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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, the company’s co-founder, was standing on the site of the original scoop shop in Burlington, urging customers to Free Ben & Jerry’s.
“Ben & Jerry’s itself has not given up on” its values, Cohen told me, but its current owner “has prevented Ben & Jerry’s from acting on its values and has destroyed the governance structure” of the company.
Cohen founded the ice cream company with his friend Jerry Greenfield nearly 50 years ago. 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, among other global brands.
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. Cohen and Greenfield remained as employees of the company, but they had no management authority. The company continued to be a strong supporter of racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the Occupy Wall Street movement, climate activism and other issues.
But relations between the ice cream company and its corporate masters began to sour, then curdled in 2021 when Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Unilever opposed the move, then sold its Israeli business to an Israeli-owned company that has continued to sell the ice cream in Israel and the occupied territories.
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. 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.
The hippy-themed Vermont brand may be associated with peace and love, but that does not characterize its current relations with its owners. In March 2025, Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever was ousted, allegedly over the company’s progressive activism. In September 2025, Greenfield quit the company in protest. Cohen, 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, which is valued at over $1 billion, is not for sale.
“They’ve prevented the company from calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. They prevented the company from supporting the student [Palestinian solidarity] protesters, and they’ve prevented the company from using the word ‘Trump’ in its posts,” said Cohen. “Magnum has become Trumpified.”
“The very thing that has built the brand, this values-led way of doing business, is the very thing that they’re destroying. So they’re taking this investment and reducing the value of it,” Cohen said.
When I asked him whether Ben & Jerry’s might leave Vermont, he replied, “It’s possible.”
He said that Ben & Jerry’s independent board had earlier prevented Unilever from closing the Waterbury ice cream plant. But Ben & Jerry’s could be moved to a central factory where other Magnum ice cream brands are made. “I don’t know what’s in Magnum’s mind, but I don’t think there would be anything to prevent them from doing that.”
Cohen urged concerned consumers to boycott other Magnum ice cream brands, but not Ben & Jerry’s, which he said “would be harmful to the people who work at Ben & Jerry’s.”
“We want to support Ben & Jerry’s — that’s the issue — but to stop buying the other stuff that Magnum makes.”
Cohen continues his brisk pace of activism. He was arrested last year at a U.S. Senate hearing featuring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accusing Congress of slashing Medicaid for poor children in the U.S. to pay to bomb children in Gaza.
Cohen said he has given up on the Democratic Party. “Both parties have presided over this system that drives all this money up to the top. The system is working the way it’s designed, and both parties are guilty of that.”
But he remains hopeful. “Action is the antidote to despair,” he said, quoting folk singer Joan Baez. “When you’re confronted with situations of injustice, you can ignore it, you can complain about it, or you can work on changing it. And personally, I prefer to do that.”
