAR) has evolved over many years, and this year’s report is no different. We’ve further stepped up our commitment to transparency by including more data than ever before. Moving forward, we’re making it easier to track our year-over-year performance against our social and environmental goals. We’re driven by a commitment to our progressive values and a deep sense of urgency as systemic racism persists in our communities and we rapidly approach and, in many instances, exceed planetary boundaries.

2020 saw the advancement of many important pieces of work that we’re pleased to share in this report. First, we’ve committed to some important, and we believe groundbreaking, goals for our racial equity work that will transform our company, our supply chain, and our franchised scoop shop system. We also continue to work hard to identify and pursue key strategic levers to reduce our carbon pollution and achieve our ambitious Science-Based Target (SBTi) for GHG reduction. We’ve identified several new interventions for our dairy farms and have pilot projects that, if scaled, have the potential to dramatically reduce the impact of dairy farms on the environment. We’ve also made progress in reducing petroleum-derived plastics in our packaging. And yet, you will see that all of this work is still not sufficient to curb our climate impact.

¹ Global data is not currently available due to complexity in our business structure and, in some cases, national regulations. We aim to increase our transparency around this topic in the future.

At Ben & Jerry’s, we aim to make justice our first ingredient. Our Social Mission drives us to pursue strategies that create, protect, and enhance justice for the people and planetary resources our business impacts. These direct impacts begin with the farms where we source our dairy and ingredients and extend to our manufacturing and packaging partners, located in communities around the globe. From wages and fair pay to building climate resilience, we seek to use our business as a force for positive change. The following section details our impacts and intentions in the areas of living wage, climate action, plastic packaging, dairy agriculture, and ingredient sourcing.

Our Climate Impact

Our planet is in peril, and we are part of the problem. Deep in a climate crisis, we are running out of time to reverse course. And as a dairy-based company, our industry is greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive with nearly 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) coming from global livestock, and with dairy cows accounting for about 20% of these livestock emissions. We’re vocal about the need for climate action because it’s not just about the health of the planet, it’s also about the health of people and the disproportionate impact that climate change has on Black and Brown people.

Recognizing the magnitude of the climate crisis and our company’s responsibility, in 2018 we set a Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) goal to reduce our emissions across our value chain. Our climate strategy is a long-range effort, with investment targeted across short- and medium-term interventions that need some time to flourish, and long-term research on innovations with industry-shaping potential. While most of these interventions will have a direct impact on Ben & Jerry’s GHG emissions, we are also making significant “carbon insetting” investments as a means of mitigating our impact. Our carbon insets do not count toward our SBTi goal, but we believe they generate outcomes that support climate resilience in the regions and communities where we source our ingredients.

Our climate goals:

• Reduce our GHG emissions and achieve our Science-based Targets Initiative climate targets against a 2015 baseline:
• 100% reduction in scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 2025
• 40% reduction per pint of product sold in GHG emissions (scope 1, 2 and 3) by 2025
• 80% reduction per pint of product sold in GHG emissions (scope 1, 2 and 3) by 2050

Our total emissions increased in 2020 even as we made some slight progress in reducing overall greenhouse gas per pint of ice cream sold. While we have many promising projects in the pipeline, at this time we are not on track to reduce our GHG intensity by 40% by 2025. While this is certainly disappointing, we do expect to hit our 2025 target shortly thereafter and then be on track to meet our 2050 SBTi target. We attribute this near-term outlook to several factors, some of which we can control more easily than others.

• A Business Based in Dairy: Ben & Jerry’s began and has grown by selling dairy-based ice cream. And while we’re very proud to have successfully launched several non-dairy alternatives, non-dairy growth will depend on wider consumer acceptance. The change is slow and while consumer shift has begun, many of Ben & Jerry’s fans love dairy ice cream and the reality is that the majority of what we make requires a lot of dairy ingredients.
• Significant Business Growth: In 2020, demand for ice cream unexpectedly grew significantly and with that our overall carbon footprint.
• Innovation: Over the past four years we have made significant investments in university-based and on-farm research of enteric reductions, manure solutions, and regenerative agriculture with many promising results. We anticipate the commercialization of many of these new approaches as we move from a research setting to implementation in our supply chain.
• Pace of change in agriculture and scaling up: We believe that the suite of interventions we’ve been developing and have begun to pilot has the potential to significantly reduce emissions on dairy farms. We are also strategically considering how we can adapt our business model for the future, but we have had to accept the likelihood that we won’t be able to adapt quickly enough to change the trajectory of our emissions to meet all of our 2025 SBTi in that timeframe. While there are a lot of promising technologies and farming methods on the horizon that we are excited about, we also know that there are existing dairy and ingredient solutions that are effective but not yet scalable for widespread adoption across the industry in 2020. Solving the scale-up problem is a major hurdle. There are also solutions that are not yet commercially available, for example a scientifically proven, effective, and cost-efficient feed additive that reduces enteric methane emissions. Additionally, it takes significant time to trial and build farmer trust with these new solutions.

Insetting

We’re proud to have set a leading SBTi goal, but the accounting methods for supply chain (Scope 3) emissions that we use to measure our reductions do not allow all the emissions reductions efforts that we’ve decided to undertake to be credited toward our targets. In past SEAR reports, we’ve discussed our Carbon Insetting approach, through which we make investments in our supply chain to reduce emissions or sequester carbon in communities where we source. These investments also help people in our supply chain adapt to climate impacts. We know that these insets do not count as reductions toward our SBTi goal, yet we have chosen to prioritize these investments because of the positive impact they make.

Ben & Jerry’s Carbon Fund

While many companies choose to improve their carbon footprint by purchasing offsets, our strategy is to invest in our supply chain to make direct GHG reductions and stimulate systemic change. The investments we make to reduce our carbon footprint are necessary and can be quite expensive. These funds largely come from our self-imposed “internal tax” on carbon. The “tax” was developed as a way to ensure funding was available annually for these important efforts and to simulate what actual governmental taxation may look like for our internal accounting practices. The internal carbon tax began in 2015, at a rate that we’ve publicly reported as $10 for emissions associated with our North American business and €10 for Europe per metric tonne of CO2e. This rate was informed by our early efforts to calculate our carbon footprint, including Scopes 1, 2, and 3. In 2016, we identified an error in our carbon footprint analysis which underestimated our climate impact and consequently made the effective rate of our carbon fund $5/metric tonne and €5 per metric tonne. In addition, our internal process did not have an automated system in place to increase the annual carbon tax accruals with growth in ice cream production. As a result, the accruals have remained flat since 2015 through 2020, even as our sales and carbon footprint have grown. We hope to move towards an accrual based on our annual footprint that will provide adequate funding in the future.

Until recently, the difference between our annual flat accrual and one based on our actual (growing) emissions has not impacted our spending on emissions reductions because of the long lead times in developing solutions. However, as time goes on we will need significantly more spending on solutions in order to fulfill our climate commitments. We forecast that we will require as much as a 16-fold increase in the accrual rate of the Carbon Fund—from today’s effective accrual rate to around $80/metric tonne by 2040, as future interventions will be more costly to implement and maintain.

Summary of Ben & Jerry’s 2020 Climate Work

In 2020 we spent approx. $1.5 million in the US and approx. 0.6€ million in Europe from our internal Ben & Jerry’s Carbon Fund on strategic carbon interventions, research, and pilot projects to support our strategy for long-term GHG reductions and climate resiliency in our ingredient supply chains.

Dairy Emissions

Piloting smaller scale digesters. We believe smaller scale digesters will be scalable across many small to medium sized farms in our supply chain and enable significant GHG reductions.

• Two new manure digesters went online on dairy farms in the Netherlands to address manure emissions. They will convert methane to carbon dioxide and produce renewable electricity while reducing emissions by a combined 1,411 MT/year
• We planned, contracted, and procured a small-scale manure digester for a dairy farm in Vermont which will serve as a pilot for a new-to-us technology. We had hoped to commission it in the fall of 2020 but due to COVID-related delays, we will commission it in 2021 and expect to reduce manure emissions by an estimated 750 MT/year

Developing tools. New tools can allow farmers to model on-farm practice changes and review outcomes using their individual carbon footprint.

• Wageningen University began development of a decision tool for dairy farmers in the Netherlands that will help to develop a GHG mitigation plan at farm level. The model will cover various decisions around animal longevity, feed production, grazing and manure management

Ongoing research partnerships. Working to understand opportunities for soil health improvements as well as carbon mitigation and sequestration on dairy farms.

• We continued to work closely with the University of Vermont, and in 2020 the work studied a variety of topics, including:

• manure application methods in hay production systems
• whether healthier soils produce fewer weeds and therefore require fewer herbicide and pesticide inputs
• various innovative cover cropping strategies that increase ‘soil armor,’ including inter-seeding diverse cover crops and roller-crimper technology which enables the farmer to terminate the cover crop, creating a thick mulch cover for the soil, typically without the use of synthetic chemicals
• drought resilience of various forage species
• impact of high-quality on-farm grown forage on milk production and GHG emissions
• grazing technical assistance to help dairy farmers expand or improve on their grazing systems

Non-Dairy Ingredient Emissions

We continued assessment to identify interventions that lower ingredient emissions factors in our global ingredients supply chain with a 50,000 MT reduction goal per year

Almonds: Kicked off a multi-year regenerative almond trial in California. We’ve partnered with several organizations and scientific advisors to create a scientific study of a conventional almond orchard transitioning to regenerative practices, including diverse cover crops, compost application, eliminating synthetic inputs, animal integration, on-site pollinators, biochar and dry farming. We will study soil health, carbon sequestration, almond nutrient density, water infiltration, pest pressure, yield, bee health, and overall life cycle analysis.

Chocolate: Continued a long-term partnership with four Fairtrade cooperatives and cocoa suppliers in our West Africa cocoa supply chain with the aim of balancing our chocolate carbon impact (including cocoa, sugar, coconut oil) by planting and managing ~189,000 tree seedlings. The goal is to remove 140,000 tCO2e over the project life. Agroforestry provides livelihood benefits to communities including income and food (e.g.: fruit, timber, and medicinal plants) through diverse crop, cocoa shade, and water retention/microclimate co-benefits. This project will address urgent sustainability challenges in West Africa including poverty at the farm household level, child labor, forced labor, deforestation, and the need to support the next generation of cocoa farms and farmers. The project will be developed, and certificate of claims delivered, in accordance with the Gold Standard Value Change Program and any future revisions to its guidance. This project is not reported in our SBTi progress as it is ‘insetting’.

Manufacturing Emissions

Electricity: Unilever North America procures Green-e RECs (renewable energy certificate) for electricity (Scope 2) on a national scale from solar and wind sources and has been procuring these RECs for 100% of electricity usage on behalf of Ben & Jerry’s since 2011. These North America RECs cover electricity usage from manufacturing, offices, company-owned scoop shops, and distribution centers in the US and Canada. Unilever Europe procures power purchase agreements and ‘guarantee of origin’ RECs for electricity from wind sources and has been procuring electricity RECs for the majority of electricity usage on behalf of Ben & Jerry’s since 2011.

Thermal: Our Manufacturing teams have been hard at work to create a decarbonization roadmap for each factory. These roadmaps include strategies to reduce the demand for fossil fuels in our processes as well as switching from fossil fuels to renewable fuels or electricity.

Food Waste: We are proud to have partnered with PurposeEnergy and Casella to begin reducing GHG emissions by processing our ice cream waste locally to turn it into renewable electricity, clean water, fertilizer and heat through anaerobic digestion. PurposeEnergy will build a digester directly adjacent to our largest factory in Vermont and we will send residual ice cream waste to them for processing. In addition, Casella will process our packaged waste by separating the package from the food and sending the food back to the digester. We worked to secure these partnerships in 2020 and are looking forward to groundbreaking and commissioning in the near future. This project will reduce emissions from food waste by approximately 6,500 MT CO2e per year and eliminate thousands of trucking miles.

Our Packaging Journey

We are very concerned about the impact that our packaging has on the environment, particularly our plastic packaging, which is inextricably linked to three things we care deeply about: environment, social justice, and climate change. As with most food product packaging, much of ours is not reused, composted, or recycled, but rather disposed of as waste. We’re on a journey to change that.

Of the 2.16 million pounds in 2020, 11% was made from plant-based sources while 89% remained from petrochemical-based sources. This overall increase in plastic usage occurred despite sales declines in scoop shops and deploying two initiatives in 2020 in our European tubs and US Retail operations:

• A new 1-side coated EU ice cream tub was launched in January 2020 and reduced the total primary plastic use by 44% per tub. The remaining interior coating was converted from petroleum-based to Biopolyethylene, a plant-based polyethylene plastic. Although Biopolyethylene is chemically identical to the petroleum-based plastic in our old coating, this change moves us away from petroleum. And less plastic means that ice cream containers in Europe are more widely recyclable.
• Our US Retail scoop shops moved from ice cream cups made of paper lined with polyethylene to certified industrial compostable paper cups lined with plant-based PLA plastic. They also moved from drink cups and lids made of polypropylene to certified industrial compostable drink cups made with plant-based PLA plastic.

Our packaging goals:

• We want 100% of our packaging to be free of petrochemical-based plastic in addition to ongoing work to make all packaging reusable, compostable or recyclable by 2025.
• 100% of products will carry packaging sustainability claims and instructions for correct disposal of the pack by 2022
• • Develop a leading process to screen packaging for chemicals of concern by 2021

Our team also continued its ongoing research into alternative materials that would support our goals to get out of petrochemical plastic and increase recyclability and compostability for our pints. In 2020 we tested biodegradable plastic materials, to support household and commercial composting. These tests included a range of laboratory and pilot trials that validate the material strength, leakage, migration, use, and end-of-life.

While we’re talking about packaging, we’re happy to tell you our pints have used paperboard packaging with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification since 2009. FSC certification means the pulp in the paperboard comes from forests that are managed for the protection of wildlife habitat, maintenance of biodiversity, and other forest sustainability criteria.

Dairy Sourcing

At Ben & Jerry’s, our aspiration is for everyone who touches our ingredients, from the farmers and farmworkers to the bakers and candy-makers, to experience greater prosperity because they are linked to Ben & Jerry’s. To make progress toward these ambitions, we are committed to a ‘Values Led’ approach to ingredients sourcing. Through Values Led Sourcing, we use our choices about dairy and non-dairy ingredient selection and the power of our purchasing decisions to pursue positive change for people, animals, and the planet. Our Values Led Dairy Vision is that all dairy used by Ben & Jerry’s comes from farms that have:

• Thriving and dignified livelihoods for farmers and farm workers
• Excellent care for cows
• A flourishing ecosystem, including feed grown ecologically and in a way that protects water resources and promotes biological diversity
• Farm operations acting as a net carbon sink through minimizing GHG emissions and sequestering carbon in the soil

Dairy farming is a challenging occupation and faces many hurdles spanning weather, animal care, logistics and labor. We admire dairy farmers’ dedication and respect their independence. It was the mutual interdependence between our ice cream and the dairy farmers who provide us with our primary ingredient that spurred us, over a decade ago, to partner to strengthen family farm sustainability. That partnership became the Caring Dairy program, a holistic, multifaceted approach that addresses the dairy farm ecosystem and advancing animal care so that farming households thrive and increase their resilience. Through the years, our Caring Dairy farmers in North America and Europe have been at the forefront of adopting and scaling practices for healthier soil, carbon sequestration, and reduced reliance on synthetic inputs.

Thriving & Dignified Livelihoods for Farmers & Farmworkers

Through support of regenerative agriculture farming practices and by rewarding performance-based outcomes, we aim to promote better economic margins for farmers, which will drive and sustain dignified livelihoods for both themselves and farmworkers.

Financial Incentives

Ben & Jerry’s paid approximately $4.1 million in US Caring Dairy Farmer Premiums to 2020 participating farmers. In recognition and sincere gratitude for the essential work our Caring Dairy farmers do on their farms every day, we provided a small ‘Thank You’ bonus check in May for the farms’ commitment to the Caring Dairy program during an unprecedented and difficult year. Otherwise, the premiums are intended to support farmers to transition to and operationalize the standards we have set in the Caring Dairy program, which we believe also drive additional economic gains for farmers; e.g., effective cover cropping results in reducing reliance on synthetic inputs like fertilizers and herbicides.

Excellent Animal Care

Progressive animal care is critical, not only from a compassionate and humane perspective, but also for its implications in human and environmental health. We continue to evolve our standards with the intent of setting a scalable model that can be expanded to the broader dairy sector. Since the inception of our Caring Dairy program in 2011, a key message we have received from fans of our ice cream is that they care about animal welfare. This shift in consumer expectation was a key factor in Ben & Jerry’s decision to adopt a third-party animal care certification. After lengthy evaluation of various animal welfare certifications, Ben & Jerry’s decided to move forward with the Global Animal Partnership (G.A.P.).

In December 2019, the Global Animal Partnership (G.A.P.) shared its first draft of its dairy standard with select stakeholders including veterinarians, animal rights groups and dairy farmers to name a few. Our ambition was to roll out the full animal welfare program in 2020. Throughout the development process, there were many discussions where G.A.P. engaged in dialogue with various stakeholders to maintain critical aspects of animal welfare while also making the standards viable for dairy farmers. This resulted in a longer than anticipated rollout timeline, which led to only beginning the process of piloting the standard in late 2020. We had four Caring Dairy farms that were able to start beta testing the standard and who provided valuable feedback on the audit preparation and process as we looked to scale to all Caring Dairy farms in 2021. In addition to being a globally recognized, multi-step, independent animal care standard, G.A.P.’s certification is also third-party audited by an outside auditing firm, which provides objective on-farm assessment that is separate from the standard developer and owner. A full rollout is planned for the fifty North American Caring Dairy participating farms in 2021.

Drive Healthy Soil & Clean Water

Supporting a thriving ecosystem is critical as a dairy farm actively participates in many eco-cycles. Reducing the use and reliance of harmful chemical inputs (e.g., herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers) promotes healthy soil and supports clean water, which in turn supports increased balanced biodiversity, which cycles back to healthier soil and cleaner water. The soil is literally and metaphorically the foundation upon which the farm and its resiliency is built; the healthier the soil, the healthier the farm – environmentally and economically.

As Ben & Jerry’s worked towards supporting farmers’ shift to regenerative agriculture in 2020, we continued to drive ecological cropping and land management practices on their farms. The integration of cover cropping, conservation tillage, and crop rotation were primary goals of the program this past year. These three practices work best when implemented as a package. Together, they are impactful aspects of regenerative agriculture. The aim of these agronomic initiatives is to ultimately scale adoption to build healthier and more resilient soils and farms.

The conservation efforts of the 55 Caring Dairy farmers included planting cover crops and implementing conservation tillage on all annual corn acres in 2020. The combination of these practices provides significant value for both farmers and the environment including prevention of soil erosion and limiting nutrient runoff. Over time they also fixe nitrogen, conserve soil moisture, and build soil health. Based on soil loss calculations by UVM Extension, with more than 11,000 acres protected by cover crops Caring Dairy farmers preserved more than 11,000 tons of topsoil and kept ground cover on those acres throughout the year. According to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Vermont farmers planted cover crops on nearly 27,000 acres in 2020, or 28% of their annual cropland acres, and conservation tillage on approximately 14,000 acres, or 15% of annual cropland acres. In comparison, Caring Dairy farmers achieved an 87% cover cropping rate and 75% conservation tillage rate.

In late 2020, soil samples were collected on 194 Farmer Innovator fields and were analyzed under the Cornell University Comprehensive Analysis of Soil Health (CASH) testing regimen. We are utilizing this information along with a short survey on field practices to identify any correlations between soil health indicators and survey scores. The ultimate desired outcome of this analysis is to determine if farm fields can be defined as regenerative based on the cropping practices applied. We anticipate the final analysis will be completed in late 2021.

Strive for Low Carbon Farming

Building on the pioneering work already started to reduce farm GHG emissions, we aim to explore innovations which could enable farms to drawdown carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the soil through regenerative agricultural practices. We aspire to ultimately catalyze the conversion of dairy farms into net carbon sinks where farms sequester more carbon than they emit, thereby providing a critical service for the planet.

“Prove-It” Projects

Additionally, in 2020 Ben & Jerry’s launched a new initiative to catalyze the practical testing of regenerative agriculture concepts on operational farms – Prove It projects. By moving the practices from the research plot into the hands of farmers on their diverse farms, Caring Dairy aims to amplify learnings and potentially accelerate the scaling of beneficial practices within the region.

Farmer Innovators, supported by dairy experts and academic oversight, developed their Prove-It project plans focusing on opportunities and challenges regarding soil health, biodiversity, and farm resilience. Project topics included testing new ways to plant multi-species cover crops, trying amendments to reduce fertilizer loss and improve soil health, figuring out how to improve on-farm pollinator habitat, and using drones to measure stored feed for reduced losses. Farmers teamed with specialists for on-the-ground technical assistance and guidance, collaborating with members of the University of Vermont (UVM) Extension, Cornell Extension, and local Conservation Districts on multi-species cover cropping, grazing, water quality, and nutrient regimens. Farmers working on biodiversity projects consulted with Audubon Vermont and UVM Gund Institute specialists to study pollinator and bird habitats.

Europe Caring Dairy

Established in 2004, our European Caring Dairy program is the longest-running sustainability program for dairy farmers in Europe. Through the years, the program has been oriented around continuous improvement, focusing on workshops for knowledge dissemination and development of action plans for further improvement. Since our European launch, more than 1000 workshops for farmers have been organised. As we continue to evolve Caring Dairy over the next couple of years, we aim to shift to an impact-focused framework in 2022.

Segregated Grazing

In 2020 we implemented a segregated supply chain for “meadow milk” in our factory in Hellendoorn. This means that all the cream and condensed milk used for our ice-cream mix is coming from dairy farms that graze their dairy cows for at least 120 days and 6 hours per day (certified by 3rd party). In 2022 this will be implemented in our EU factory in Gloucester (UK) as well.

Continued Program Evolution

Over the next two years, we will establish new performance standards focused specifically on circularity. To help lay the groundwork for the new standard, 2020 efforts focused on building farm-level baseline information. All Caring Dairy farms regularly track 11 indicators including soil health, CO2 reduction, and stimulation of biodiversity and wildlife. In 2020, the farms also completed a carbon footprint for their farm operations and tracked pesticide and ecotoxicity data. Through our animal welfare program, Cow Compass, European farms also tracked antibiotics use and key animal welfare indicators, such as mobility and body condition. Our farms are working toward using 100% renewable energy with support from investments in on-farm digesters.

Participation & Premiums

Ben & Jerry’s paid €1.86 million in European Caring Dairy Farmer Premiums for the 188 farmers in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands who participated in the 2020 program. These farmers provided approximately 22,400 metric tons of dairy cream and milk.

Other Ingredients

Non-dairy ingredients such as cocoa, nuts, fruits, and sugar, make up 60% of what we use in our recipes. Many of these ingredients, sourced from around the world, are grown in countries in a Global South challenged by rural poverty and increasing vulnerability to climate change. Commodities such as vanilla, sugar, and cocoa leave the hands of the farmers and travel through dynamic global supply chains, arriving at our manufacturing plants refined, extracted, chunked, and swirled. To advance linked prosperity across these complex, global commodities markets, we partner with non-profit organizations who facilitate our engagement with specific cooperatives at origin to develop support programs with and for the farmers themselves.

Through these relationships, we bring energy and resources to help close the gap between living income and current incomes while achieving better community and environmental impact. Since 2013, Ben & Jerry’s has partnered with Fairtrade International to advance our shared vision to support farmer resilience and self-agency through income, productivity, and professional development.

2020 was an extremely difficult year for farmers globally. COVID-19 increased economic vulnerability due to severe drops in market demand, field resource support, and supply chain disruptions. To further support farmers’ resilience, in 2020 Ben & Jerry’s stepped up our commitment in cocoa by paying higher prices to farmers, which would support farmers in earning the equivalent of a living wage. We also continued to pay Fairtrade premiums for sugar, vanilla and almonds, and supported climate resilience-related projects, regenerative agriculture research, and community development investments.

2020 Key Commodity Impacts

In 2020 we paid an estimated $5,024,347 in Fairtrade premiums, globally, for the Fairtrade-sourced commodities purchased in our value chain:

At Ben & Jerry’s, we have a long history of using our company’s activism to drive changes to big issues that we care deeply about.

Our Approach to Activism

At Ben & Jerry’s, we combine issue advocacy strategies with traditional marketing techniques, budgets, channels and insights to advance progressive social change. We partner with civil society groups with bold justice agendas to advance campaigns that address root causes and drive systemic changes. This work and associated impacts, by nature, tend to be nonlinear and collaborative, and require longer time horizons for lasting change.

Our ambitions:

• Set the standard that defines progressive corporate activism
• Confront the injustices of the past and present so that we may move forward together to advance human rights and dignity, social and economic justice, and restoration of the Earth's natural systems

Our advocacy goals for 2020:

• Policy and societal landscape changes
• Achieve an incremental policy win on criminal justice reform
• In the EU, implement six local activism campaigns on refugee and asylum seeker rights
• Grow our influence
• Increase our US Activist network by 100%
• In the US, deliver 50k voter pledges and 10k voters to the poll
• Drive 250K actions by European activists (through 2022)

Progressing Systemic Change

In the US, we moved toward, but did not quite achieve incremental policy wins on criminal justice. We did, however, contribute to 2020 Congressional and Presidential victories that may yield movement in support of racial justice.

Criminal Justice Reform

Over the past year, our US Activism team contributed to efforts to dismantle institutions that support mass incarceration, an outcome of systemic racism in the US. In 2020, the team continued to support the work of our partner, Close the Workhouse Coalition, in St. Louis. Despite city leaders passing Board Bill 92 last summer to defund the Workhouse jail and re-allocate funds for its operations to community programs, no action was actually taken by the city to close the facility. In the pandemic remote environment, we leveraged technology to drive tweets, emails, and messages of accountability to city leadership, urging them to honor their commitment and close the Workhouse jail.

In addition, because COVID-19 posed an increased risk to vulnerable and incarcerated people, Ben & Jerry’s worked with its NGO partners to mobilize action in support of urging lawmakers in Miami, East Baton Rouge, and St. Louis to pass compassionate release measures. These measures were aimed at reducing populations in jails and prisons that are disproportionately comprised of Black and Brown people because of systemic racism in the criminal legal system. While few of these policy pushes were successful at the beginning of the pandemic, we eventually saw a win in East Baton Rouge where we supported Advancement Project’s campaign for compassionate release.

Get Out the Vote

Elected policy makers hold tremendous influence over actions that shape how we treat the planet and reconcile injustice. In 2020, we helped our partners such as NAACP, Black Women’s Roundtable and Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to mobilize young, low-propensity voters who share our values to get out and vote in the most consequential US election in recent history. Across the country, we used both digital and experiential tactics to get voters to the polls, targeting the issues of public safety and criminal justice reform. In North Carolina, we supported a constellation of groups under the hub organization, Blueprint North Carolina, to hold --safe, nonpartisan voter education and get out the vote events in the run-up to the presidential election.

In 2020, we also partnered with the hip-hop duo Run The Jewels (RTJ) and the cable network Adult Swim to inspire voter registration and election turnout. We were especially focused on increasing voter participation among young, low-propensity voters in North Carolina. We worked with RTJ and Adult Swim to create a live-stream activation that was both culturally relevant and fun. The live stream reached 433K viewers and had 1.27M views across social media.

After the presidential election, the US Activism team shifted its focus to the Georgia runoff election for the state’s US Senate seats. We supported groups such as Black Voters Matter, New Georgia Project and Woke Vote through experiential activations and organic posts on social media to help increase participation at their events. All these groups are led by Black women and helped achieve record breaking voter turnout numbers among young voters and voters of Color in the national and Senate runoff elections.

Setting a New Standard for Corporate Activism on Racial Justice

Our Silence Is Not an Option response to the murder of George Floyd and unbridled white supremacy gained national attention and became a leading example of corporate activism in support of systemic change. However, this statement was not the start nor the pinnacle of our work as agents of change for racial justice.

Refugee and Asylum Rights

Worldwide, there are more than 75 million people who’ve been forcibly displaced from their homes. Governments in Europe have not done enough to give people the safety, security and basic dignity they need. Our activism team is supporting partners working to change existing systems that do not adequately protect rights for refugees and asylum seekers, with particular focus on the United Kingdom (UK), France, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Spain.

Campaigns In Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil

While some of our other regional campaign strategies are still evolving, in 2020 we continued to support organizations working to protect and expand LGBTQ+ rights in Brazil and advance climate action in Australia. In Australia our activism team supported 350.org’s campaign, Unfudge Our Future, where we called on our fans to sign a petition in support of the Climate Change Bill that would commit the country to net zero emissions by 2050. The efforts resulted in over 10,000 online messages sent to key government leaders and 2,000 handwritten postcards to Parliament.

Ice Academy

We continued to support and deliver the Ice Academy in the UK, France and the Netherlands, a refugee entrepreneurship training program co-developed with our partner, The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN). 59 refugees completed the program in 2020, with two-thirds of participants progressing into running their new business full- or part-time. In a typical year, upwards of 80% of participants are employed or running their business full time; this year that statistic is 62%, in part due to COVID.

The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation

Grassroots Organizing for Social Change Grant Program

The Ben & Jerry's Foundation Grassroots Organizing for Social Change Program offers competitive grants to non-profit, grassroots community organizing groups throughout the United States and Vermont. The grants fund organizations working to bring about progressive social change by addressing the underlying conditions of societal and environmental problems through constituent-led organizing and activist strategies. To learn more about grants awarded in 2020, go here.

Vermont Capacity Building Grant Program

The Vermont Capacity Building Grant Program supports Vermont statewide organizations to achieve greater organizational strength and sustainability. Organizations must be aligned with the Foundation’s broad interests in social justice, environmental protection and sustainable food systems. To learn more about grants awarded in 2020, go here.

Vermont Economic Justice Grant Program

The Vermont Economic Justice Grant Program supports Vermont-based organizations helping to alleviate the impacts of poverty and works toward social, environmental and economic justice in the state of Vermont. To learn more about grants awarded in 2020, go here.

Vermont Community Action Team (CAT) Grant Program

CATs fund an array of community programs - social services organizations, cultural, recreational, or arts programs and community celebrations located within the state of Vermont. The CATs pay special attention to underserved populations including seniors, youth and low-income communities. The CATs prioritize support for basic human needs and the needs of underserved areas of the state as well as organizations that are primarily volunteer-led. To learn more about grants awarded in 2020, go here.

The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation provided funding to 374 organizations in 2020, totaling $3,264,252*. [*This number does not include Foundation funding for the UK Fund, seen below.]

Our Foundation’s UK Fund

In 2016 the US Foundation set aside $200,000 to launch a UK Fund, which retains the US Foundation’s belief in supporting social justice movements and community organizing but focuses entirely on migrant-led groups in the UK.

The UK Foundation funds organizations that are working to improve the systems under which refugees and migrants are supported to settle in the UK. The Foundation targets its funding to groups that work to drive change in the following areas:

• Supporting refugee, asylum and migrant groups to come together to target systemic change – The Foundation recognizes that the voices of those most affected by the issues are best placed to identify and tackle systemic constraints and mobilize to create real and lasting change. It therefore funds projects that put refugee and migrant groups at the heart of their organization.
• Changing perceptions within the public consciousness – The Foundation funds organizations that combat stigma and challenge negative perceptions around the role of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants within society, as well as those that empower local communities to provide a positive and inclusive welcome.
• Building capacity in the sector – The Foundation also funds capacity development and networking to try and drive greater collaboration between organizations in the sector, as well as supporting a greater proportion of leadership from people with lived experience.

Funding provided by the UK Fund went to 7 organizations in 2020, which totaled $134,531.

Special COVID-19 Giving

Support for Scoop Shops

As would be expected, the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the Ben & Jerry’s US franchised scoop shop community in 2020. The company responded by creating several workstreams to provide support in a variety of areas, including:

• Researching and providing health and safety requirements, guidance and support to protect both staff and customers, including PPE/sanitation measures and controlled shop closings and re-openings.
• Hosting weekly webinars on mental health and well-being, business-critical information about federal PPP and economic disaster loans, how to maximize delivery platforms, and our newly-created curbside ordering service.
• Waiving royalties (equivalent to $2 million USD) and creating two emergency funds totaling $675,000 USD to get franchisees through the initial phase of the crisis.
• Launching the “Project Joy” program.

Project Joy

In the spring of 2020, we created the Project Joy fund to allow US scoop shops to make ice cream donations to essential workers in their communities. The fund reimbursed shops for up to 20 bulk tubs for these donations. Initially focused on workers at institutions, organizations, and businesses providing front-line care and other essential services to the community, we expanded the program to empower shops to scoop ice cream at racial justice events following the murder of George Floyd. By the end of 2020, 89 shops had scooped 1,485 bulk tubs, the equivalent of over 118,000 servings of ice cream.

Independent Auditor's Report

For our 2020 report, we engaged Moss Adams LLP, an independent accounting firm, to review specific Quality of Results indicators that Ben & Jerry’s set as priorities for the year. You can download a copy of their letter.