Ben Cohen looks more like the guy who drives the Good Humor truck than the founder of a multibillion-dollar ice cream brand. His personal aesthetic is Dad Who Buys Everything at Costco: plaid button-down shirts tucked into yard work-ready jeans; slip-on shoes with good tread; a slightly decomposed North Face backpack that, if found unattended in an airport, would prompt an evacuation.
Of course, Cohen is rich. The scoop shop he and his friend Jerry Greenfield launched in 1978 in a derelict gas station in downtown Burlington has become one of the world’s best-known ice cream companies, noted as much for its gooey, chunk-filled pints as its outspoken politics. For just about every progressive cause, Ben & Jerry’s has a punnily named flavor: Colin Kaepernick’s Change the Whirled, a nondairy caramel confection created to support the former NFL player’s racial justice nonprofit; Pecan Resist, released during Trump 1.0; Justice ReMix’d, a chocolate and cinnamon ice cream produced alongside a civil rights organization to raise money for criminal justice reform.
The cultural myth of Vermont as a kind of hippie Xanadu has arguably done as much for Ben & Jerry’s as Ben & Jerry’s has done for the cultural myth of Vermont; it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say that, because of Ben & Jerry’s, crunchy politics and the Green Mountains have become forever yoked in the consumer imagination. The factory in Waterbury, which churns out some 350,000 pints per day, is one of the state’s most popular tourist destinations. And the company employs some 600 people in Vermont across its Waterbury and St. Albans production facilities and corporate headquarters in South Burlington.
Cohen, 75, is still technically a Ben & Jerry’s employee, though he has no official duties. Under different circumstances, he would be contemplating semiretirement. Instead, he’s spending most of his time trying to figure out how to buy back his company, which is currently suing its corporate owner, the Amsterdam-based Magnum Ice Cream Company, a spin-off of the consumer goods giant Unilever.
Unilever bought Ben & Jerry’s for $326 million in 2000, in a highly unusual deal that allowed the company to maintain its autonomy, including the freedom to take stances on contentious political issues. According to Cohen, however, Unilever and Magnum have been stifling the activism that has come to define Ben & Jerry’s. As Cohen put it in one of several recent interviews with Seven Days: “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 lives in Williston, but he had decamped for the month of February to Briny Breezes, Fla., a seaside trailer park community of about 500 mobile homes halfway between Boca Raton and West Palm Beach. For exercise, Cohen sometimes rides his e-bike 20 or so miles each way to flip the bird at President Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago.
What they’re doing is destroying the very essence of what built Ben & Jerry’s into such a large, profitable company.
Ben Cohen
In fact, Trump is an offstage character in Ben & Jerry’s highly public standoff with Unilever and Magnum, which culminated, last fall, with Greenfield resigning in protest. The company’s advocacy for the Palestinian cause has made it some powerful enemies who, under the current administration, have been emboldened to punish dissent. What began in 2021 as a firestorm over Ben & Jerry’s decision to pull its ice cream from Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank has now evolved into a proxy war in an increasingly regressive political climate.
The agreement between Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s, still unprecedented in the annals of mergers and acquisitions, contained legally binding provisions to prevent the conglomerate from meddling in the ice cream company’s affairs. It allowed Ben & Jerry’s to appoint and maintain an independent board of directors that would have complete control over its marketing and political activism, unencumbered by interference from on high. The contract also gave Ben & Jerry’s the power to sue Unilever for breaching its terms, a power the ice cream maker has been exercising with some regularity in recent years.
In a string of federal lawsuits, Ben & Jerry’s alleges that Unilever and Magnum have attempted to undermine the independence enshrined in the merger agreement and curb the company’s expressions of its political views. The suits also claim that employees who fail to heed Unilever’s directives regarding its political statements have faced discipline or dismissal — notably, former CEO David Stever, who was relieved of his duties without the board’s consent last March.
After Unilever created Magnum to manage its frozen dessert portfolio, Magnum — which inherited the merger agreement — announced retroactive board member term limits in December that would immediately remove three of Ben & Jerry’s independent directors, including its chair, Anuradha Mittal. (Those three directors have so far refused to resign.) Most recently, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm, has claimed in court filings that Unilever and Magnum have sought to remove Mittal, a vocal Palestinian-rights advocate and foundation trustee, and threatened to withhold funding from the foundation unless she steps down. The case is pending in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, where, last week, a judge denied Magnum’s motion to dismiss.
As the litigation unfolds, Cohen and Greenfield, both of whom stepped back decades ago from official leadership roles, are trying to play the game their way. When Greenfield quit in September, he filmed a video with Cohen in which he read his resignation letter aloud, explaining why he could no longer, in good conscience, remain part of the company he founded. (Greenfield, who now lives in Colorado, declined to be interviewed for this story.)
“Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important — and yet Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power,” Greenfield wrote in his letter. “From the very beginning, Ben and I believed that our values and the pursuit of justice were more important than the company itself. If the company couldn’t stand up for the things we believed, then it wasn’t worth being a company at all.”
It was a savvy move that turned a potential liability — the departure of one-half of the namesake brand — into an opportunity to drum up the kind of press they wanted. A week before Greenfield’s exit, he and Cohen launched a campaign, “Free Ben & Jerry’s,” that publicly called on Magnum to release the company from its ownership. Cohen said he’s identified a group of “socially aligned investors” who would be willing to purchase the company, but Magnum has declined to entertain the proposition.
According to Cohen, Greenfield left, in part, because of his generally conflict-averse nature. “He needed to resign in protest. And for me, I don’t particularly enjoy conflict, but I’m willing to do it,” he said. “The struggle for justice involves conflict.” In Greenfield’s absence, Cohen has become the face of the effort to save the company from becoming, as he likes to put it, “another piece of frozen mush.” He’s not worried about reprisals from Magnum.
“One cofounder resigned over this issue,” Cohen said. “Firing the other one might not be such a good look.”
Nutty Beginnings
Few global companies inspire the kind of personal devotion that Ben & Jerry’s has cultivated among its following. This X factor is partly the nature of its product, which can be consumed, with equal abandon, in states of both celebration and despair, and partly the nature of the men who created it. The company’s bespectacled founders seem to be everywhere their ice cream is, looking goofy and teddy bearish, two mensches plainly enjoying their Cherry Garcia.
For years, Ben & Jerry’s has consistently ranked second, behind Patagonia, on the Authenticity 500 Index, produced by a consumer research group that analyzes brands based on perceived transparency and ethical integrity. Ben & Jerry’s has cemented this reputation not only because of its outspoken and occasionally irreverent support of progressive causes, but also because Cohen and Greenfield are singularly effective ambassadors for the concept of leftist ice cream. In 2005, Ben & Jerry’s protested oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by showing up on Capitol Hill with a 900-pound Baked Alaska, which Cohen and Greenfield personally helped serve to the masses.
Cohen, who opposed the decision to site F-35 fighter jets at Burlington International Airport, once drove around the city in a pickup truck with a set of speakers in the back, blasting the sound of fighter jets flying low overhead. He racked up four noise violations and was eventually arrested. Later, he apologized to Burlington residents for the disturbance. “It was necessary to do this to prevent a greater harm,” he explained at the time.
And then there’s the Ben & Jerry’s origin story, a tale so familiar to the American psyche that it felt like an old chestnut even when it was still a fairly new chestnut: Two chubby Jewish adolescent boys from Long Island strike up the kind of lifelong bond that can only be forged between the slowest kids in gym class, open an ice cream parlor in a defunct gas station in Vermont and stumble into great prosperity. A couple of years after they opened the Burlington scoop shop, Cohen told the New York Times Magazine in 2020, he and Greenfield overheard a boy ask his father: “Daddy, is there really a Ben and a Jerry?” His father replied: “Maybe many, many years ago.”
Cohen and Greenfield made an elemental pairing. By all accounts, Cohen could be exacting, impulsive and intensely critical, while Greenfield was a gentle, stabilizing presence. People who worked with Cohen and Greenfield over the years describe a similar routine: Cohen would chew someone out, and then Greenfield would show up to smooth things over.
As former CEO Fred “Chico” Lager put it in Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop, his biography of the company, “working with Ben was, in plain English, a pain in the ass.” Occasionally, his employees would serve it right back to him. The R&D team was known to give Cohen — who had a preternatural ability to detect consistency flaws in any batch of ice cream — three bowls of identical product, Lager wrote, “and sadistically watch him squirm as he tried to figure out which one he preferred.”
Cohen often had brilliant ideas and vague, unrealistic notions of how to execute them. Lyn Severance, who hand-lettered the Ben & Jerry’s logo and worked with the company as an in-house designer on and off for two decades, remembers a typical assignment from Cohen: He wanted a poster, but not just any poster.
“He wanted a poster that would hang on the wall of every franchise,” she said. “So it had to be beautiful. But it also had to be a calendar. And he wanted it to have a coupon for each month of the year, but each coupon had to be different, and each coupon had to be beautiful. And the whole thing had to be no bigger than 8.5 by 11 inches, and also, you had to be able to fold it. And also it had to be done cheap, very cheap. And he wanted it by tomorrow.” Severance and her team somehow managed to deliver this chimera, for which they won a graphic design award.
Before Cohen and Greenfield went into business together, they’d failed at plenty of individual endeavors. Cohen had a short-lived career in pottery, and Greenfield had been rejected, twice, by every medical school he applied to. In 1977, Cohen was working at a residential school for troubled youths in the Adirondacks, and Greenfield was chiseling out frozen rat brains in a lab at the University of North Carolina Hospital. Then Cohen’s school shut down, and Greenfield’s girlfriend — the person for whom he’d ended up scooping rat brains in North Carolina — broke up with him. (The girlfriend, Elizabeth Skarie, would eventually become Greenfield’s wife.) The two friends decided it was as good a time as any to embark on another venture with low odds of success.
After dismissing a Sunday delivery service for bagels and lox plus the New York Times as too capital-intensive, Cohen and Greenfield settled on ice cream. They took a $5 Penn State correspondence class in ice cream making, did some market research, and concluded that Burlington, with its abundant supply of college students and lack of other homemade ice cream parlors, was the right place to set up shop. In May 1978, with a total of $12,000 in startup funding, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade in a gas station on the corner of St. Paul and College streets.
The gas station was in rough shape. It had a very leaky roof, which Cohen patched with aluminum lithography sheets he’d gotten on the cheap from the Burlington Free Press. Cohen, who has an olfactory abnormality that makes him unable to distinguish subtle nuances in flavor, preferred ice creams with an interesting mouthfeel and a lot of mix-ins, which is how Ben & Jerry’s got its chunks and swirls. (According to Cohen, the biggest source of conflict between him and Greenfield was about optimal chunk size.) Greenfield, who had the science background from his days of chiseling out rat brains, was the ice cream mixologist.
At a time when most commercially available ice creams were light and heavily aerated, Ben & Jerry’s stuff was dense, almost chewy, made with high-quality, high-fat cream from local farms. As soon as they opened, people were lining up to buy their product, but Cohen and Greenfield weren’t making any money. The problem, Cohen said, was that they had no idea how to run a business. They used expensive ingredients, their scoops were too large, and they weren’t charging enough for them.
In an attempt to improve their cash flow, they rented a bigger production space in a former spool and bobbin mill on South Champlain Street and started a wholesale business, delivering ice cream in 2.5-gallon tubs to a few local restaurants. Then Cohen and Greenfield discovered they could sell their product by the pint to grocery stores along Cohen’s restaurant delivery routes. In just a few months, they went from 50 accounts in Vermont to almost 200, too many for Cohen to keep up with in his aged ice cream delivery truck.
Even with the jump in wholesale business, they were still only managing to stay on top of their debt. “We felt like we were becoming just another cog in the economic machine that tends to exploit and oppress a lot of people,” Cohen said.
In 1981, Time published an article on the growing trend of high-butterfat ice creams — Häagen-Dazs had also recently arrived on the scene — that began: “What you must understand at the outset is that Ben & Jerry’s in Burlington, Vt., makes the best ice cream in the world.”
This breathless endorsement was a boon for business, but it came at an awkward time for Cohen and Greenfield, who had just opened their first franchise location in Shelburne and were acutely distressed about the prospect of becoming The Man. They were both burned out, and Greenfield decided to move to Arizona with his girlfriend.
Not long after the Time article appeared, they listed Ben & Jerry’s for sale and, within a few months, got an offer from a former M&M Mars executive. But in the end, they decided not to sell. A Brattleboro restaurant owner named Maurice Purpora convinced Cohen that he could do better.
Business was just a neutral tool, kind of like a hammer, and you could use it either to destroy things or to build things.
ben cohen
“He said, ‘Ben, if there’s something you don’t like about business, why don’t you just do it differently?’ And that had not really occurred to me before — that business was just a neutral tool, kind of like a hammer, and you could use it either to destroy things or to build things,” Cohen said. “So we decided to see if we could create a business that actually helped to improve the quality of life in the community.”
Corporate Swirl
Armed with this new philosophy that business could be a force for good, Cohen began to feel less squeamish about expanding beyond the gas station. To raise money for a new production facility in Waterbury, the company held its first public stock offering in 1984, which initially was limited to Vermont residents to avoid U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules about interstate commerce. At one point, according to Cohen, one out of every 100 Vermont households owned stock in Ben & Jerry’s.
Annual shareholder meetings usually took place outside, under a tent, as a multiday music festival carried on around them. Cohen would begin by chanting the legalese like a rabbi. Then he would open the floor for discussion.
“There was always one shareholder who would stand up and say, ‘Hey, man, we love being part of this company, and you’re doing great stuff, and it’s great ice cream, but how am I ever going to get a return on my investment? There’s no market for this stock,’” Cohen recalled. “And then other shareholders would stand up and say, ‘Just owning the stock is enough.’”
By the mid-’90s, Ben and Jerry’s had national distribution and annual sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not everyone was charmed by Cohen and Greenfield’s new-agey capitalism. A scathing 1995 article in the New Republic said the founders “believe the most flattering image of themselves: that, despite their millions, they haven’t sold out. ‘It’s really interesting what you can do with a business when you don’t care about making a lot of money,’ millionaire Ben mused to The New Age Journal in 1988, a quote earnestly reprinted in the Harvard Business School case study of the company.” The article suggested that Cohen and Greenfield were selling easy, sanitized activism to “gullible yuppies,” but “the scarier truth,” it went on, “may be that they’ve scammed themselves.”
When Ben & Jerry’s merged with Unilever in 2000, observers were quick to make a microscandal out of a socially conscious Vermont company selling out to a multinational conglomerate. As corporate law experts Antony Page and Robert Katz wrote in their 2012 postmortem of the sale in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “If Ben & Jerry’s was a kind of corporate Woodstock, this sale was its Altamont” — a reference to the 1969 rock festival in which a Hells Angel stabbed and killed an 18-year-old.
But Cohen and Greenfield, whose reticence about the sale was recorded in the merger agreement, sounded a cheerful note about the deal in the press. “While I would have preferred for Ben & Jerry’s to remain independent, I’m excited about this next chapter,’’ Cohen said in a statement to the New York Times after the agreement was signed — a statement that included, yes, Grateful Dead lyrics: “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.’’
At the time of the merger, Cohen said, their lawyers believed they had to sell to Unilever or they would risk shareholder lawsuits that they were certain to lose. As one Ben & Jerry’s investor told the New York Times, “We think it’s horrible that a company has no choice but to sell to the highest bidder or get sued.”
But the underlying assumption — that corporations have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder profits — was a flawed one, according to Page, who until recently was the dean of Florida International University’s law school. If the shareholders had sued, Page contends, Ben & Jerry’s likely would have prevailed in court. (Two and a half decades later, Cohen certainly wishes they’d tried to fight it. “Kind of destroys your faith in lawyers,” he said.)
The merger went ahead, and the parties ultimately brokered a deal that seemed to give everyone what they wanted: Loyal local shareholders made bank; Unilever got what would become the top-selling ice cream brand in the country; Ben & Jerry’s could enjoy the benefits of worldwide distribution without surrendering its principles, autonomy or iconoclastic position in the corporate world. And both Cohen and Greenfield received substantial paydays: Greenfield’s stake was reportedly worth about $10 million, Cohen’s approximately $40 million.
The feel-good moral of the Ben & Jerry’s story has been that profitability and social responsibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive — in fact, Cohen insists, they can complement each other. Corporations, he said, are now the most powerful force in society — more powerful than religion, government or any other institution that has historically acted as a moral custodian. Ben & Jerry’s, he believes, has a mandate to stand for something other than profit.
“If the most powerful force in society isn’t using its power for the benefit of society, we’re gonna end up where we’re headed,” he said. This logic, of course, has some grim implications — that only business is now powerful enough to fix the ills wrought by business, something people don’t necessarily want to hear from a very successful businessman.
But Ben & Jerry’s has, in fact, done tangible things to support progressive issues, if sometimes imperfectly. In 1989, long before supporting LGBTQ rights was mainstream in the corporate world, the company extended health benefits to same-sex partners of employees. Through the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, it has donated tens of millions to small, grassroots organizations, including $130,000 to local farmworker advocacy group Migrant Justice between 2010 and 2017, when Migrant Justice was publicly pressuring the company to adopt higher standards for working conditions in its Vermont supply chain. (In 2017, Ben & Jerry’s signed Migrant Justice’s Milk With Dignity pledge, which ensures fair treatment, adequate housing and better pay for farmworkers.)
Ben & Jerry’s was also the first major company to publicly back the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Cohen and Greenfield spearheaded a $1.8 million fundraising campaign to support the protests — despite grumbling from some Occupiers that corporate philanthropy was the last thing they wanted.
Bitter Impasse
For two decades, the strange marriage of Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s was a case study in the possibilities of enlightened capitalism. The merger was the subject of white papers in law review journals and entrepreneurship seminars. Paul Polman, the CEO of Unilever until 2018, was a champion of Ben & Jerry’s approach to corporate responsibility and acquired several other socially conscious brands during his tenure, including Vermont cleaning product maker Seventh Generation. As Cohen told the New York Times Magazine in 2020, “There’s no doubt that Ben & Jerry’s has influenced capitalism more than capitalism influenced Ben & Jerry’s.”
Then, in July 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop selling ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in support of the Palestinian cause. The backlash was swift. Several states, including New York, Florida, Arizona and New Jersey, dumped hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Unilever stock from their investment funds. Israeli president Isaac Herzog declared the Ben & Jerry’s boycott “a new type of terrorism,” and Benjamin Netanyahu, then the country’s opposition leader, tweeted: “Now we Israelis know which ice cream NOT to buy.”
A few months later, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, a staunch supporter of Israel and a major Trump donor, met with then-Unilever CEO Alan Jope. According to the Financial Times, Peltz urged Jope to reverse the boycott. Jope responded that his hands were tied because of the merger agreement.
At the end of that year, the pro-Israel Simon Wiesenthal Center, of which Peltz was then chair, placed Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s on its Global Anti-Semitism Top Ten watch list. The following summer, Peltz joined Unilever’s board of directors; soon thereafter, Unilever sold Ben & Jerry’s Israeli trademark to a local distributor, effectively ending the boycott without consulting the ice cream company’s independent board.
In response, the board sued Unilever, claiming it had violated the merger agreement. The parties eventually reached a settlement: The new Israeli distributor could keep selling Ben & Jerry’s in the occupied territories, and Unilever agreed to buy $2 million worth of almonds annually from Palestinian farmers for at least a decade. (More recent court filings, however, allege that Unilever has not held up its end of the deal.) Peltz, for his part, was pleased. As he told the Financial Times: “Ben & Jerry’s job is to sell ice cream, not to make political statements.”
Ben & Jerry’s job is to sell ice cream, not to make political statements.
Nelson Peltz
Before the West Bank controversy and Peltz’s arrival on the Unilever board, the company could freely post about political issues, according to former Ben & Jerry’s employee Chris Miller, who was the global social mission director until last March. “There was never a need to ask permission from the parent company,” said Miller, who worked at Ben & Jerry’s for two decades. “If we were going to do something that we thought might be controversial and generate some buzz, we would give our colleagues at Unilever a heads-up. The idea was, Don’t catch your stakeholders off guard.”
But that dynamic started to shift. In 2023, Miller and a coworker created a Fourth of July social media and blog post about the United States’ violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which was supposed to establish a 35 million-acre permanent home for the Sioux Nation. The post included a petition to return the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Sioux: “The United States was founded on stolen indigenous land,” it read. “This Fourth of July, let’s commit to returning it.”
In response, Unilever placed Miller and his coworker under a “business integrity investigation” for violating a company code prohibiting marketing materials “likely to cause serious or widespread offence to any religion, nationality, culture, gender, race, sexual orientation, age, disability or minority group.”
“Their claim, basically, was that we offended the U.S.,” Miller said. (On Instagram, the feedback was slightly different: “Imagine posting these while making ice cream for profit on those same lands,” one reply read. “What a stain of a company.”) Neither Miller nor his coworker was fired, but Miller said the investigation resulted in a demerit in his performance evaluation that year that affected his compensation package. “It’s clear to me that the purpose was to intimidate us, and it worked,” he said.
After the 2024 presidential election, according to a March 2025 lawsuit filed by the independent board, Ben & Jerry’s prepared a statement for Inauguration Day identifying areas of concern under the Trump administration, including health care, abortion rights and climate change. The suit claims that Peter ter Kulve, president of Unilver’s ice cream division, “unilaterally barred Ben & Jerry’s from issuing the post because it specifically mentioned ‘Donald Trump.’”
“Just look at the company’s social media feed now,” Miller said. “There’s no criticism of the Trump administration. And at a time when the company that’s been so outspoken on climate, on LGBTQ rights, on democracy, voting rights and all these things that are literally being eviscerated under the current administration, it’s just like: Really? You’ve got nothing to say?”
A January 8 post on Ben & Jerry’s social media channels condemning “the US intervention in Venezuela” and two posts about the killings of U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis make no mention of Trump. Even an October 2025 post following the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests, which were explicitly anti-Trump, acknowledged “the millions who showed up across the country this weekend to protect our rights, protect our democracy, and send a clear message that we will not settle for authoritarian or broken systems” — without naming the president at whom these protests were aimed. “It’s pretty painful to see this contorted stuff,” Miller said.
Even if an inhibited Ben & Jerry’s is still much less inhibited than most other major corporations when it comes to expressing political sentiments, Cohen isn’t having it.
The company he founded has no official position on the “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign. “Ben is running that as an individual,” said Jay Curley, the company’s chief marketing officer, acknowledging that “there’s a lot of pragmatic things that would make a separation very challenging.” And not everyone at the company feels they have a personal stake in the outcome of the lawsuits or in the larger debate over the value of corporate stances on political issues. Some people just want to make ice cream and pay their bills.
Even if Ben & Jerry’s wins in court against its corporate overlords, the real battle, in Cohen’s view, has never been about the terms of the merger agreement. He thinks Magnum simply isn’t interested in selling ice cream that stands for anything other than ice cream. “They’re not going to suddenly embrace the values of Ben & Jerry’s,” he said.
Nor does Magnum have much incentive to get rid of Ben & Jerry’s, one of the most profitable brands in its portfolio. The next frontier in his battle to wrest back the company, Cohen said, is grassroots public pressure. In fact, Ben & Jerry’s has successfully employed this tactic before. In the mid-’80s, Pillsbury acquired the Vermont company’s biggest competitor, Häagen-Dazs, and told its distributors that it would no longer supply them with Häagen-Dazs if they continued to sell Ben & Jerry’s. Cohen and Greenfield responded by hiring small planes to fly over sports stadiums with banners that asked: “What’s the Doughboy Afraid of?” On every pint, they printed an 800 number that costumers could dial to hear a recording of Cohen and Greenfield explaining how Ben & Jerry’s was being unlawfully squeezed by Big Ice Cream, and those customers wrote angry letters to Pillsbury. Eventually, Pillsbury desisted.
On April 14, Cohen is planning to roll out Free the Cone Day, a twist on Ben & Jerry’s annual Free Cone Day, at the site of the original Burlington scoop shop. Cohen will be there, selling $10 commemorative Free the Cone Day T-shirts, while someone dressed in a giant Magnum bar costume attacks someone in a giant Ben & Jerry’s pint costume.
So far, the campaign’s open letter to Magnum has received more than 28,000 signatures: “Free Ben & Jerry’s and allow it to be sold to values-aligned investors who will preserve its mission, or watch loyal customers like me turn away from Magnum brands, taking the trust, love, and value that built Ben and Jerry’s with us,” it reads. If enough people stopped buying other Magnum products — Cohen is careful to emphasize that he’s not personally calling for a boycott, though he’s not not calling for one, either — then, perhaps, Magnum might relent.
“The reality is,” Cohen said, “that it’s in the hands of the people.”
In other words, the only thing more powerful than a corporation is a consumer, which is what a person becomes when they buy something from a corporation. That irony, as one might say about Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is pretty rich. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Rocky Road | Chunks of two hippie founders smushed with gobs of corporate overlords and a melty political core. How did they find themselves in such wavy gravy?”
This article appears in March 25 • 2026.
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