Is Ben Cohen the last holdout of hippie capitalism or a contrarian who won’t let go?
Ben Cohen at his Vermont home filming social-media content for his “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign in January. One afternoon in Morningside Heights, toward the end of March, about a hundred socially conscious investors were getting fidgety.
They’d convened in a blocky limestone building on Riverside Drive for the biannual conference of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of “faith- and values-based” groups — religious organizations, pension funds, family foundations, and others — interested in pushing corporations to practice “social and environmental justice. ” Talks included “The Cost of Excess: Executive Pay and Systemic Risk” and “Pregnancy Accommodation and Worker Protections at Amazon. ” Together, the members shepherd some $4 trillion in capital.
Attendees would escape to happy hour soon, but not before a special guest, Ben Cohen, the 75-year-old co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, arrived from Vermont. In his younger days, Cohen looked the part of a hippie ice-cream enthusiast: portly with aviator-style glasses and overgrown facial hair à la Jerry Garcia.
But in recent years, he’d come to resemble a conventional corporate boomer: trim, clean-shaven, and most often in a sort of REI business casual — sensible slacks, discreet rimless glasses, button-up shirts, and Merrells. Cohen took the stage alongside Whitney Nguyen, the director of impact research at NorthStar Asset Management, an investment firm that specializes in building “portfolios with purpose.
” Nguyen, four decades younger than Cohen, had been following the controversy swirling around Ben & Jerry’s for the past year as the company’s founders accused its parent corporation, Unilever, of choking the ice-cream brand’s beloved social mission. Like so many Ben & Jerry’s customers, Nguyen was emotionally attached to the brand and what it stood for. She regaled the crowd with a story about her wedding: They had served six of the company’s ice-cream cakes.
In front of a massive screen, she clicked through slides on Ben & Jerry’s history and its current crisis, laying out the case that Unilever had failed the brand, describing a pattern in which the company’s chosen messaging had been “blocked, forbidden, silenced. ” “Ben & Jerry’s isn’t just an ice-cream brand,” Nguyen said.
“Ice cream just happens to be the vessel. The social mission is the reason Unilever paid a premium to acquire it … If you strip that away, you don’t have Ben & Jerry’s anymore. ” For decades, the company has sought to do more than just sell ice cream, making the environment, workers’ rights, free speech, equality, and peace integral to its business. It has long donated to related causes, and it prioritizes climate-friendly local sourcing and fair-trade ingredients.
Cohen had been sermonizing about this approach for nearly 50 years, but he was onstage at ICCR to ask for help. When it purchased Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, Unilever, a multinational conglomerate that owns more than 400 consumer-goods brands and brings in around $60 billion in annual revenue, had agreed to uphold this social mission and install an independent board dedicated to that task. The arrangement worked shockingly well for more than two decades.
But in 2021, Ben & Jerry’s decided to pull distribution from Israeli-occupied settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, an idea the board had been weighing for years. Israel’s then–prime minister, Naftali Bennett, publicly threatened “severe consequences” for Unilever if the plan moved forward. Unilever reversed the decision and created a work-around, allowing an Israeli distributor to sell the ice cream in the disputed territories.
Throughout the war in Gaza, Unilever has allegedly thwarted Ben & Jerry’s protest efforts, blocking its public calls for a cease-fire and an end to U.S. military support. It was too much for Jerry Greenfield, the Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s, and in the fall of 2025, he resigned in protest. Cohen wasn’t too rattled; he knew his partner didn’t have the disposition for what was coming.
“Jerry’s been my best friend since I was 12,” Cohen would tell me later, “and he’s the most wonderful best friend you could ever have. But getting into a fight, a battle like this, is the kind of thing that would just tear him up. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. ” Cohen, though, has always spoiled for a fight.
“He’s always been — not the leader of the company but a provocateur,” said Jay Curley, Ben & Jerry’s chief marketing officer and an employee since 2008. Cohen has been arrested for civil disobedience four times over the course of his career: for protesting against the presence of fighter jets in Burlington, Vermont; against the prosecution of Julian Assange; on behalf of campaign-finance reform; and, most recently, against the genocide in Gaza during a Senate hearing where RFK Jr. was promoting Donald Trump’s health budget for the year.
In the ’80s, Cohen battled Pillsbury, Ben & Jerry’s main competitor at the time, which had attempted to restrict the company’s distribution. And now, it was Cohen against Unilever — and the Magnum Ice Cream Company, formerly a Unilever subsidiary housing all its ice-cream brands. Magnum became its own publicly traded entity in December but remains financially tied to the conglomerate.
“Jerry and I both came to the realization that under the current leadership of Unilever-slash-Magnum, the social mission was essentially going to die,” Cohen told the ICCR crowd. In September, he’d begun a campaign he called Free Ben & Jerry’s, an effort to wrest back control.
He now churns out social-media content, including front-facing videos imploring Ben & Jerry’s fans to descend upon Magnum’s various pages, and zanier material, like an animation of an anthropomorphized Magnum ice-cream bar attacking a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. In a video from December, Cohen sits writing a letter to Santa Claus, asking for help reviving the “spirit of the season,” which entails, in part, freeing Ben & Jerry’s.
At the same time, Cohen has been in constant meetings with a group of like-minded investors, gathering funds for a bid to buy back the company he founded.
The offer, according to Cohen, will likely have to be between $1 billion and $2 billion, but Ben & Jerry’s is one of the crown jewels of Magnum, and the corporation has been so uninterested in selling that it has refused to provide the financial data necessary to make a play. Unilever has also shielded relevant data. When asked about the inner workings of the company he created, Cohen often says he’s not a numbers guy.
“You know, you go into corporate offices, and it’s just people going over numbers,” he told me. “Einstein said that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. And it happens to be that it’s those things that can’t be counted — love, compassion, kindness, positive feelings — that don’t show up in the stuff these guys are looking at. ” He meant the executives at Unilever and Magnum.
But Cohen identifies as “a marketing guy,” and at ICCR, he knew what was needed. More than two-thirds of Unilever is owned by institutional investors, some of whom were represented in that room. He told them, “We need you to speak out publicly … They need to hear from the investors. They need to hear it from financial analysts; they need to hear it from the financial press … Sell a stock and be public about it.
” His voice was rising now.
“Don’t do it and not let people know. ” Cohen was well aware of the power of the role he played in the public’s mind, the character of the friendly ice-cream man whose love of sweets and doing good had incidentally built one of the most popular companies in the world. Before happy hour started, it was announced that everyone in the room would be offered Phish Food, Americone Dream, and Non-Dairy Strawberry Swirl, personally scooped by Ben.
Though Cohen is still on the payroll, simply as “co-founder,” neither he nor Greenfield has been involved in the day-to-day operations of Ben & Jerry’s for many years, and Cohen seldom sets foot on its Vermont premises. But with Greenfield out of the game, Cohen is effectively the company’s mascot.
“The media mostly wants the guy that people have heard of,” he told me. It was late January, and we were sitting in an apartment in downtown Burlington, overlooking a frozen Lake Champlain.
Cohen lives more like a dentist or tax attorney than a one-percenter or an activist: He drives a recent-model Volvo and lives in a quirky cabin-esque house in Williston, partway between Burlington and the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury. His wife, Tatiana Repnikova , used to live in this modest apartment.
When I visited, he was using it as a makeshift headquarters for the Free Ben & Jerry’s campaign. He and his team used the space to film videos for not only Free Ben & Jerry’s but also Up in Arms, an organization he started last summer to protest military spending. In one video, he uses cookie dough to demonstrate what could be offered to the American people instead of spending $250 million on a single F-35 fighter jet.
He runs a knife along the edges of a paper cutout of the aircraft laid over the dough.
“This is a school,” he says, pressing a small cookie cutter into the dough. It was dinnertime when we met, and Cohen, a “totally unrestrained” eater, in his own words, was awaiting an order of Nepalese takeout. A couple of hours earlier, he had cardiac rehab. He’d experienced heart problems right around the time of the Unilever acquisition and recently had a “cardiac event.
” Still, he was maxing out his exertion.
“You know, I am working as hard now, as a percentage of available energy, as I was when I was 26 and starting an ice-cream company,” he said, opening his laptop to show me his calendar. His day had been full of calls with potential investors and Zoom meetings with the directors of his campaigns and organizations. Like his neighbor and friend Bernie Sanders, Cohen scorns corporate greed; he also advocates for racial justice and criminal-justice reform.
But his lifelong preoccupation is war. Over the past couple of decades, he has established a network of advocacy groups and nonprofits to fight exorbitant defense budgets, and he tends to link every conversation to military spending and what it really costs the American people.
“The general mainstream conventional wisdom,” he told me, “is ‘Oh, geez, we’d really like to help people. We don’t really want there to be poverty, people who don’t have enough to eat, people dying of preventable diseases. We want good schools. But we just don’t have the resources.
’” Cohen is typically a calm and measured speaker, but these ideas bring out a fiery indignance.
“It’s a total crock of shit,” he said. “We do have the resources. We just spend them on preparing to kill millions of people. ” That week, he and his content crew had been scheduled to film a video in which he’d make a new ice cream dedicated to Renee Nicole Good and in protest of ICE: Maxi Hearts of Minneapolis, featuring coconut, passion fruit, salted caramel, and chocolate.
When Alex Pretti was killed by federal immigration agents just 17 days after Good, Cohen realized, he said, “this was not just a mistake. This was kind of standard operating procedure.
” It was “not a time for ice cream. ” Cohen had been hyperactive on social media since the prior spring, when he’d gone viral for a video of his protest on the Senate floor against the war in Gaza. He’d hired a social-media manager, a marketing professor and Burlington local named Lindsay Bumps.
But when Cohen started dedicating more of his time to the Free Ben & Jerry’s campaign, amping up his production value and flooding his personal Instagram page, many of the comments revealed a major problem: Die-hard fans and regular customers alike tended to misinterpret its aims.
“I will not purchase Ben & Jerry’s until all of this is made right,” one user wrote. “I buy B&J because of the social missions they support, their treatment of employees, and what the creators stand for. Period. ” On Reddit, after Greenfield resigned, one asked, “Are we boycotting or supporting Ben & Jerry’s?
” Cohen’s goal is to put enough pressure on his opponents that they agree to sell, and some in his orbit have suggested a boycott could be an effective recourse, but the very idea is painful for him. When I asked why, he scoffed and grew lightly testy.
“I don’t know, maybe because I’ve spent 50 years trying toBen & Jerry’s sales? ” he said.
“And decreasing the sales, it hurts the people who are working at the company. I want Ben & Jerry’s to be strong. ” The enterprise’s commercial success wasn’t just incidental to its social mission; it was the point. It was proof that business didn’t flourish despite ethical standards — it could flourish because of them.
Cohen says companies need to behave like people, beholden to a moral code.
“There’s a spiritual aspect to business, just as there is to the lives of individuals,” he told me. “As your business succeeds, as you help others, they help in return. As the business supports the community, the community supports your business. ” Some of Cohen’s professional allies — social-impact-minded executives, ethical investors — see him as a necessary and galvanizing force.
In the age of Trumpism, someone needs to stand for corporate integrity and freedom of expression. Others, particularly within Unilever’s Dutch offices, tend to speak about Cohen’s efforts with a wry chuckle, seeming to view him as an eccentric old man waging a nutty war in the press rather than as a real threat. Ben & Jerry’s CEO, Jochanan Senf, whom Unilever appointed last year, had a euphemistic — perhaps condescending — assessment: “Ben’s an incredible campaigner.
” It’s easy, in this doomer era, to dismiss boomer leftist ideologues. Many of Cohen’s contemporaries from the wave of hippie entrepreneurs who established companies in the ’70s and early ’80s discarded their convictions years ago, ceding power to corporations that would eventually render “ethical consumption” meaningless. The British human- and animal-rights activist Anita Roddick sold her beauty brand, the Body Shop, to L’Oréal, a company known for its animal testing, in 2006.
The next year, Burt’s Bees founder Roxanne Quimby sold her beloved “Earth-friendly” brand to Clorox for almost a billion dollars. Odwalla — one of the early manufacturers of more natural, crunchy-leaning bottled juices — went to Coca-Cola in 2001 and was discontinued by 2020. Patagonia, now valued at about $3 billion, remains one of the few examples of a large environmentalist brand that hasn’t sold out, staying private and baking climate protection into its business model.
Some involved in the Ben & Jerry’s dispute are skeptical of Cohen’s motivations: Is he truly trying to do what’s best for the company — and the world — or is he just a compulsive contrarian? Cohen has, at times, seemed out for himself. Over the years, Curley told me, as the company took on various fundraising or advocacy initiatives, Cohen often launched completely separate projects about the exact same issue.
When, in 2012, the company protestedin a campaign called Get the Dough Out of Politics, Cohen launched a similar but separate initiative called the Stamp Stampede to “stamp money out of politics. ” “He was giving out stamps to people that they could use to stamp their currency with messages like ‘Not to be used to bribe politicians,’” said Curley. Spending time with Cohen, it’s impossible to doubt his earnestness. But the story he tells is sometimes too tidy.
Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s worked together basically harmoniously for 20 years, yet he describes them as fundamentally at odds. The conglomerate doesn’t “know how to deal” with Ben & Jerry’s activist mission, he said. As someone close to the business put it with an air of amusement, “Ben has to rage against the machine, but he is the machine.
”Cohen and Greenfield met as seventh-graders on Long Island in the early ’60s and bonded through their shared hatred of gym class. They were both middle-class Jewish kids; Cohen was raised by an accountant father and an artist mother. It was the Cold War, and he would sometimes imagine the U.S. and Soviet armies facing each other with their huge piles of weapons.
“Behind them,” he said, “were the people who lived in those countries, who were suffering and didn’t have their basic needs met. It became stuck in my craw. ” In high school, Cohen and Greenfield were known as bright but somewhat insubordinate students, particularly Cohen.
“They did the outsider thing, the rebellious, protest–the–Vietnam War thing,” one of their classmates once told the Long Island“Back then, it was hard to tell if they were destined for greatness or destined for jail. Bennett especially could have gone either way. ” Though they dabbled in antiwar demonstrations and graduated from high school in 1969, Cohen shrugged when I asked if he identified with the word“I think Jesus was a hippie,” he said.
“What were the hippies about? Peace and love. That’s what Jesus is about. I’m still into peace and love.
” The idea that Ben & Jerry’s was an activist proposition first and a business second is a bit of revisionist history by the media and the company itself. After dropping out of multiple liberal-arts colleges, Cohen tried to make pottery professionally for a few months, but nobody would buy his pieces.
He and Greenfield had been living together in New York City for a spell when he decamped for the Adirondacks to work as a crafts teacher for emotionally disturbed children. Around the same time, Greenfield failed to get into medical school and followed his girlfriend to North Carolina.
By their mid-20s, both men were aimless, each feeling the impending weight of failure, and they decided they wanted to run a business together — be their own bosses — ideally with something related to food. When they found an advertisement for a $5 mail-correspondence course on ice-cream-making through Penn State, they started making real plans. In 1978, they moved to Burlington, the right kind of rural college town, and set up shop in a refurbished gas station.
They made ultra-rich ice cream by hand and sold it alongside soup and crêpes, their dilapidated space marked by a hand-painted sign in big block letters: BEN & JERRY’S HOMEMADE, the ampersand a psychedelic rainbow. The company survived its first year — commemorated with the brand’s first Free Cone Day — and in 1980, Ben & Jerry’s landed on retail shelves across Vermont.
The pints were decorated with a folksy illustration of a bearded man in an apron churning butter, and on the back label was a letter from the founding duo explaining why the ice cream was a bit expensive: It was decadent, creamier, and more loaded with fillings than any other. Through the ’80s, they extended their distribution up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Florida.
Cohen and Greenfield carved out distinct roles in the business; Cohen was often on the road, relentlessly pushing for expansion, while Greenfield cultivated relationships with staff back at headquarters.
“It wasn’t easy for Ben to be a boss,” wrote former Ben & Jerry’s CEO Fred “Chico” Lager in his 1994 book about the company,“Ben had spent his entire life questioning authority and resented being told what to do by others. ” Now he struggled to be the authority. Cohen’s obstinate streak was productive but frustrating. InLyn Severance, the company’s lead graphic designer for a decade, spoke about Cohen’s managerial style.
“He didn’t always know what he wanted, but he wanted it really cheap because he had no money, and he wanted it really fast because he was always doing things at the last minute,” she said. “And he usually didn’t like anything after it was done, convinced that it could have been better if we had changed this or that detail. ” In 1984, Ben & Jerry’s reached $4 million in annual revenue, though cash flow was still extremely limited.
Surging demand meant Cohen and Greenfield needed to build a new production plant, which would cost between $2 million and $3 million. To raise the money, they did something unconventional: They took the company public but only within the State of Vermont. The stock price was set at $10.50, and the minimum purchase was just 12 shares.
The Vermont IPO was a success, and suddenly Ben & Jerry’s was not only lauded for the high volume of cookie and candy-bar chunks in its pints but for its ability to scale. The same year, Pillsbury, which owned Häagen-Dazs, then the most popular “superpremium” ice cream, attempted to thwart its new rival by threatening to pull Häagen-Dazs from any distributors that stocked Ben & Jerry’s.
Ben & Jerry’s filed an antitrust suit, and Cohen hit the marketing front in what would become his most masterful campaign. On the pints, alongside the slogan WHAT’S THE DOUGHBOY AFRAID OF? , the brand pitched its side of the fight. Ben & Jerry’s was cemented in the public’s mind as the scrappy David taking on Goliath, and public support went overwhelmingly in its favor.
The court too ruled in its favor. The next year, the company was able to take its stock national. Cohen was making around $40,000 a year, a huge raise from the nothing he had made during most of the years prior. They were hiring rapidly and building out teams of employees who were paid and treated well above market standards.
When I asked Cohen when he began to think about using the company to promote his ideas about society, he said, “I think it originated when I realized that Ben & Jerry’s had some power. ” At the time of the first public offering, the company formed the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and committed to donating 7.5 percent of all annual revenue to “fund projects that were models for social change. ” It sought to support, Lager wrote, groups “that approached problems in nontraditional ways, which enhanced people’s quality of life, and which supported community celebrations. There was an intended bias toward weird and offbeat projects that were unlikely to get funding from traditional sources. ” In 1987, when sales reached $30 million, the company started using its pints to express the founders’ distinct political and cultural point of view.
It launched the still-popular Cherry Garcia flavor, an ode to Jerry, the Grateful Dead front man, soon followed by Rainforest Crunch, a Brazil-nut-inflected ice cream, promoting the preservation of the Amazon rainforest, and Economic Crunch, a nod to Black Monday, which the company handed out for free, with winking goodwill, to Wall Street traders in the aftermath of the market crash. In 1988, Cohen hatched the idea for Peace Pops, ice-cream bars tied to a campaign to redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund “peace-promoting” projects.
Behind closed doors at Ben & Jerry’s, the planning was contentious; many on the board questioned the propriety of taking such an explicitly political stance. Cohen argued that peace was actually quite neutral, and he won out in the end. Lager wrote that he had seen Cohen as “apolitical” before this moment.
Later in the same year, when President Reagan named Cohen and Greenfield the recipients of a Small Business Persons Award, presented at the White House, Cohen made a speech directly criticizing Reagan, arguing that the military budget should be spent meeting basic human needs. Even Greenfield was stunned.
“It was shocking to me,” he said, some years after, “that he would have the gumption to attack government policies in front of those people. ” Cohen was just getting started. Cohen told me he’s always had a bad memory, but the fight with Unilever had transported him back to the battle with Pillsbury.
“We were the little upstart. We just said, ‘We’re going to let the public know what’s going on and kind of ask for their help. ’” Of course, Ben & Jerry’s is no longer the little upstart. In 2024, it reported $1.28 billion in worldwide sales.
This would be a best-case scenario for almost any contemporary entrepreneur: grow a small company, get acquired by a much bigger one, succeed on a massive scale.
“For Jerry and myself,” Cohen says, “it was never about making a killing. It was about making a living. ” Yet the duo had made compromises to expand. One of Cohen’s ambitions was to enforce a strict salary ratio in which executives could never make more than five times the earnings of the company’s lowest-paid employee.
But this made attracting high-level talent extremely difficult, and in 1990, they did away with the rule. According to Lager, Cohen was constantly setting limits for how big the company would grow — preaching the “slow growth gospel,” Lager wrote — and then revising later; “Despite a lot of talk on the subject, we rarely made decisions that were consistent with the idea of limiting our growth.
” By the ’90s, Cohen and Greenfield were only intermittently involved in day-to-day operations, and in 1992 Cohen felt good enough about the state of the business to take a sabbatical, a moveannounced by joking that he’d contracted a “bad case of the guilties” over how much money the company was raking in. He can’t pinpoint when, exactly, he could have chosen a different path for Ben & Jerry’s and retained control.
He could have brought in venture capital instead of going public, but then, he said, they would have been entirely beholden to profit. Maybe keeping the business smaller would have protected their ethos.
“If you have a particular culture in your company and you end up hiring people from outside, that changes your culture,” he noted. “We became aware of that. ” In 1995, Ben & Jerry’s hired its first outside chief executive. By this point, the company’s stock price had stagnated, and its first attempt to distribute in the U.K. had flopped.
After a brief run by a former McKinsey partner, the company brought in Perry Odak, previously in senior management at a gun manufacturer. It was an odd choice. In the press, Cohen argued that Odak had the chops and the right convictions. Now, though, he traces the current crisis to Odak.
Cohen says Odak began making overtures to bigger corporations — potential buyers — just a couple of years into his tenure.
“We hired the wrong CEO,” he told me, “who saw a way for him to make a bunch of money by selling the company. ” Odak didn’t have the power to sell Ben & Jerry’s on his own, but by soliciting bids, he’d put it “in play”: Representing a publicly traded company, the board had a legal duty to consider acquisition offers. Cohen says the founders then reached out to investors.
He assembled a group that included some socially conscious backers — Roddick from the Body Shop among them — and some standard corporate players. Unilever was a part of the deal but slated to get only a 28 percent stake. Cohen would get a 36 percent share. Odak has a different memory of the events.
He says it was in fact Cohen who put the company in play — accidentally, unaware of laws regulating bids. Odak claims that Cohen, wanting to take the company private again, submitted the group bid first, and unwittingly opened the floodgates.
“From there,” Odak says, “there was no stopping it. ” At the last minute, just as the sale was about to be finalized, Unilever made a much higher bid to purchase Ben & Jerry’s on its own. It offered $326 million, 20 percent more than the group offer, and the Ben & Jerry’s board was all but required to accept it. The maneuver has, at times, been categorized as a hostile takeover.
As part of its winning bid, Unilever agreed to install an independent board and to maintain the commitment to giving 7.5 percent of profits to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation. The conglomerate also agreed to make a separate $5 million annual donation to the foundation, earmark another $5 million to help fund minority-owned businesses, and provide $5 million more to be distributed to Ben & Jerry’s employees.
Cohen made roughly $40 million in the sale; he donated half his earnings to other socially conscious businesses. Much of Ben & Jerry’s progressive mission seems to have flourished under Unilever. The vast majority of flavors that actually provided funding to distinct causes were launched post-acquisition: Americone Dream, a collaboration with Stephen Colbert, was brought to market in 2007 with 100 percent of proceeds going to charities related to veterans, children, and the environment.
In 2009, the brand rolled out “Yes, Pecan,” a limited-run offering in celebration of President Obama’s inauguration, with proceeds going to the Common Cause Education Fund. Change the Whirled, a collaboration with Colin Kaepernick, went live in 2020; all proceeds went to the Know Your Rights Camp. When Ben & Jerry’s attempted to pull distribution from the occupied territories two years before the war in Gaza began, moving against Israel was rare in the corporate world and legally complex.
In response, Arizona and New Jersey divested funds from Unilever, citing anti-BDS laws, and other states threatened to do the same. When Unilever effectively vetoed the wishes of Ben & Jerry’s executives, the board, and its founders over the issue, “that’s when things started breaking down,” Cohen said. The board took Unilever to court in a suit that was eventually settled when the conglomerate agreed to give $20 million over ten years to a fair-trade company working with Palestinian farmers.
In 2025, Unilever blocked Ben & Jerry’s idea to create a watermelon-flavored pint in support of Palestinians. Shortly after, Ben & Jerry’s then-CEO, David Stever, was ousted and replaced by Senf, a Unilever internal hire. The situation worsened over the following months as Unilever audited the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and produced a list of its alleged deficiencies — which Cohen and the board perceived as an elaborate maneuver to gain control. Then, last summer, Unilever informed Ben & Jerry’s executives that it was ending funding for the company’s philanthropic giving, blaming trustee failures, and indefinitely freezing donations amounting to more than $5 million a year.
Unilever also prompted the board to sign what the members call an “allegiance pledge” and to agree to stricter oversight or face removal. All but two — Unilever appointees — chose removal. That pair now makes up the entirety of the board.
“Big corporations don’t want to offend anybody,” Cohen said. “They want to be so-called neutral. But as Desmond Tutu said, in situations of injustice you can’t be neutral. If an elephant is standing on the tail of a mouse and you claim you’re neutral, the mouse will not much appreciate your neutrality.
”When Greenfield announced his departure, Cohen noticed that many casual onlookers seemed to think there was some bad blood between them.
“Some people felt like,” he said, “Which is not the case. ” The two lived a few miles down the road from each other for many years while they were raising their kids. Though Greenfield moved to Colorado in October to be closer to his grandchildren, and maintains a certain cool distance from the struggle at Ben & Jerry’s, the pair still talks frequently.
In May they went to New York together for Colbert’s finalwrap party.
“Jerry and I used to walk in the woods together,” Cohen told me. Recently, he walked by a stream they’d passed frequently.
“I took a little video and sent it to Jerry. ” After Cohen went viral for his arrest in the Senate — filmed shouting, “They’re buying bombs to kill kids in Gaza and getting the money for it by kicking kids off health care here in the U.S.! ” — the flood of engagement online, he said, “was amazing.
” We were sitting in a small professional studio space in downtown Burlington, where a crew was gathered to shoot a mock infomercial starring Cohen. This one was for Up in Arms, the anti–military-spending organization. Cohen would be pitching a product called the “Hole-In Dome” — a real colander, available for sale — to skewer Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile-defense system. In plain clothes, behind a kitchen countertop, Cohen demonstrated all the magnificent ways the Hole-In Dome could be used.
Spaghetti was boiling, soon to be drained; various fruits were washed while Cohen bragged that the holes in his device made sense, whereas Trump’s Golden Dome — financially and scientifically unfeasible — did not. On set, Cohen was surrounded by half a dozen people about half his age, but he was by far the most energetic, standing on his feet for more than five hours, his spiel growing more urgent with each successive take.
“There’s a lot of other things we could spend our money on,” Cohen said, looking into the camera, “besides wasting it on a system that don’t friggin’ work! ” He banged his fist loudly on the counter.
“Don’t tell him this,” Bumps, the social hire, whispered to me. “But I’m making Ben an influencer. ” When I asked Cohen what this period of turbulence has been like for employees of the company he founded, he said, “I think what’s happened is that Ben & Jerry’s is occupied. It’s kinda like the Vichy government.
If they want to keep their jobs, they have to walk the parent-company party line. The CEO there is the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, but he represents Magnum. ” At the same time, Cohen said, they also had to deal with the founder “trying to get the company sold to someone else. ” His impression was that employees “mostly feel kind of ill at ease and untethered.
They don’t know which way things are going to go. ” According to Curley, there is in fact some unease and uncertainty at headquarters, and media attention hasn’t helped. But Unilever’s failings are not a major topic of conversation, and many don’t view the conglomerate as any kind of oppressor.
“When I look at what we’re doing now, I don’t see it as being muzzled,” Curley said. “I see us talking, speaking out about ICE. ” In response to the killings in Minneapolis, the company had posted expressions of heartbreak and outrage.
“You know, we’re probably the only business who said a word about this war in Iran,” Curley went on. “We’re continuing to talk about trans rights and Venezuela. We’re out being us, doing our thing. ” Repnikova, Cohen’s wife, owns a spot in Briny Breezes, Florida, a 43-acre co-op of tiny and mobile homes in Palm Beach County — just a dozen miles down the road from Mar-a-Lago.
One of the only affordable communities in this bastion of wealth, the co-op regularly rejects half-billion-dollar offers from real-estate developers; to its residents, the place is priceless. Cohen went down for the month of February, his first extended stay. But there was still work to be done, and his laptop was open, his phone turned on. He was talking to investors and advisers and working on messaging for Up in Arms.
He called me from the veranda one morning and talked about the latest with the potential sale. Just the day before, he’d posted an open letter on social media aimed at any potential investors, outlining the ways Magnum and Unilever’s meddling could threaten their bottom lines.
He referred to Unilever’s decision, about 15 years before, to incorporate social and environmental goals into its operations: “I’m sorry to say that Unilever and Magnum are no longer the companies you were led to believe they were. ” Now, he told me, Magnum’s first earnings report was out, and profits were well below expectations — a small victory.
Cohen’s crew of outside investors was still struggling to put together a bid, but the break from the Vermont winter had Cohen chipper.
“It’s sunny. I’ve got the ocean. I feel really lucky. ” I asked him if being in Florida made him contemplate the idea of retirement.
He laughed and brushed it off.
“More and more of my friends are retired, and you know, it is tempting,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem like I ever do it. ” “My wife is pretty understanding about it,” he continued.
“I keep telling her it’ll be over soon. ” He broke out into a deep laugh.
“I think she’s kind of heard that before. ” He’d been floating the possibility since the ’90s.
“Ben is on a quest,” said Walt Freese, a former Ben & Jerry’s executive. “It’s this belief he has that one of the reasons he’s here on this planet is to help people understand that it’s not winner take all. ” The fight against authority, he said, “is one of the main reasons he was put on this earth.
” If Cohen is successful in wresting back control of Ben & Jerry’s — a long shot — a whole new set of problems will arise. The investors are, of course, not guaranteed to see his convictions through. Cohen has been meeting with experts to try to map out ways to protect the company’s values, though the original agreement with Unilever was designed to do just that.
For now, Ben & Jerry’s will likely continue to look like the same company it has been for nearly 50 years. But it’s easy to see how the line could continue to move — how slowly the qualities that define the company could get watered down to nothing but sugar and quirk. There’s still plenty to fight for. Cohen told me, “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.
”The governor has noted she never ended her Senate campaign, but it’s not clear that she plans on reviving it in light of Platner’s new troubles. With SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI set to go public, millions of Americans could soon own shares of AI companies whether they want to or not. Margaret Hartmann Trump announced the results of his health exam at Walter Reed, revealing that he somehow aced an IQ test without even taking one.
Whether the motivation was backlash from Republicans in Congress or rulings from federal judges, the disastrous $1.776 billion slush fund is no more. How this time might be different for Maine voters, why some people are shrugging it off, and what could come next. In new renderings, the ballroom looks like a henchmen-filled compound James Bond must infiltrate to thwart Trump’s evil plan. Steyer used his wealth to pry progressives from Becerra as Hilton consolidated the GOP vote.
On Tuesday, we’ll see which two make it to November. Trump’s stupid vanity project died on Friday when a federal judge ordered that his name be removed from the living memorial to JFK. The New Jersey senator has been on the front lines of chaotic protests at the immigrant detention facility — and thinks everyone should join him. *Sorry, there was a problem signing you up.
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