Speaker A
When you're confronted with situations of injustice, you can ignore it. You can complain about it, or you can work on changing it.
Ben Cohen fights to preserve Ben & Jerry's social mission amid corporate conflicts and ownership changes.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Ben & Jerry's social mission was uniquely protected by an independent board during the Unilever acquisition.
- Corporate ownership changes have threatened the company's ability to act on its social values.
- The socially responsible business movement faces significant challenges, especially under political opposition.
- True commitment to social justice in business requires embedding values into the core mission, not just marketing.
- Ben Cohen is actively fighting to preserve and possibly regain control of Ben & Jerry's to maintain its founding principles.
What the video covers
- Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, advocates for maintaining the company's social mission despite corporate ownership changes.
- Ben & Jerry's was acquired by Unilever in 2000 with an independent board to protect its social mission.
- Tensions rose when Ben & Jerry's opposed sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, leading to legal battles with Unilever.
- Unilever sold the ice cream business to Magnum, which Cohen claims undermines the company's social mission and governance.
- Jerry Greenfield resigned in protest in 2025 due to conflicts with the new ownership.
- Cohen discusses the broader socially responsible business movement and its challenges under political and corporate pressures.
- He highlights the importance of integrating values into business missions rather than treating them as trends.
- The video covers the history, struggles, and Cohen's ongoing efforts to buy back Ben & Jerry's and restore its mission.
- Cohen criticizes Magnum for limiting Ben & Jerry's activism and controlling messaging, including censorship of political content.
- The conversation reflects on the evolving role of businesses in social justice and the fight to keep those values alive.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Confronting Injustice
- 01:24Ben & Jerry’s Ownership and Social Mission
- 02:40Jerry Greenfield’s Resignation and Corporate Conflict
- 03:48Pioneering Socially Responsible Business
- 05:07Challenges to the Movement Under Political Pressure
- 06:25Corporate Commitments to Racial Justice and DEI
- 08:29Embedding Values in Business Missions
- 09:54The Unilever Acquisition and Governance Structure
- 11:37Magnum’s Ownership and Impact on Ben & Jerry’s
- 12:56Ongoing Activism and Future Prospects
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And I personally, I, I prefer to do that. Welcome to the Vermont Conversation. I'm David Goodman.
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When Ben & Jerry's ice cream held its annual Free Cone Day in April, it had to contend with an unlikely protester, Ben Cohen.
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The company's co-founder was standing on the site of the original scoop shop in Burlington and urging customers to free Ben & Jerry's.
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Cohen founded the ice cream company with his friend Jerry Greenfield nearly 50 years ago.
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The two men ran the company until 2000, when it was acquired by Unilever, a multinational company that owns Dove soap, Hellmann's mayonnaise, and Vaseline, to name a few.
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Ben & Jerry's succeeded in getting Unilever to agree that the iconic Vermont company could continue to pursue its social mission, which would be overseen by an independent board.
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Cohen and Greenfield would remain as employees of the company, but they had no management authority.
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The company continued to be a strong supporter of racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and climate activism, among other issues.
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But relations between the ice cream company and its corporate masters began to fray, then broke apart in 2021 when Ben & Jerry's announced it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
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Unilever opposed the move, then sold its Reilly business to an Israeli-owned company that has continued to sell the ice cream in Israel and the West Bank.
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Ben & Jerry's sued Unilever in 2024, accusing it of muzzling the company's support for Palestinian rights and silencing its criticism of President Donald Trump.
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In March 2024, Unilever spun off its ice cream businesses to Magnum, which is now one of the largest ice cream companies in the world.
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The hippie-themed Vermont brand may be associated with advocating for peace and love, but that does not characterize its current relations with Magnum.
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In September 2025, Jerry Greenfield quit the company that is Konami for him in protest.
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Ben, who is 75, is now waging a battle to save the soul of Ben & Jerry's and possibly buy it back, though Magnum says the company is not for sale.
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I spoke with Ben Cohen this week. Ben Cohen, welcome to the Vermont Conversation.
Speaker A
Yeah, good to be here, David.
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So then you've been a champion of the socially responsible business movement, the idea that business can be a force for good.
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Why don't we start by just saying, what do you feel like has been your biggest accomplishment in that movement's biggest accomplishment?
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Well, I think that Ben & Jerry's has been in the forefront of socially responsible business.
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I think that we were a pioneer, along with a few others, like The Body Shop and Patagonia and Seventh Generation back in the day.
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And it's beautiful to see that that movement has grown and blossomed. It's become the whole big corporation movement, which is beautiful to see.
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There's 10,000 B Corps around the country. Beautiful to see. You know that Patagonia has now become owned by the Earth.
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Pretty much. Doctor Bronner's is another company that I've admired quite a bit.
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They've grown a whole lot more. They're no longer the little hippie soap company.
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And it's amazing to be able to marry this, this what has really become the most powerful force in our society—business with social justice.
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So I'm proud of that. And I'm trying to keep it alive at Ben & Jerry's.
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So we're having this conversation because that whole movement is probably under the greatest strain and challenge that it's ever faced.
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And we're seeing that under Trump, businesses are outdoing themselves to abandon DEI initiatives and other social justice programs.
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What does it say about the lasting impact of the socially responsible business movement that it finds itself, you know, including some of the socially responsible business companies are also retreating on these things, keeping their head down?
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Your thoughts on that?
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Well, I'm not really aware of, you know, say, Doctor Bronner's or Patagonia keeping their head down.
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I mean, what I am aware of is that I was so excited and enthused.
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You know, I mean, it was a really sad time after the murder of George Floyd.
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But it was beautiful to see all these corporations making these statements and commitments about how they were going to start hiring more Black people, how they were going to diversify their supplier base, how banks were going to start loaning to people that they had been discriminating against in the past.
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And so I was very encouraged. And then when Trump came in and all these companies threw out all those commitments to DEI, what had said to me was that the companies never really embraced it.
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It was just kind of an add-on because, you know, it was trendy or they thought their customers kind of demanded it.
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But I think that for the true believers, the companies that truly have embraced these values, I don't think they're pulling back from it.
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I mean, there is a particular problem that we're having at Ben & Jerry's, but, you know, when there were these companies that just started falling all over themselves, you know, doing or not doing whatever Trump wanted or didn't want?
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I was trying to figure out what the heck is going on here. And then I realized that for companies that do not have any values except for maximizing short-term profits, it was a very easy decision.
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If the guy in the White House says, do this and you think you're going to make more money if you do that, you do it.
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But the key is to have values as part of your mission. And certainly for Ben & Jerry's, that was the big innovation for Ben & Jerry's back in the 1980s and values with this three-part mission statement
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that one third of the mission is to solve social problems. And so, you know, but can I say Ben & Jerry's itself has not given up on that, but the owner of Ben & Jerry's, Magnum, the Magnum Corporation, which owns about 100 different
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ice cream brands around the world, has prevented Ben & Jerry's from acting on its values and has destroyed the governance structure,
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you know, the legally mandated governance structure.
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Well, let's talk about that because a lot, right?
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That's the piece that's so unusual about the Ben & Jerry's acquisition by Unilever back in 2000.
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How did you bake in the social mission in that deal? Because it was fairly unprecedented.
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Yes, it was unprecedented. You know, at the time, neither Jerry nor I wanted to sell Ben & Jerry's.
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It was a publicly held company, and Unilever was offering so much more money for the stock that, according to SEC rules, the company had to be sold.
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But there were other suitors. There were other companies besides Unilever that wanted to buy it, and Unilever really wanted it.
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And they came to understand that what would make their bid most attractive was if there was a way of maintaining the social mission, because that was what was the most important to Jerry and myself.
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And so we tried writing the social mission into the purchase and sales agreement, and discovered that the problem was that the social mission had to evolve.
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It needs to keep on changing as the environment, as the society that it's in, keeps on changing.
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And the way we found to do that was to establish an independent board of directors for Ben & Jerry's, whose purpose is to be the guardians of the social mission and to direct and drive the social mission,
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as well as being responsible for the quality of the ice cream. And what happened was when Magnum became the new owner, they fired the long-term employee, a 30-year employee who had worked his way up from tour guide to CEO.
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And they fired him because he was respecting the authority of the i
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They prevented the company from supporting the student protesters. And they've prevented the company from using the word Trump.
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And it's in its posts. You know, I mean, this is a company that's called out presidents and politicians against going to war and, you know, in favor of voting rights.
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And, and, and as a matter of fact, actually called out Trump by name his first time around.
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But, you know, I don't know, Magnum has become Trump or, you know, they they're not willing to.
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You know, to to engage in anything that creates controversy. And, you know, as, as I've always said, if everybody already agrees with the stand that you're taking, you didn't need to take that stand.
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Well, I did review Ben & Jerry's postings, and from afar it might look like, no, they're they're still out there.
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Swing in there, have some posts criticizing, you know, the funding for Ice, things like that.
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But then you look more closely and you see that they are blaming a House passed bill that funds Ice and the House that did this and that.
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And to your point, they do not mention the source of these things, which is Donald Trump.
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And it's you can go through, you know, listeners can go through those posts and see this for themselves, the sort of contortions that they do to never name Donald Trump.
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But I want to go to, you know, you've mentioned the various causes that Ben & Jerry's has advocated post, George Floyd for racial justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights.
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You could pretty much pick and choose the issues you cared about until 2021. The one issue that crossed the line for Unilever was advocacy for Palestinian rights.
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What did you advocate then and how did Unilever respond at that time? Well, it's interesting the issue of the illegal settlements in the West Bank had been something that the independent board and the company had been discussing for,
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I don't know, a couple of years. And there were they were trips to the area to to research what was going on and a lot of conversation.
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And, and there was a belief that continuing to have our ice cream sold in the settlements in the, in the occupied territories violated the values of, of Ben & Jerry's and eventually the board and the management of Ben & Jerry's and Unilever
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agreed that Ben & Jerry's should pull out of the West Bank. But what what happened was, as soon as that was announced, Israel got kind of upset and were heard.
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We hear that the head of Israel called the head of Unilever and said, if you don't get that ice cream back here, we're going to kick out all the Unilever businesses from from Israel.
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And so Unilever at that time made a unilateral decision to, to sell the rights to Ben & Jerry's to an Israeli, and that was illegal.
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And that was usurping the authority of the board. And so the board sued them at the time.
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Explain this little maneuver. The selling it to an Israeli enabled what to happen. Well, it enabled the ice cream to still be available in Israel.
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And Unilever could say, well, we don't it doesn't have anything to do with us because we don't own it because we've sold the rights to it.
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And as I recall, it is the pint containers are all in Hebrew letters now.
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So is that sort of a workaround that they have? Yeah, that was that was part of the deal.
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I mean I wasn't part of negotiating that. So I don't I don't know exactly how that happened.
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So Magnum says that it is actually strengthening the social mission of Ben & Jerry's.
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What's your response? Yeah, that's that's what kind of drives me up a wall. I mean, that's what I don't know what what really got my goat.
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Is that what they call it? That they put out a press release that says that they are enhancing the governance.
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And the reality is, at the end of that press release, they say, and we're getting rid of the entire independent board, which is responsible for the social mission.
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So, you know, I mean, I called that statement Orwellian, that they're saying they're making it better, but they're actually making it worse.
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I mean, you know, I've been doing these social media videos and, you know, in a in a coming one, we're talking about how, you know, the the Magnum guys are saying, hey, we got a real problem with this brand.
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The problem is it's hard. We say, and they come up with a solution, we say we're going to we're going to help improve the heart, but we're actually going to remove it.
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And then they actually pull it out. So that that's kind of what's going on.
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So last year you launched the Free Ben & Jerry campaign. What are you calling for?
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We're calling for, you know, obviously, since Magnum is not willing to abide by a legally binding contract and is not and does not support the social mission, we're calling for them to sell Ben & Jerry's to a group of socially aligned investors
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that do support the social mission. And, you know, when when Unilever first announced that they wanted to spin off their entire ice cream division, Jerry and I went to them and said, hey, why don't you just separate out
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Ben & Jerry's so we can sell it to people who actually believe in the mission?
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And, you know, Unilever refused at that time, but we were very public about it.
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And, and a bunch of socially aligned investors appeared and they're ready to, to buy the company.
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The problem is that Unilever or that Magnum now is not willing to sell it.
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And so the free Ben & Jerry's campaign is designed to put some pressure on Magnum in order to get them to see the light, help them to to see the light, because, you know, I mean, just if you look at it from the point of view of, of money,
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which is the way they look at it, except they look at it in short term money.
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But, you know, they, they, they have investors that have paid a premium for this brand, for Ben & Jerry's and the very thing that has built the brand, this values led way of doing business is the very thing that they're destroying.
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So they're they're taking this investment and reducing the value of it. What would it cost?
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I hear numbers like $1 billion is the valuation of Ben & Jerry's, or you actually able to raise that kind of money?
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Well, that's certainly not the not the financial realms that I myself deal in. But apparently there are other people and there are funds, family offices that are tend to be kind of some of which are values led pension funds. And
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the those are those are the places where the money would be coming from. Are you calling for a boycott of Ben & Jerry's while this dispute is going on?
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That is. That is in the offing. I would say that, yeah, that that is what we're planning to do because we've we've kind of asked nicely and, you know, we've been totally shut down.
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And so now, well, you know, what's happened is that people hear about what's going on and they say, wow, should I boycott Benny Jerry's?
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And I say, no, you shouldn't boycott Ben & Jerry's. Ben & Jerry's is the victim here.
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But then I realized that, well, Magnum owns a whole lot of other brands, and you could boycott them.
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So, you know, Magnum owns popsicle. They own good humor, they own briers, they own Pawlenty, they own Klondike, they own Jaso.
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So, you know, I'm not buying any of those products, and I would suggest that nobody else buy them either.
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But are you buying? Well, of course, you probably don't have to buy Ben & Jerry's, but is does your call for boycotting extend to Ben & Jerry's? No.
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Absolutely not. You know, I mean, a boycott had been injurious, would be harmful to the people who work at Penn and Jerry's.
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I mean, harmful to the to the brand itself. And there's no reason to stop buying Ben & Jerry's.
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We want to support Ben & Jerry's. That's the that's the issue. But to stop buying the other stuff that Magna makes makes a lot of sense to me.
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So also part of that original agreement in the original brand was a commitment to sourcing most, I think originally all of the dairy from Vermont.
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I understand now it's not just Vermont, but it is still Ben & Jerry's buys a lot of dairy produced by Vermont farmers.
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Do you think that that agreement is also in jeopardy and that Ben & Jerry's might leave Vermont?
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It's possible. You know, the the reality of the rest of Magnum's brands that they own is that they're not located in a particular place.
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They don't have any association with a particular place. And, you know, they they're all administered out of Magnum Central offices.
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They don't have separate offices for the brand like they do for for Ben & Jerry's. And, you know, they they have a lot of ice cream plants around the country and the world, and I and and I can tell you that it was the independent board
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that made sure that the plant in, in Waterbury was not closed there. You know, there was an effort on the part of Unilever to close that plant because, so I think that is I don't know what's in Magnum's mind,
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but I don't think there would be anything to prevent them from doing that. If you were lecturing, other would be or aspiring social entrepreneurs.
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What would you tell them to do differently about protecting their social mission and their brand that you didn't do?
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Since Ben & Jerry's, you know, formed, there have been new business structures that have been created, a lot of it as a result of people seeing what happened with Ben & Jerry's.
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So there's be corporations that legally require. To take into account the benefit of the community.
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And there are new legal structures that are designed to be a lot more, you know, enforceable and effective than the one that that we put into put into effect in, in when Ben & Jerry's was first founded, and then when we first went public and then, you know,
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when we, when we had this negotiation with, with Unilever. So, you know, there are lawyers now that specialize in these alternative legal structures.
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And I'd encourage people to use them in research, you know, use AI for good use.
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Find to find out what the latest is. Why did Jerry resign and you stay and fight?
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Well, we we both came to the same conclusion that there was no way that the social mission of Ben & Jerry's was going to survive under the current ownership.
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And, you know, Jerry is my best friend and an incredibly kind and compassionate individual who just hates conflict.
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I mean, he, you know, it's a it's a visceral, physical reaction that he has to conflict.
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And, you know, unfortunately, you know, the I mean, it is a fight to save Ben & Jerry's, and it's not something that he's able to do.
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And so he resigned in protest. And I said, I'm going to do my best to keep the mission alive to, to because I think that.
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Ben & Jerry's holds a particular place in the world of socially conscious business. It's a leader.
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And and if that, if that, if that ends, it's it's a big you know, it's a real blow to the movement.
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And, and the other thing is that, you know, Ben & Jerry's, amazingly enough, has become, you know, a huge company.
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I mean, it's a it's $1 billion company and it has a tremendous amount of power, and it can use that power for justice for, you know, on, on many, many forms of environmental or racial or economic justice.
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And it can continue to go on and campaign and be in a, in a leadership position on those issues.
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And, and it as a business, as a for profit business, it adds a lot of credibility to people that are trying to fight for those, you know, for, for for those I don't know what what should be human rights.
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Last year, you were arrested and hauled out of a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., where Robert F Kennedy was testifying.
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What were you protesting then? You know what happened for me? You know, everybody's got their breaking point.
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And for me, I was following two news items. One was that there was a new outbreak of lead poisoning somewhere in the Midwest.
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I think it was, I don't know, Milwaukee or Minnesota and and, you know, lead poisoning kind of drives me crazy because it's a lifelong thing.
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There's nothing you can do to for a little kid who got lead poisoning that their their brain is compromised for the rest of their lives.
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And we know what causes it. We know what to do about it. I mean, it's chipping lead paint in their low rent apartments, and we refuse to spend the money to do that.
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And instead we spend the money to buy bombs to to give us a gift to Israel, to kill little kids there.
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So those two things were going on in my head, and I said, I got to do something.
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I got to do make the strongest statement that a citizen can make, which is to commit civil disobedience. And so I ended up at that hearing that Robert Kennedy was at.
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And, you know, they're talking about cutting Snap benefits and throwing kids off health care programs.
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And so that's what I said, that the country is, is taking food and health care from kids in our country and using that money to kill kids in Gaza.
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You recently said that you've given up on the Democratic Party. Why? Because I think that both parties.
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Don't really care about regular old, everyday people, especially people that are at the lower end of the of the economic spectrum.
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I mean, in terms of war and, you know, outrageous sums of money to being spent on preparing to kill literally millions of people.
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Both parties are horrible in terms of, you know, the economic structure of the company, that of the country, that as, as we see, has driven what all this money to the to the top thousand, you know, to the richest thousand people in the, in the country.
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I mean, I was just listening to a speech by, by Bernie last night. I mean, he's saying that the top thousand richest people in the country own own as much as the bottom.
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I don't know, I mean, I think he said 90%. I don't know, I might have my numbers wrong a little, but it's it's absurd.
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They they both parties have presided over this system that drives all this money up to the top.
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And it's structural, you know, it's like the system isn't broken, it's fixed, the system is working the way it's designed.
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And both parties are guilty of that. So you have been at this a long time.
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Ben & Jerry's has been around almost 50 years. You've been active for all of that time.
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And hearing you talk is to hear the way a lot of people with conscience and who care and are paying attention are talking.
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And I'm wondering, how do you keep despair and apathy from taking over? Well, who was it who said Joan Baez?
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I think she said that action is the antidote to despair. You that's that's what works for me is is working to working to change it.
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I think that I would be. You know, more more in despair if if I weren't working to, to change it.
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I mean, I feel like when you're confronted with situations of injustice, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can work on changing it.
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And I personally, I prefer to do that. And when you look out into the world right now, where do you see the hope?
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What keeps you going? Well, you know, I look at Bernie and I'm very hopeful.
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I look at Zohran Mamdani and I'm incredibly helpful. I look at hopeful. I look at Platner, the guy who's running for, I don't know, Congress or Senate in in Maine.
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And I'm hugely hopeful. I mean, I mean, as Bernie was pointing out last night when mom Dani first started running, he was at 1% in the polls.
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No one had ever heard of him. But then when they heard about what he was advocating for economic justice, essentially, you know, he he won by a landslide.
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And it was kind of the same with with Bernie. I mean, he the first time he won an election in Burlington, it wasn't exactly a landslide.
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He won by ten votes, but it was because he he went door to door and told people what he was planning on doing, and he was trying to help regular, everyday people.
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I mean, most of the country is regular, everyday people. You know, these politicians, Bernie and Zohran and Platner and there's a bunch more.
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I mean, they're sincere about it. You know, Trump was kind of saying the same thing during the election campaign.
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He just used just lying like he does. Well, Ben Cohen, I want to thank you for joining us on the Vermont Conversation and for some fabulous ice cream and great causes that you've been put out in the world all these years.
Speaker A
Well, really good talking to you, David. Thanks for having me on the show. Ben Cohen is the co-founder, with Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.
Speaker A
That does it for this week's Vermont Conversation. I'm David Goodman. Thanks so much for listening.
Topics:Ben CohenBen & Jerry'ssocially responsible businessUnileverMagnumcorporate activismsocial missionPalestinian rightsbusiness ethicsVermont Conversation
