Ben & Jerry’s Hasn’t Cleaned Up Its Act, Consumer Group Claims
The ice cream brand known for its earthy, crunchy, all-natural ethos is under attack for allegedly letting pesticide slip into its products.
It’s summer in America, and that means action-packed movies, piles of hot dogs and plenty of ice cream. But according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a consumer food-advocacy group, if your choice of ice cream is Ben & Jerry’s, it may come with a swirl of pesticides.
With wacky flavors and a do-gooder reputation, the company was the second-largest ice cream brand in the U.S. last year, with $801 million in sales, according to Euromonitor. Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t just taste good, the company promises, it does good. “Values-led sourcing” means that some ingredients are Fair Trade and all are non-GMO, the ice cream maker pledges on its website; the most important one—milk—comes from “Caring Dairy” farms, it says. The website defines the term as including animal welfare monitoring and farmer and farm-worker standards.