‘It ain’t the same’: inside the bitter battle to free Ben & Jerry’s

Ben Cohen says his ice-cream company has been silenced by corporate ownership – and a boycott of Magnum brands could force a sale Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream in the tub is still great, but the brand’s newest chocolate-covered ice-cream bar on a stick? “It ain’t the same,” Ben Cohen, the company co-founder, told the Guardian. Sure, the chocolate coating is still thick enough, but the ice cream itself is “kinda fluffy”, Cohen said – an insult in the ice-cream world that suggests extra air was added to cut costs. The criticism is surprising coming from Cohen, who opened his eponymous ice-cream shop in Burlington, Vermont, with childhood friend, Jerry Greenfield, in 1978. But it’s perhaps an apt metaphor of how he feels amid a simmering fight to take back Ben & Jerry’s from a parent company he says has silenced the brand’s trademark activism. For Cohen, 75, the battle is legal and existential. Ben & Jerry’s social and economic value was protected for decades, he says, by an independent board with final say on the brand’s voice, values and ice-cream quality. But that independence has all but disappeared, Cohen said. In November 2024, Ben & Jerry’s board sued pa