Ben & Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are taking the case against their parent company to late-night TV, setting what promises to be a newsmaking visit to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert for this Thursday, Dec. 11.
Locked in a long-running and increasingly public fight over the direction of the company they created nearly 50 years ago, the founders have been clashing with parent company Unilever—and its newly spun-off ice-cream division, Magnum—over what they describe as efforts to blunt the brand’s activist identity. Those tensions reached a breaking point in September, when Greenfield resigned from Unilever altogether, saying the independence the founders negotiated in the company’s 2000 sale had effectively disappeared.
A major fault line has been Ben & Jerry’s long-standing activism around Gaza. The founders and the board say the brand’s social mission is inseparable from its identity; Unilever executives have warned that political positions could hinder growth.
The rhetoric escalated over the weekend when Magnum’s new chief executive told The Financial Times that Cohen and Greenfield, both in their seventies, should “hand over” their seats on the company’s independent board to “a new generation.” Cohen dismissed the notion, saying there’s “no age limit” on campaigning for social justice.
The two founders are likely to find an ally in Stephen Colbert, with whom they’ve collaborated for years through Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream, a top-selling Ben & Jerry’s flavor that supports Colbert’s charitable AmeriCone Dream Fund. Their visit gives them a friendly national platform at a moment when they’re trying to draw public attention to what they see as an existential fight over the brand’s values.
Although they haven’t appeared on The Late Show since Colbert succeeded David Letterman in 2015, Cohen and Greenfield twice visited with the host during his Colbert Report era.
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