Ben Cohen, one half of the duo behind Ben & Jerry's, has spent nearly five decades arguing that businesses can make a profit while doing good at the same time. More recently, he has spent much of his time arguing that the brand bearing his own name has abandoned that idea under its new ownership.

Cohen accuses The Magnum Ice Cream Company, the owner of Ben & Jerry's, which was formed when Unilever spun off its entire ice cream division in 2025 to focus on its higher-growth personal care and home goods brands, of gutting the company's independent board and starving its philanthropic arm. He has launched a public campaign called 'Free Ben & Jerry's' that is pushing Magnum to sell the brand to more socially minded investors instead. The campaign has gathered more than 200,000 signatures so far.

“We’re trying to keep Ben & Jerry’s soul alive,” Cohen tells Fortune. He says Magnum is the wrong steward and could damage the brand’s long-term value. “They ain’t got no soul,” he adds. “The only mission these guys have is profit.”

It is a characteristically bold move for the 75-year-old, who has been arrested for civil disobedience multiple times — including at a recent Senate hearing — and speaks openly about his views on U.S. foreign policy and the use of economic and military leverage, positions he acknowledges most public companies avoid entirely.

Cohen, a hippie ice cream maker, helped build one of the most popular ice cream companies in the world, which generated $1.1 billion in global sales last year. For him, activism and good business go “hand in hand.” Customers “actively seek out brands with authenticity and attitude,” Cohen says.

From ice cream to activism

Cohen and childhood friend Jerry Greenfield opened their first shop in a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978.

Money was tight from the beginning. Cohen recalls that the shop barely broke even because they were scooping cones too generously, so the pair switched to packing ice cream into two-and-a-half-gallon tubs and letting retailers portion it themselves.

He soon came to see the tub as more than packaging. “It was real estate,” Cohen says. “I wanted to use it to tell the public stuff they might not be hearing about in mainstream media.” That instinct produced one of the company’s more polarizing early products, the Peace Pop — a chocolate-covered ice cream bar with a written note on the wrapper that called for redirecting defense spending toward peace-promoting projects.

“Businesses have power,” Cohen explains. “You can use that power for profit or to make the world a better place. What we realized at Ben & Jerry’s is they’re mutually reinforcing.”

The board later made the company’s social mission legally equal to profit and product — a structure that predates and helped inspire the broader benefit-corporation movement — and in 1985 created the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation. The foundation was seeded with an original board commitment of 7.5% of pretax profits and, over four decades, has distributed more than $70 million to social-justice causes.

In 2000, Cohen and Greenfield agreed to sell Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever for $326 million, on the condition that the company would retain an independent board to oversee the brand’s social mission. For years, that arrangement was held up as a model for how a conglomerate could acquire a value-driven business without hollowing it out. Twenty-five years later, the same mechanism is at the center of a bitter legal fight.

How the relationship cracked

The arrangement held for two decades before it unraveled. Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever have been in a legal dispute since 2024. The independent board says the parent company blocked it from supporting causes it considered core to the brand’s social mission and claims Magnum moved to remove members of the board by introducing a nine-year term limit.

In July, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation said it would shut down by the end of the year after Magnum cut its funding. Cohen describes that as “an asset-stripping campaign dressed up as governance reform.”

A Magnum spokesperson called the foundation’s account a “mischaracterization of events.” “Any suggestion that TMICC [The Magnum Ice Cream Company] dismantled the board is nonsensical. Three of the independent directors chose to make themselves ineligible to serve by refusing to sign our Code of Business Integrity,” the spokesperson said, adding that a maximum term of nine years has been established for board members across the business.

A legal challenge over the governance changes and funding cuts remains pending in New York federal court.

Despite the hostility, Ben & Jerry’s is Magnum’s best-performing brand. It has posted the fastest growth of Magnum’s four main products, with sales up 9.2% in the second quarter of this year.

Shareholders push back

Not everyone in Magnum’s investor base is comfortable with that trade-off. A coalition of investors led by NorthStar Asset Management and the Dutch sustainable-investment group VBDO sent Magnum’s board a letter ahead of its May 7 annual meeting. The investors demanded standalone financial disclosures for Ben & Jerry’s and an explanation of how Magnum intends to preserve board independence.

“They’ve dismantled the brand’s social mission which, for us as investors, is the brand equity,” Whitney Nguyen, NorthStar’s director of impact research, told Reuters.

Cohen brought the dispute into public view at the same meeting, orchestrating a stunt in which a protester in a Magnum-cone costume interrupted proceedings to call for a boycott. He has since threatened to extend the boycott to Magnum’s full portfolio of brands if the company does not sell Ben & Jerry’s to investors aligned with its founding mission.

“If you’re fighting an entity that’s much bigger than you, optimized to play on the field of the legal system with all the money in the world for lawyers, that’s a difficult playing field,” Cohen says. “You need to play in the court of public opinion instead.”

Ben & Jerry’s says it remains committed to activism. “We remain firmly committed to both funding a granting entity to support grassroots movements and progressive change,” a spokesperson says. “We’ve taken stands on ICE, refugee support in Europe, cannabis justice, and voting rights.”

Inside Magnum, Cohen’s campaign has caused confusion. He is a “very skilled campaigner,” a Magnum spokesperson says. “Ben is great. He loves to fight for a cause, but in this case, the question becomes: what exactly?”

Cohen sees himself as a needed force in the corporate world. He says there is “a failure of corporate nerve” among businesses today, pointing to recent decisions by some companies to scale back their ESG commitments amid growing political pressure in the United States over diversity, environmental, and social-justice initiatives. “Businesses today are afraid of speaking up on issues they disagree with. For them silence is complicity,” he says.

He points to Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s, a fairtrade soap brand, as rare examples of companies still balancing commercial scale with a genuine social mission. Patagonia’s founder transferred ownership to a trust and nonprofit in 2022, channeling roughly $100 million a year in profits into fighting climate change. Dr. Bronner’s caps executive pay at five times its lowest-paid employee’s salary and donates a percentage of sales to social justice and sustainability causes.

Whether Ben & Jerry’s remains part of that small group of mission-driven companies may depend on a ruling in New York court in the coming months. Cohen, for his part, is not inclined to wait quietly for that decision. “The nature of working for justice,” he says, “is to fight injustice.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com