Ben & Jerry’s Foundation says it will shut down amid legal dispute with parent company

The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation says it will shut down at the end of the year after its corporate parent cut off funding and evicted its three staffers Wednesday. The move leaves $600,000 a year in grants to Vermont organizations, and 40 years of the ice cream brand’s progressive mission, hanging on a judge’s future ruling.

“This is the other foot dropping in terms of the way Magnum is trying to destroy the social values of Ben & Jerry’s,” said Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, in an interview Wednesday.

The Vermont-based iconic ice cream brand has been in a legal fight with its parent company, The Magnum Ice Cream Co. — an ice-cream spinoff of the larger corporation Unilever — since November 2024. Ben & Jerry’s alleges that the corporation overreached its control, pushing out the CEO and interfering with the brand’s political views. The question before a judge is whether the corporate parent had the authority to reshape governance and withhold funding from the foundation.

Amid the push-and-pull over governance, Unilever audited the foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Ben & Jerry’s, in April 2025, finding conflicts of interest and a lack of governance and financial control.

Liz Bankowski, president of the foundation’s board of trustees, said in an interview that Unilever withheld the philanthropy’s funding late last year and ordered foundation staff to vacate its corporate office in South Burlington by July 15 because of governance issues the audit raised. This led the foundation’s leaders to join the ongoing lawsuit, fought by the ice cream brand’s independent board, in an effort to retain funding. The lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

While the foundation’s leadership is framing the decision to cease operations as the only option after Unilever withheld funding, an unnamed spokesperson for Magnum wrote in a statement to VTDigger 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; much to our dismay.”

Since the audit, the foundation has adopted a conflict of interest policy, but “the bottom line was that unless we changed our board, they were going to continue to withhold funding,” Bankowski said.

Cohen described the audit as “a bunch of trumped-up charges.”

“The foundation has been independently audited every year,” he said. “I think that Magnum was searching in vain for some illegal or unethical activities. I think they found none.”

Since Ben & Jerry’s sold the ice cream business to Unilever in 2000, the corporation has given $60 million to the foundation. The philanthropic arm has operated for 40 years, supporting the ice cream brand’s progressive mission by offering financial backing to social justice organizations across the country. The foundation does not have an endowment and is reliant on the funding its parent company gives annually, outlined in its merger contract.

A chunk of that funding, $600,000 a year, goes to Vermont organizations such as the immigrant farmworker rights organization Migrant Justice and the LGBTQ+ nonprofit Outright Vermont, according to foundation leaders.

“We fill a particular niche that not a lot of other funders fill,” said Rebecca Golden, the foundation’s director of programs, who has worked at the organization for 34 years.

Golden is one of three foundation staffers whose last day in the physical office is Wednesday, following orders from Magnum to vacate. Although Magnum did not directly address its vacate order in its statement to VTDigger, the spokesperson wrote that the foundation’s leaders recently “took the position that its staff are not Ben & Jerry’s employees, despite utilising Ben & Jerry’s offices and systems.”

Golden described the possible shutdown as an “enormous loss” that will not only affect the organizations that the foundation supports but also Ben & Jerry’s employees who “feel very proud of being a part of the foundation.”

“It’s been a really long year, so there’s been a lot of emotions — the whole gamut, as we like to say of the seven stages of grief. But I think at this point we’re sort of in the acceptance phase,” she said.

The Magnum spokesperson indicated that the work of the foundation will continue even if its leaders decide to cease operations at the end of the year, writing that the company is “firmly committed to funding a grant-giving foundation, supported by appropriate governance controls to ensure it is living by its values.”

But Cohen is not confident that Magnum will uphold the values of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation in the corporation’s continued philanthropic efforts.

“What are they going to fund? I have no idea. My guess is that they would not be looking to fund entities that are opposed to the status quo,” Cohen said.

The foundation’s leaders have pointed to its support of Migrant Justice during a period when the farmworker organization was considering a boycott of Ben & Jerry’s as an example of their commitment to social justice. After immigrant farmworkers raised concerns about working conditions at farms supplying Ben & Jerry’s, the company joined a program that collaborates with farmworkers to strive for fair working conditions.

Political activism has been central to the Ben & Jerry’s brand since its founding. As a part of the ongoing lawsuit, Ben & Jerry’s alleged in a May filing that Magnum has been undercutting its social justice mission in order to “censor, intimidate and purge” the company’s independent board, which Cohen said was created to defend its progressive values.

Three of the board’s members, including one who has been an outspoken critic of Israel, were removed late last year after the parent corporation introduced a new set of governance practices. In its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Magnum argues that it retains ultimate authority and the brand’s social mission must be nonpartisan.

As the lawsuit awaits a decision, Cohen, who is not a part of the suit, has created a campaign to “free Ben & Jerry’s,” amassing around 160,000 signers for its petition demanding that Magnum sell Ben & Jerry’s to a “group of values-aligned investors.”

“The very values-led business model that built Ben & Jerry’s into this amazing, phenomenal brand is the very thing that Magnum is currently destroying,” Cohen said.

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