The Consumer Goods Company That Actually Owns Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream
Who owns the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's? Surely, you might think the answer is Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield, or both of them, who started selling ice cream out of a gas station in Vermont. In actuality, it is a company called Unilever that has ownership over your favorite frozen treat brand. In the same way that Diageo is a beverage company that secretly owns Johnnie Walker and that Smithfield Foods, an American food company, is owned mostly by China, Ben & Jerry's still retains the name of its founders on the carton, operating as a wholly-owned autonomous subsidiary of Unilever, selling ice cream in over 40 countries worldwide.
Ben & Jerry's is not the only frozen delight owned by Unilever. Breyers, Good Humor, Klondike, Magnum, and Popsicle are all under the Unilever parent corporation, along with other foods such as Hellmann's mayonnaise and Lipton tea. The consumer goods company's other areas of business involve beauty, wellbeing, home care, nutrition, and personal care products like Vaseline, Q-Tips, and skin creams from Pond's and Noxzema. For soaps, shampoos, and lotions, Unilever owns products from Dove and Suave in those categories. Unilever even owns Axe body spray.
Unilever first acquired Ben & Jerry's back in 2000, when it bought the brand for $43.60 a share, for a grand total of $326 million in cash. While under Unilever, Ben & Jerry's remains committed to a three-pronged mission statement on the brand's official webpage, emphasizing product quality, economic reward, and a commitment to the community.
The melted relationship between Ben & Jerry's and Unilever
The ice cream business has been hard hit, with chains like Thrifty Ice Cream closing 500 locations and Dairy Queen announcing more closures in the first half of 2025. For Ben & Jerry's and Unilever, the professional relationship has been a rocky road for several years, starting in 2022 when Ben & Jerry sued Unilever for selling its products to a domestic licensee in Israel to do business in the Middle Eastern country and the West Bank region. The Ben & Jerry's lawsuit noted that Unilever made a commitment to cease the sale of products in the region in 2021 in order to demonstrate support for Palestinian sovereignty and argued it was not violating that pledge.
Changes in leadership at Unilever between 2022 and 2023 led to the 2024 announcement that the company was planning to cut 7,500 employees of their 128,000 global workforce, mainly laying off office-based roles. In conjunction with this downsizing effort was the announcement of "The Separation of Ice Cream" from Unilever.
In a post on the Unilever website, the company owns five of the top 10 selling global ice cream brands, including Ben & Jerry's, that generated €7.9 billion ($9.1 billion) in 2023. Despite those earnings, Unilever plans to step away from ice cream altogether, and this "demerger" from the desserts will be completed by the end of 2025, likely creating a new company to spin off ownership of Ben & Jerry, as well as other ice cream brands.