#unilever

[vyorei]

Unexpected, nice job Ben & Jerry's, better late than never I guess

[queersatanic]

thinking of getting a "third eye" forehead tattoo but it's just this

[more-flotsam-and-jetsam]

"My attempt at a Brand Map"

posted on Reddit r/coolguides

[daily-plush]

1999 Unilever Snuggles the Teeny Bean Bear Plush

[nice-to-know-youu]

🥱

[thoughtlessarse]

In early 2020, Bernard Looney had one clear goal as the incoming chief executive of BP: to convince the world to see the oil company differently. For a time, he did exactly that. In a glossy, high-concept London campaign launch, the BP boss set out 10 new aims for the company, the most significant being BP’s transformation to a net zero energy company by 2050. Within months, he reinforced the rebranding with a pledge to cut the company’s oil and gas production by 40% from 2019 levels by the end of the decade. At the time, his strategy even won the approval of Greenpeace – a feat few oil executives can boast. But by early 2023, BP had watered down the 40% cut to a 25% reduction after the war in Ukraine caused oil prices to surge, doubling the company’s profits. Within months, its greenest ever chief executive was ousted from the company amid revelations about undisclosed relationships with colleagues. His green plans have followed suit. It emerged last week that BP plans to abandon its curbs on fossil fuel production in favour of targeting several new investments in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico. The news angered climate campaigners, but surprised very few. BP’s green retreat has arguably been the most brazen in the industry – from a grandstanding green agenda to a fresh focus on fossil fuels – but the backtrack from environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards is gaining pace among the world’s biggest companies and investors. The term ESG was first coined by the UN in a 2004 report entitled Who Cares Wins. It provided companies and investors with a model for implementing the ideals of responsible investing in their spending plans.

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[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

Ultra-processed food producers are key actors in a complex global network of influence groups where they exert disproportionate power on global food policy and nutrition policy, according to a new paper.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/health/junk-food-corporations-are-running-global-food-policy

#TheFreeThoughtProject

[classic-nicktoon-pictures]

Popsicles for the New Three

[stoplookingup]

[friendsdontlieokay]

Does Unilever support Israel? If so I gotta stop supporting it, please let me know if somebody knows, it's urgent, I can't contribute in this genocide

[eelhound]

"For thousands of years, those native to West Africa have cultivated the oil palm, deriving from it cooking and lighting oil, medicines, cosmetics, and much else. The 'ever-giving' oil palm remains central to the traditions and the culture of many from this part of the world. Nothing about the African oil palm, or the oil it exudes, demanded the emergence of a globalized, destructive, and profitable industry. It was the international slave trade, inaugurated by agents of European imperialism, that created a global market for palm oil.

At first, the oil fed enslaved Africans enduring the middle passage or greased their bodies to increase marketability. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, industrialists began relying on palm oil to lubricate railway locomotives, steamship engines, and the machines of newly thrumming factories.

Initially, British merchants purchased palm oil from a distance, relying on Africans themselves to extract the oil. Yet as European demand increased in the mid-nineteenth century, enterprising British colonizers began invading the African interior to seize direct control of palm oil production themselves. Backed by the capital of corporations — still fairly novel entities in the Victorian age, a 'strange legal fiction' created to 'facilitate the risky colonial and later slave-taking ventures of the rising European bourgeoisie' — palm oil merchants hired private militaries to confiscate lands and subdue their inhabitants. In 1897, the British launched a 'punitive expedition' to crush the Edo Kingdom, a powerful empire that considered palm oil to be a holy substance and therefore strictly regulated its trade — 'to the chagrin of British merchants.'

Those merchants (and their hired chemists) were learning how to bleach and deodorize palm oil, to drain it of any characteristic smell or color and thereby render it as maximally usable and minimally distinctive as possible. Palm oil became so profitable precisely because of this protean quality, and soon it was central to the creation of a range of cheap commercial goods like candles.

William Lever, a Liverpool industrialist, started using palm oil to produce bars of soap, and soon he had established massive oil palm plantations — another 'uniquely modern and fundamentally colonial' innovation — throughout the Congo. Counterintuitive though it may seem today, soap was not at the time an especially common consumer good, so Lever had to use advertising to create a market for his wares, adopting the language of personal responsibility to communicate to middle-class and later working women that the bars were needed amid increasing urban pollution.

Thanks far more to the advertising than to the quality of his soap or the efficiency of its production, Lever (and his eponymous company) grew rich. Today, his company — since renamed Unilever — remains 'one of the world’s single largest consumers of refined palm oil.'"

- Scott W. Stern, from "The Story of Palm Oil Is a Story About Capitalism." Jacobin, 19 January 2023.

[compellingselling]

Smart strategy. GREAT pun.

Axe has hired Lil Baby to help promote a 'Logne Forgiveness program.

"AXE fans simply need to drop their Cash App $cashtag in the comments on our 'Logne Forgiveness TikTok posts for a chance to win their $150 refund… to help refund the cost of their old cologne."

It's a punny way to give guys permission to wear a fragrance that doesn't cost fifty bucks from a department store. Axe claims their new "Fine Fragrance Collection" scents are "formulated to smell as fresh as a premium cologne."

As Lil Baby says completely on his own and not at all written by the PR agency in a Source piece: “Y’all can smell just as fine with the new AXE and keep building your cash in the meantime. That’s how you do it when you’re the GOAT.”

[tomorrowusa]

Shell and Unilever are still operating in Russia.

Two of Britain’s biggest companies have been blasted for continuing to operate in Russia after it invaded Ukraine. Despite an exodus of firms after the war began last February, oil giant Shell is still trading Russian gas a year after promising to pull out of the country’s energy market. And Dove soap and Cornetto maker Unilever has been labelled an ‘international sponsor of war’ by the Ukrainian government as it continues to sell food and hygiene products in Russia. The broadside marked a difficult start for boss Hein Schumacher, who took over at the weekend. Campaigners at the Moral Rating Agency (MRA), which pushes for companies to exit the Russian market, have called on Schumacher to ‘do the moral thing’ and pull the business out of the country. 

[ ... ]

‘A Cornetto ice cream seems innocuous until you realise that millions of them being sold each day can quickly pay for the launch of a missile,’ said MRA founder Mark Dixon. ‘Likewise, a bar of Dove soap starts to look pretty dirty when there are enough of them being produced to purchase a Russian tank.’

[ ... ]

Shell, meanwhile, has been accused by Ukrainian officials of accepting ‘blood money’ by continuing to deal in Russian energy. It is shipping Russian gas through a deal with Novatek, Russia’s second-largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm, which compels it to buy 900,000 tonnes per year from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.

If you are interested in boycotting, Shell is largely unambiguous about its products. However Unilever owns hundreds of brands. This graphic is probably incomplete.

Shell and Unilever are financing Russian terrorist acts like these.

All we know about Kramatorsk pizza restaurant missile strike that killed twin sisters

4 people dead, 34 wounded, 50 cars destroyed and 30 houses damaged: aftermath of Russian strike on Lviv

These are intentional acts of terrorism against civilians; such atrocities take place almost every day. The number of casualties caused by Vladimir Putin and his fellow Kremlin war criminals would have made Osama bin Laden envious.

Frankly, Putin should be regarded the way bin Laden was and should not be normalized. Western companies have had plenty of time to notice what is going on and leave Russia.

BTW, this is not the first time Shell Oil has been chummy with genocidal dictators...

Calls for Shell to apologise for ‘fuelling Nazi war machine’

[misstealady]

Kenya's tea pickers are destroying the machines replacing them

KERICHO, Kenya — Kenyan tea pickers are destroying machines brought in to replace them during violent protests that highlight the challenge faced by low-skilled workers as more agribusiness companies rely on automation to cut costs.

At least 10 tea-plucking machines have been torched in multiple flashpoints in the past year, according to local media reports. Recent demonstrations have left one protester dead and several injured, including 23 police officers and farm workers. The Kenya Tea Growers Association (KTGA) estimated the cost of damaged machinery at $1.2 million (170 million Kenyan shillings) after nine machines belonging to Ekaterra, makers of the top-selling tea brand Lipton, were destroyed in May.

...

Notable

A BBC documentary in February uncovered widespread sexual harassment and abuse on tea farms in Kericho, with 70 women having been abused by their managers at plantations operated by British companies Unilever and James Finlay.

(image source: Adobe Stock)

[memesnotwelcome]

Companies/Brands Owned by Unilever, International Sponsor of War

It’s a lot.

But some notable ones (American given my perspective) include:

Dove

Ben & Jerry’s

Axe

Hellmans

Lipton

Tresemmé