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, and the most important one—milk—comes from “Caring Dairy” farms. The website defines the term as including animal welfare monitoring and farmer and farm-worker standards.
The Organic Consumers Association alleges, however, that Ben & Jerry’s isn’t keeping its word. The consumer watchdog said in a complaint filed in District of Columbia Superior Court in Washington that the company and its parent, European food giant Unilever, have engaged in deceptive marketing by misleading shoppers into thinking they’re buying an environmentally friendly treat. According to the lawsuit, the ice cream is made from milk sourced from the same kinds of farms as most other dairy products, and that the final product contains the pesticide glyphosate.
“Unilever,” according to the complaint, “is building on Ben & Jerry’s reputation as an environmentally responsible company to deceive consumers into believing that the products are made with humane and environmentally responsible practices.”
“Their advertising is clearly intended to create the perception that this is a company that cares deeply about animal welfare, the environment and climate change,” said Katherine Paul, associate director of the OCA, in an interview. “We felt it was important to expose them for what they’re actually doing to the environment.”
Ben & Jerry’s declined to comment on the lawsuit. However, in response to a news report on the presence of the pesticide, the company said last summer that it was working to improve its sourcing to avoid such substances appearing in its products.
“There’s a myth out there that Vermont is bucolic and natural and the cows are all on grass, but the reality now in Vermont is that almost all dairy cows are in a lifetime of confinement—they never see the light or put their hoofs on grass—and the farming relies extensively on pesticides,” said Michael Colby of Regeneration Vermont, an environmental nonprofit.
The dairy industry (including companies such as Ben & Jerry’s) funnels more than $2 billion into Vermont each year, but it comes at a steep environmental price, according to his group, which works with OCA to document such issues. “The water crisis in Vermont is at a staggering level now.”
Though the “Caring Dairy Standards” page of the Ben & Jerry’s website states that meeting the program’s basics is “required for all farmers,” the OCA lawsuit alleged that the ice cream maker’s milk comes from a cooperative in St. Albans City, Vermont; that less than 25 percent of that co-op’s suppliers (as of January 2017) met the Caring Dairy standards; and that the co-op doesn’t separate the milk depending on whether it originated from a farm which adheres to Caring Dairy standards.
Ben & Jerry’s didn’t respond to questions regarding milk segregation practices. St. Albans Cooperative Creamery didn’t respond to a request for comment.