Ben Cohen doesn’t look like a man sitting at the center of a corporate legal battle worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Ben & Jerry’s co-founder favors plaid button-downs, practical jeans, and a North Face backpack that has clearly seen better days. But behind the everyman exterior, Cohen is waging one of the more fascinating fights in American food and business culture: an attempt to reclaim the company he built from the multinational giant that now controls it.
Cohen, 75, and his longtime friend Jerry Greenfield started their ice cream operation in 1978 out of a converted Burlington gas station. What grew from that modest scoop shop is now a globally recognized brand, one as famous for its chunk-heavy pints as for the progressive politics baked into its identity. Flavors like Colin Kaepernick’s Change the Whirled, Pecan Resist, and Justice ReMix’d have made Ben & Jerry’s something unusual in the consumer goods world: a corporation with a conscience, or at least one that tries hard to project one.
That identity is now under serious threat. Ben & Jerry’s is currently suing its corporate owner, the Amsterdam-based Magnum Ice Cream Company, itself a spin-off of consumer goods giant Unilever. Unilever purchased Ben & Jerry’s back in 2000 for $326 million in a deal that was unusual from the start. The acquisition included provisions allowing Ben & Jerry’s to maintain significant autonomy, including the freedom to take public stances on contentious political issues. Cohen argues that Unilever and Magnum have systematically violated that agreement by suppressing the company’s activism.
“What they’re doing is destroying the very essence of what built Ben & Jerry’s into such a large, profitable company over the last half century,” Cohen told Seven Days in a recent interview.
The stakes are significant beyond the courtroom. The Waterbury factory produces roughly 350,000 pints per day and ranks among Vermont’s most visited tourist destinations. The company employs around 600 people across its Waterbury and St. Albans production facilities and its South Burlington corporate headquarters. Ben & Jerry’s is woven into Vermont’s economic and cultural fabric in ways that few other brands can claim for any state.
There’s also something larger going on here about what happens when activist brands get absorbed by corporate structures that have no real interest in activism. The Vermont mythology matters. The cultural image of the Green Mountains as a haven for principled, left-leaning enterprise has long been intertwined with Ben & Jerry’s public identity. The brand helped build that image, and that image helped build the brand. Unilever’s purchase always carried the risk that the values animating the company would eventually be treated as a marketing asset to be managed rather than a genuine commitment to be honored.
Cohen is now spending most of his time working toward a buyback of the company. He was in Briny Breezes, Florida, a small seaside trailer park community between Boca Raton and West Palm Beach, for much of February, occasionally riding his e-bike twenty miles each way for exercise. It’s an almost deliberately unglamorous picture of a man worth considerable wealth, and it fits neatly with the brand persona he has cultivated for decades.
The “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign that Cohen and others have pushed reflects something real about this moment. Corporate consolidation routinely swallows up independent voices, and the brands that survive intact are the exception. Whether Ben & Jerry’s can legally enforce the autonomy provisions from its 2000 acquisition agreement, and whether Cohen can actually engineer a buyback, are open questions. But the fight itself illustrates something important about the limits of progressive identity within corporate structures that ultimately answer to shareholders in Amsterdam rather than activists in Burlington.
The ice cream is still good. The politics are still printed on the packaging. But the question of who controls the message, and whether that message means anything when a giant holding company decides it doesn’t, sits at the center of this legal and cultural dispute. For Cohen, the answer is worth fighting for, one pint at a time.
