Fortune published a long feature on August 7, 2026 under a headline that reads like a eulogy: "They ain't got no soul." The subject was Ben Cohen — the Ben of Ben & Jerry's — and the target was the company that now owns the brand he built in a Vermont gas station. Cohen is no longer just asking shoppers to skip a pint. He is asking retailers to stop buying an entire portfolio.
It is the strangest boycott of 2026: a progressive founder demanding a commercial blockade of his own creation's parent company, while the conservatives who quit that freezer aisle years ago watch from the sidelines. Which raises the question none of the coverage is asking. If Cohen wins, does the ice cream actually get less woke? Our answer is no. Ben & Jerry's scores 70/100 — woke, and nothing in this fight moves that number.
Correction First: Unilever Does Not Own Ben & Jerry's Anymore
Most commentary on this story still says "Unilever." That has been wrong since last winter. Unilever completed the demerger of its ice cream division on December 6, 2025, with the new company's shares beginning to trade in London on December 8 and in New York and Amsterdam the following day. The spinoff is called The Magnum Ice Cream Company, and it is the largest standalone ice cream business on earth. Magnum, Wall's, Cornetto and Ben & Jerry's all went with it.
That detail is the whole story. Unilever did not lose the argument with Ben Cohen — it walked away from the table and left the argument to a new company that has to answer to its own shareholders from day one. Magnum has said the brand is not for sale.
What Cohen Is Actually Demanding
Cohen's "Free Ben & Jerry's" campaign wants the brand sold to what it calls mission-aligned investors. By the campaign's own count it has gathered more than 100,000 signatures across petitions and letters. Having failed to move the company with consumer pressure, Cohen has escalated to the supply chain: he has said retailers and suppliers should either stop buying Magnum products or at minimum raise their voices, and he has floated pressure on the parent's entire portfolio — not just the pints with his name on them.
The legal spine of all this dates to the 2000 sale to Unilever, which established an independent board to protect the brand's product integrity and social mission, funded under an annual formula. That arrangement held for more than two decades. It is now in litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the independent board is fighting the parent company.
The Foundation Is the Real Receipt
The hardest number in this story is not a stock price. The Ben & Jerry's Foundation has said it will suspend operations on December 31, 2026 unless it prevails in its legal challenge, after the parent eliminated its funding and directed it to vacate its office. At stake is roughly $600,000 a year in grants to Vermont organizations, including groups that had publicly pressured the company over its own supply chain. The company's side of it, as reported: an April 2025 audit found conflicts of interest and gaps in governance and financial control. Both things are on the record, and readers deserve both.
Here is what conservatives should notice. A corporation is defunding a progressive activist foundation — and it is doing so not out of conviction but because a spun-off, independently traded business looked at a $600,000 annual line item and a governance headache and made an accounting decision. That is not a moral awakening. It is a spreadsheet.
Why the Score Is Still 70
Our score measures verified policy and money: ESG programs, DEI infrastructure, Pride sponsorships, HRC Corporate Equality Index participation, political giving, and CEO Action membership. It does not measure which faction is currently angry.
By that standard, Ben & Jerry's at 70/100 is unchanged. The activist positioning that built the brand is still stamped on the packaging and still baked into the corporate programs. A boardroom fight over who controls that activism does not remove it. If anything, both sides of this lawsuit are arguing about which of them is the better custodian of it.
Who Actually Owns Your Freezer
Since the demerger scrambled the org charts, it is worth knowing whose scores you are buying into when you reach past the Ben & Jerry's:
- Häagen-Dazs — the brand is owned globally by General Mills, which scores 70/100, with U.S. operations run under license by Froneri.
- The rest of Unilever — the ice cream is gone, but the parent's profile lives on in your bathroom. Dove scores 90/100 — extremely woke, one of the highest in personal care.
- Its rival — Procter & Gamble lands at 56/100, materially lower than Dove's parent but nowhere near clean.
- Soft serve — McDonald's scores 80/100, and Starbucks remains one of our only perfect 100/100 ratings.
The Woke-Free Scoop
If you want out of the entire argument — the founder's, the spinoff's, and the lawsuit's — the alternatives are unusually clean in this category.
Dairy Queen scores a flat 0/100, a clean sweep of zeros across all six dimensions: no ESG framework, no DEI program, no Pride campaign, no CEI rating, no partisan giving on record. For an American chain that size, that is remarkable. Smaller still, Charlie's Homemade Ice Cream & Burgers in Sylvania, Ohio scores 2/100 — a family shop that simply makes ice cream.
That is the whole point of scoring instead of shouting. Browse the full dairy and food and beverage boards, or see our roundup of the best woke-free ice cream brands in 2026.
The Verdict
Ben Cohen may well be right that the company holding his name has no soul. But a founder trying to wrest a brand back toward more activism is not a win for anyone shopping the other direction. Whoever ends up owning Ben & Jerry's, the pint in the freezer is a 70. The score tracks what a company funds and reports — not who is currently mad at it.