The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation has officially announced that it will cease operations at the end of the year. This decision follows a series of aggressive actions taken by its corporate parent, The Magnum Ice Cream Co.—a spinoff of the larger corporation Unilever—which included the termination of the foundation’s funding and the eviction of its three staff members from their South Burlington corporate office on Wednesday. The closure places $600,000 in annual grants for Vermont-based organizations, along with 40 years of the ice cream brand’s progressive mission, in a state of uncertainty pending a future court ruling.
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, spoke out against the move during an interview on Wednesday, framing it as a direct assault on the brand’s core identity. “This is the other foot dropping in terms of the way Magnum is trying to destroy the social values of Ben & Jerry’s,” Cohen said. The brand has been embroiled in a legal battle with The Magnum Ice Cream Co. since November 2024. The central question currently before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is whether the corporate parent possessed the legal authority to reshape the brand’s governance and withhold funding from its philanthropic arm.
The conflict intensified in April 2025 when Unilever conducted an audit of the foundation. The corporation claimed the audit revealed a lack of financial control and various conflicts of interest. Liz Bankowski, president of the foundation’s board of trustees, stated that Unilever withheld the foundation’s funding late last year and ordered staff to vacate their office by July 15, citing the audit’s findings. This pressure prompted the foundation’s leadership to join the ongoing lawsuit, which is being fought by the ice cream brand’s independent board, in a bid to secure their funding. Although the foundation subsequently adopted a new conflict of interest policy, Bankowski noted that the parent company remained unmoved, stating, “the bottom line was that unless we changed our board, they were going to continue to withhold funding.”
Ben Cohen dismissed the audit entirely, describing it as “a bunch of trumped-up charges.” He emphasized that the foundation has undergone independent audits every year and asserted that Magnum was “searching in vain for some illegal or unethical activities” and ultimately found none. Since the sale of the ice cream business to Unilever in 2000, the corporation has contributed $60 million to the foundation. Because the foundation lacks an endowment, it relies entirely on the annual funding stipulated in the original merger contract. This funding supports various social justice organizations, including the immigrant farmworker rights group Migrant Justice and the LGBTQ+ nonprofit Outright Vermont.
Rebecca Golden, the foundation’s director of programs, who has served the organization for 34 years, described the potential shutdown as an “enormous loss.” She noted that the impact extends beyond the organizations they support to the Ben & Jerry’s employees who take pride in the foundation’s work. Golden, one of the three staffers ordered to vacate the office, remarked that the team has moved through the stages of grief and is now in the acceptance phase. Regarding the office eviction, a spokesperson for Magnum told VTDigger that the foundation’s leaders had recently taken the position that its staff were not Ben & Jerry’s employees, despite utilizing the brand’s offices and systems.
While the foundation’s leadership views the closure as their only remaining option, the Magnum spokesperson insisted that the shuttering is “entirely down to the Trustees and their decision to ignore the findings of an independent audit and failure to put in place basic good governance.” The spokesperson added that the company remains committed to funding a grant-giving foundation with “appropriate governance controls.” However, Cohen expressed deep skepticism about this promise, questioning what kind of entities the corporation would actually fund, noting, “My guess is that they would not be looking to fund entities that are opposed to the status quo.”
The foundation’s history includes supporting Migrant Justice even during a period when the group was considering a boycott of Ben & Jerry’s, demonstrating a commitment to social justice that Cohen argues is now under threat. In a May filing related to the lawsuit, Ben & Jerry’s alleged that Magnum has been undercutting its social justice mission to “censor, intimidate and purge” the company’s independent board. Three board members were removed late last year following the introduction of new governance practices. Magnum, in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, argues that it holds ultimate authority and that the brand’s social mission must remain nonpartisan. Meanwhile, Cohen has launched a “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign, which has gathered approximately 160,000 signatures on a petition demanding that Magnum sell the brand to investors who are aligned with its original values.
