Welcome to Ben & Jerry’s 2008 Social and Environmental Assessment Report. Here’s a glance at some of our most notable efforts from the past year to make positive change in the world through our business.

We’ve taken the additional step to have key sections of this report examined by an independent auditor this year. Read the auditor’s opinion.

2008 Highlights

For 30 years, Ben & Jerry’s has been dedicated to a sustainable corporate concept of linked prosperity. Our mission consists of three interrelated parts: Product Mission, Economic Mission and Social Mission. Central to the mission of Ben & Jerry’s is the belief that all three parts must thrive equally in a manner that commands deep respect for individuals in and outside the company and supports the communities of which they are a part.

In 2008, Ben & Jerry’s took a big step forward in translating these three missions to our growing global business. In October, we brought company leaders from around the globe to Vermont and held our first-ever Social Mission Summit. The goals we set together will guide us over the next several years to make Ben & Jerry’s an even stronger force for progressive change from Sydney to London to Burlington, Vermont.

GOAL 1.
Use our Company to further the cause of Peace and Justice.

We believe that buying more Fair Trade ingredients is one of the ways we can support economic and social justice through our business practices. So we took the time in 2008 to develop our first-ever Fair Trade Certified flavor to be sold globally, Chocolate Macadamia, for a 2009 launch. The Fair Trade logo that will be on the pint means the farmers who grew the vanilla and cocoa for us received a fair price for their harvest and used environmentally sound techniques to grow and harvest their crops. Chocolate Macadamia will join three existing Fair Trade flavors in Europe and three more in the United States. We’ll keep looking for more ways to source ingredients in line with our values in the years ahead.

We began to build key alliances with leading-edge global partners in 2008 to activate our consumers on the issues of peace and justice.

• We launched Imagine Whirled Peace® in the United States, a new flavor named for John Lennon and dedicated to the cause of global peace. We celebrated the anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Bed-In for Peace by re-enacting the event in New York City, and then we kicked off a national search for modern-day Peace Pioneers on our website. We named two winners, awarding their organizations each $10,000 to continue their work in the cause of peace.
• Globally, we established a partnership with Peace One Day, to help drive awareness of the United Nations’ annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence on September 21, and for which the Company has helped underwrite curriculum materials to teach peace in 3,800 U.S. schools.
• We partnered with ONE.org in the United States and the Millennium Development Campaign globally to build awareness of the United Nations’ goals to end extreme poverty and AIDS around the globe by 2015. Employees in Vermont and a few of our scoop shop franchisees participated in global Stand Up Day in October, in which more than 116 million people around the world stood up together to call for stronger action to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

We continued our financial support of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, which offers small grants to nonprofit, grassroots organizations throughout the United States working for progressive social change. In 2008, Ben & Jerry’s contributed $1,944,700 to the Foundation.

We gave our support to the men and women who own and operate franchised Ben & Jerry’s scoop shops for the positive impact they are having on their local communities. In 2008, our franchisees directly contributed almost $500,000 worth of time, product, and money in support of local community projects, and leveraged even more support for valuable projects around the country through their efforts. On Free Cone Day alone, our franchisees collected over $225,000 in donations for nonprofit allies.

GOAL 2.
Harmonize Our Global Supply Chain and Ensure its Alignment with Our Values

In 2008, we continued to use natural and humanely produced ingredients and deployed better standards across all products and regions. For example, we’ve been using eggs from free-range hens for 100% of our European production since 2004, and by year-end 2008, we were sourcing about 30% of the eggs used in our U.S. production from cage-free farms. We intend to complete a full transition to using only Certified Humane cage-free eggs in the U.S. by year-end 2010.

In 2008, we completed preliminary work to phase in more sustainable materials for our product packaging. In early 2009, we will begin converting to Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paperboard for our U.S. pint containers. We’re a year later than we originally hoped, but still committed to the change. The FSC certification means that the paperboard comes from sources that meet Rainforest Alliance criteria for sustainably managed forests, including the protection of wildlife habitat, maintenance of biodiversity, avoidance of genetically modified tree species, and protection of traditional and civil rights. We will look to expand FSC sourcing for the packaging we use in other regions in the future.

In response to the challenge of climate change, we continued to study our Company’s climate impacts on a global scale so we can make informed decisions about how best to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. In Europe, we worked with HIER, a consortium of forty NGOs, to complete a life cycle analysis of our Company’s climate impacts from cow to cone. We then developed a detailed carbon emissions reduction plan, which includes aggressive plant efficiency upgrades and the purchase of Gold Standard carbon offsets, in order to meet HIER’s requirements for a ‘Climate Neutral’ claim for our entire European business. In the United States, we continued work on a carbon inventory of our operations to identify the best areas for reducing climate impacts. We continued to offset 100% of emissions associated with our Vermont manufacturing facilities for the seventh year — as well as employee air travel for the third year — with the help of Vermont-based NativeEnergy, a nationally recognized provider of high quality carbon offsets.

In Europe, we completed the third and final year of Ben & Jerry’s Climate Change College, a program that sponsored activists from each of eight European countries to follow their dreams to achieve greenhouse gas reductions in their own countries. These Climate Change Ambassadors received mentoring on their business plans, a research field trip to the Arctic and cash support from Ben & Jerry’s to develop their plans. Ambassadors launched efforts to help restaurants reduce their water use; to encourage green choices for do-it-yourself home improvement projects; and to recycle cooking oil, among other things.

In the United States, we partnered with Greenpeace to create a “Cleaner, Greener, Freezers” program to introduce environmentally friendly hydrocarbon (HC) freezers. We put fifty of the new HC freezers into service as a pilot test while we seek EPA approval for widespread commercial use, as the U.S. is one of the few developed countries that has not yet accepted this technology. If and when the EPA grants approval, we expect HC freezers will become widely adopted in the United States, as they are more efficient than today’s hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) freezers and don’t have the negative climate impacts of HFC gases.

GOAL 3:
Take the Lead Promoting Global Sustainable
Dairy Practices

In 2008, we helped advance sustainable dairy production through two programs, Caring Dairy™ and the Dairy Stewardship Alliance. Caring Dairy™, now in its sixth year, promotes sustainable dairy farming practices with the farmers in the Netherlands who supply milk to Ben & Jerry’s — a total of 550 dairy farms that collectively care for 25,000 cows. In 2008, the program held 131 workshops for farmers and helped them evaluate and improve in 11 different areas of sustainable practices. The Dairy Stewardship Alliance, in its seventh year, helps Vermont farmers to self-assess and continuously improve their practices in ten areas related to farm sustainability. To date, 52 farmers have participated in this program and half of them have implemented changes to their farm operation. Expansion of this program is a high priority for 2009. Our long-term goal remains to engage all of our dairy suppliers around the world in sustainable dairy partnerships.

We continued to partner with a coalition of public interest groups in the United States to stand up for the right to put rBGH labels on dairy products. As a Company, we have always opposed rBGH, a genetically engineered hormone given to cows to increase their milk production, and we believe rBGH labels help consumers to make good choices about the foods they want to buy. But under pressure from biotech groups, many states considered laws or regulations that would restrict rBGH labeling in 2008. We intend to keep working until the challenges to rBGH labeling have been defeated.

We were also active in the movement to ensure careful oversight and regulation of cloned animals in the U.S. food supply in 2008, following Food and Drug Administration approval of these foods in January 2008. We support a national framework to track cloned animals so people and companies like us can have a choice to avoid cloned foods, and we’re watching the issue closely in Europe and elsewhere. We’ve talked to lawmakers, food safety experts, and the public via our website to build momentum for good policy in this area.

Any of our past SEAR reports can be obtained from this link.