It’s been a rocky road of late for Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield, who has decided to hang up his scoop after 47 years with his semi-eponymous brand. The 74-year-old former hippy-turned-entrepreneur said his brand’s parent company, Unilever, is making it too difficult to speak out on social issues.
He made his resignation known through Ben Cohen, his fellow co-founder, in a post on the X platform.
“For more than 20 years under their (Unilever’s) ownership, Ben & Jerry’s stood up and spoke out in support of peace, justice and human rights, not as abstract concepts, but in relation to real events happening in our world,” he wrote. “That independence existed in no small part because of the unique merger agreement Ben and I negotiated with Unilever, one that enshrined our social mission and values in the company’s governance structure in perpetuity. It’s profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone,” he said.
After some blah, blah, blah about the current administration, immigration, voting rights, and the LGBTQ community, he added, “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.”
After 47 years, Jerry has made the difficult decision to step down from the company we built together. I’m sharing his words as he resigns from Ben & Jerry’s. His legacy deserves to be true to our values, not silenced by @MagnumGlobal #FreeBenAndJerrys pic.twitter.com/EZXGRjs76a
— Ben Cohen (@YoBenCohen) September 17, 2025
In 2000, London-based Unilever paid $326 million in cash to Cohen and Greenfield for the company with a promise to preserve a certain amount of social activism as part of the brand’s culture and identity.
In March 2024, the company announced that it was exiting the ice cream business and would spin off Ben & Jerry’s into an independent company named The Magnum Ice Cream Company, which would be the parent company to the brand that made Cherry Garcia famous.
Since then, in addition to supporting the losing campaigns of Joe “I like vanilla” Biden and Kamala Harris for president, Cohen and Greenfield have been trying to take control of the company again.
Magnum didn’t seem to have an appetite for selling the company back to them, and so it did what any self-respecting, impersonal corporation would do when it doesn’t give a Phish Food. It issued a statement to the Associated Press that reads like ChatGPT generated it: “We disagree with his perspective and have sought to engage both co-founders in a constructive conversation on how to strengthen Ben & Jerry’s powerful values-based position in the world.”
Translation: “Don’t you guys have better things to do? I mean, it’s just ice cream.”
Well, the guys do have a foundation, and they appear to devote a certain amount of time to it. According to its website, it focuses on “engaging employees,” “giving to Vermont communities,” and, of course, “supporting social justice.”
In recent years, it seems the founders have been more of a distraction than an integral part of the company and the brand they created.
There have been lawsuits filed over management decisions that Cohen and Greenfield have alleged were in retaliation for the company’s social and political activism. Some of the recent developments include:
- In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s said it would discontinue serving certain Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
- In 2022, Unilever sold its company in Israel to a local firm that agreed to sell Ben & Jerry’s products throughout Israel and the West Bank.
- And then in November of 2024, when Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit against Unilever where it alleged that Unilever was censoring Ben & Jerry’s statements that were in support of Palestinians in the Gaza war. In that same filing, the ice cream brand stated that its parent company would not let it click “send” on a social media post that detailed issues the company believed would be problems for the country during a second Donald Trump presidency.
And so it would appear that at least some of these issues, along with others, were enough for Greenfield to decide to make like a banana and split. Thank you for your service, Jerry. Ice cream has never known such valor. In the paraphrased words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “Old ice cream soldiers never die; they just melt away.”
One more thing: The culture war is real! If you want to see the Democrats go down to defeat in next year’s midterms and beyond, now is the time to join the battle to Make America Great Again. Without you, America can lose. We need your help to succeed!
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