I like my ice cream social justice flavored.
Is flavor alone enough to build brand loyalty?
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/14kIIEcgps6hqm2GK_nqOzS_j0MFHGIDc3SAM_p3Ua7E/edit?usp=sharing
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ice cream is one of those product categories that’s supposed to be fun, and so it’s surprising when corporate accusations and lawsuits spillover into the frozen treats aisle, especially when that drama involves a brand as beloved as Ben & Jerry’s, the superpremium ice cream sold in pints with distinctive names like Cherry Garcia, Chubby Hubby, Phish Food, Oatmeal Dream Pie and Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream.
Originally launched in 1978 as a small ice cream shop in Vermont by partners Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield and soon pivoting to a packaged brand, Ben & Jerry’s has become one of the best-known and most beloved dessert brands there is, and a big part of their success has been their commitment to donating 7.5% of their profits to their charitable foundation.
Ben & Jerry’s is one of the oldest and most prominent mission-driven brands there is, and it’s often perceived as the secret of their success.
The brand has always had a strong sense of social justice behind it as well as an irreverent sense of humor.
The founders are often viewed as hippie holdovers who’ve found a way to make a difference in the world by turning capitalism into a force for good instead of a force for greed, and their association with jam bands like Grateful Dead and Phish and celebrities like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Colin Kaepernick and Ava DuVernay have helped to cement them as a fixture of pop culture and progressive activism.
So, when the founders sold the brand to the massive conglomerate Unilever in the year 2000, they worked out a special deal that would allow them to continue to govern the brand and direct profits to their foundation.
Neither Ben nor Jerry continued to run the company under this acquisition – Ben Cohen stayed on as a member of the governing board, while Jerry was more tangentially involved with the brand’s social mission.
But both would continue to be employees of the brand and gadflies in the social justice arena.
So it’s a little surprising that just this summer, The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation announced it’s shutting down at the end of the year, Ben Cohen is staging a crusade to try to get his brand back, and Ben & Jerry’s is now in the midst of a legal battle that will be likely to impact the future of the brand.
And here’s where I think we need to ask – if one of the flagship brands for mission-driven marketing goes down, can any well-meaning brand survive getting swallowed up by a corporate parent?
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Before we delve into this discussion, let me first address my own biases.
I’m a small business owner myself, so when I hear about a David vs. Goliath sort of story, I’m almost always rooting for David.
It’s sort of baked into our culture at RPG – our founder’s name is David Rich, after all! – but it’s also because I’ve seen a lot of great companies get swallowed up by large corporations and then utterly destroyed in the process.
The founders and maybe some of the early employees may get their chance to cash out and make some money, but all that’s left is a brand that’s been hollowed out from the inside.
I think one of the saddest stories I’ve ever seen is an old computer software company called The Learning Company, which started life in the 1980s making really neat and innovative educational software for children to teach them about reading and logical thinking and electronics, but which eventually went through a series of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s that turned them from a maker of software into a label for it, and then, ultimately, just a tagline for its new owner, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Almost nobody wants to see a major brand they worked hard to build get turned into bland intellectual property under a corporate owner. And while sure, there are a very vocal contingent of so-called serial entrepreneurs who are total sellouts, most people who start a brand have bigger dreams and aspirations for it, hoping that they can see what they created survive and have a long-lasting legacy.
Ben & Jerry’s is one of those brands that’s tried really hard not to sell out despite playing the corporate game, and they’ve long been known for very cleverly using media and their prominence as a social activist brand to get Wall Street to see things their way.
In the 1980s, right around the time Ben & Jerry’s was going public, the company got into a distribution spat with Haagen-Dazs, another superpremium ice cream brand that was owned by Pillsbury. At the time, it was outselling Ben & Jerry’s by 10:1.
Haagen-Dazs attempted to force its distributors to stop carrying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and the company responded with a famous PR and advertising campaign called “What’s the Doughboy Afraid of?”, using Pillbury’s own famous mascot, Poppin’ Fresh, against it.
At the time, Ben & Jerry’s only had 23 employees and was a New England Brand that had just raised $750,000 from an IPO restricted to residents of Vermont, while Haagen-Dazs, first established in 1971, had national distribution and $4 million in sales.
But Ben & Jerry’s was so vocal, and so savvy about getting their message out there, that Pillsbury had to back down. They distributed flyers and even sold t-shirts to raise money for their legal defense.
And this helped to build their brand in an important way by shaping public opinion.
Here was this little ice cream brand, trying to do good with its profits, that was being muscled out by a big conglomerate that also owned Burger King and Green Giant.
They managed to paint the creator and founder of the Haagen-Daz brand, Reuben Mattus, as a villain and won a lot of earned media for themselves as heroes.
And the interesting thing about all of this is that Reuben Mattus himself had started out as a little guy who was forced into building his own distribution network in the 1970s because nobody wanted to carry his brand.
His success came from a lot of hard work, and as he says in one article from the time, “What took me 15 years to do, they did in three years.”
Ben & Jerry’s also had to navigate the 1990s itself dodging accusations that it was keeping other little guys down through intimidating distributors into not carrying competing brands.
After all, one of the natural progressions for a David vs. Goliath story is for David to one day become Goliath so another little guy can take him down.
It didn’t quite happen that way for the original King David, but it certainly is the angle journalists love to look for.
But Ben & Jerry’s has always been savvy and has long promoted its commitment to social justice and progressive political issues as being its defining quality.
Even under Unilever, the brand managed to try out new eco-friendly packaging, go GMO-free, launch programs to limit emissions from farming, stage protests against oil drilling in Alaska, stand for Palestine and remove its brand for sale in Israel, partner with activist brand Tony Chocolonely to bring attention to child labor and slavery and continue their annual “free cone day” promotion where they offer free ice cream at their retail stores and raise awareness and funds for charitable organizations.
But everything changed in 2024 when Unilever decided to spin off its ice cream brands into a new subsidiary called Magnum, named for the Magnum Ice Cream Bars brand.
This new entity, which was fully spun off in 2025, owns and operates brands including Cornetto, Breyers, Calippo, and Wall’s as well as Ben & Jerry’s, which together account for about 1/5th of global ice cream sales.
The Netherlands-based company has since been in a public feud with Ben and Jerry.
Jerry Greenfield announced he was stepping down in September of 2025 saying he “can no longer in good conscience, and after 47 years, remain an employee of Ben and Jerry’s” because he felt that Unilever and Magnum were silencing the brand’s social mission.
Magnum’s position, in response, was: “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.”
Ben Cohen, in the meantime, has been waging a very public campaign to collect signatures to persuade Magnum to return the brand to its founders.
He published an op-ed in Time Magazine in January of this year titled “Why We Are Fighting For Ben & Jerry’s To Be Independent Again” and alleged that Magnum was trying to strip the brand’s governing board of its power, explaining in the piece that the whole reason for the board in the first place was to ensure that the brand could survive the acquisition by Unilever back in 2000.
He’s said in more recent interviews that Magnum has removed funding from the charitable foundation and is moving to reposition the brand as just a brand, not a value-driven force for real social issues.
And this leads to the question – is Ben & Jerry’s a brand that consumers buy because of its social values? Or do they just really like the ice cream?
Ben Cohen has said in a recent interview for TheStreet that both are important to their customers, and both the product and the mission have to be strong for the brand to work.
I personally am a little skeptical of this claim because I have always viewed Ben & Jerry’s as being an irreverent brand that stands out because of its strong connections to Vermont dairy farmers, its insistence on a high quality product and its connection to popular culture, but their broader progressivism has always felt to me – and keep in mind, I’m sympathetic to their viewpoints in many issues! – like two old hippies raging against the machine that enabled their success.
When I first heard about Ben Cohen’s “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign to try to force public opinion on the side of the founders, I have to admit that my gut reaction was, “you guys sold out and got to be millionaires, and this is what happens when you do that.”
It was only when I began researching the topic for this piece that I found myself a little more sympathetic since, from all appearances, the actual Ben & Jerry have been working for decades to outwit and outfox the very predictable fate for their consumer brand that’s now starting to happen under Magnum.
And these things always sting a little harder when your own name is tied up in the dispute.
But here’s the unfortunate truth. When Ben & Jerry’s went up against Pillsbury in the 80s, they really were the little guy trying to make it.
Today, they’re a global brand that is very recognizable and familiar, and that was built through the corporate marketing machine that gave them superior distribution and growth.
Whatever values the company has held and promoted have helped benefit its positioning as a premium brand that’s environmentally-friendly and socially conscious, but it’s also been very much to the benefit of the corporate owners to use Ben & Jerry’s as an eco-friendly portfolio brand to point to when their other operations don’t live up to those same ideals.
Unilever has been singled out by organizations like Greenpeace for using some of its other brands like Dove for greenwashing to disguise its role as an industrial polluter.
And a BBC article in 2023 uncovered sexual abuse happening in Kenyan plantations jointly operated by Unilever and James Finlay, leading to Unilever to sell its stake in the plantations.
The company is also frequently targeted by animal rights activist groups for permitting animal testing on medical and cosmetic products.
I’m not here to bash Unilever, especially since they don’t directly own Ben & Jerry’s anymore.
But I would suggest that Ben & Jerry, the people, could have started over and launched a new brand back in 2000 and used the money they’d made from the sale of their company to create something authentic and entirely within their control.
Unilever almost certainly would have managed the Ben & Jerry’s brand differently if they had. And it would have allowed the market to show whether consumers were just showing up for the ice cream or if the ideals mattered to them as well.
Unfortunately, what we’re seeing instead is what happens when a creator-driven corporate brand no longer shares the values of its founders.
I doubt very much that Ben Cohen will ever be able to get back what’s been lost, and it’s a shame that the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation is going to be a casualty of this whole fight.
But it’s also a cautionary tale for those of us who own small businesses that you have a make a decision at some point if you value growth or integrity more.
Ben & Jerry’s did an admirable job of trying to balance both, but it was only a matter of time before they became just another brand sitting on the shelf.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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