Co-founder and namesake Jerry Greenfield has resigned from Ben & Jerry’s, the outspokenly political Vermont-based ice cream company. It’s the latest escalation in a series of disagreements between Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company Unilever.
The news was announced in an open letter published early on Wednesday to co-founder Ben Cohen’s social media channels. It read in part: “It’s with a broken heart that I’ve decided I can no longer, in good conscience, and after 47 years, remain an employee of Ben & Jerry’s. I am resigning from the company Ben and I started back in 1978. This is one of the hardest and most painful decisions I’ve ever made.”
Greenfield cited the worsening relationship between Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company Unilever as his reason for resigning. Unilever acquired the ice cream company in 2000 in a move that caused some to accuse Ben & Jerry’s — which has long prioritized social justice and human rights in its branding and operations — of selling out. The merger agreement allowed Ben & Jerry’s some level of independence, including retaining its own independent board of directors that had the freedom to pursue and support Ben & Jerry’s social mission.
At the time of the Unilever acquisition, a statement from Ben & Jerry’s reps promised that its social mission would be “encouraged and well-funded” by Unilever. Greenfield claims in his current letter that “[this] independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever” is now “gone.”
In recent years, Ben & Jerry’s has accused Unilever of failing to “recognize and respect” its social mission and brand integrity. In November 2024, Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit against Unilever alleging that Unilever had failed to adhere to the contractual obligations of the merger agreement, by suppressing the brand’s public posts on political issues including support of visas for Palestinian refugees and pro-Palestine campus protests and criticism of President Trump.
Unilever is in the process of spinning off its ice cream portfolio into The Magnum Ice Cream Company in a cost-saving maneuver. In the midst of this rearrangement of ownership, Cohen and Greenfield announced a new effort: Free Ben & Jerry’s, which seeks to “free Ben & Jerry’s from Magnum” by allowing it to operate, once again, as an independently owned company.
A letter from Cohen and Greenfield to Magnum Ice Cream Company’s board members argues that while Magnum may be a new company, it retains the Unilever legacy and “the history of its actions against Ben & Jerry’s.” Greenfield’s legacy “deserves to be true to the values we founded this company on, not silenced by @magnum,” Cohen wrote in his Instagram caption. As Cohen and Greenfield write in their letter to the board, Ben & Jerry’s strength “lies in the authenticity of its values and its voice, whether in opposing crimes against humanity, speaking out against white supremacy, supporting marriage equality, demanding climate justice, or insisting that businesses have responsibilities beyond profitability.” These actions, they write, are done “out of loyalty to the millions of people who see Ben & Jerry’s as a standard-bearer for integrity in business.”
There has been an outpouring of support for Ben & Jerry’s in response to the news. One of the top comments on Cohen’s Instagram post reads: “Make a different ice cream. We’ll all buy it.”
