The Magnum Ice Cream Company says it is “firmly committed” to providing funding to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation despite a claim those resources have been cut.
Set up in 1985 as a social mission entity independent from the Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream business, which is now under the auspices of TMICC following a demerger from Unilever late in 2025, the Foundation has warned it may have to suspend operations unless funding is restored.
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
“The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation today announced it will suspend operations as of December 31, 2026, unless it obtains a favourable ruling in its legal challenge to its loss of funding,” it said a statement yesterday (15 July).
“The Foundation is actively pursuing that challenge which is expected to extend into next year and is fully committed to seeing it through.”
In response, TMICC said via a spokesperson that itself and Unilever have to date provided $60m to the Foundation as the ice-cream company also posed the accusation that the social mission organisation “mischaracterises events past and present”.
TMICC added: “The decision to suspend operations 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.
“TMICC remains firmly committed to funding a grant-giving foundation and to supporting the Ben & Jerry’s team and its three-part mission – making great ice cream and campaigning on the causes the brand cares about.”
The Foundation claimed that TMICC cut its funding in April last year and since then has instructed the organisation to vacate its corporate office in South Burlington, Vermont, effective from yesterday.
For its part, the Foundation suggested it has never been informed of the results of the audit.
“While we’ve lost funding and been removed from our office, we stand firm in the belief that the law and the facts are on our side,” Liz Bankowski, the president of the Foundation’s board of trustees, said.
The Foundation claimed in the statement that following the 2025 demerger, “using a pretextual governance review and a promised but never-disclosed audit”, TMICC “moved to remove a Foundation trustee and members of Ben and Jerry’s independent board and to cut off funding”.
TMICC had made changes to the corporate governance rules for the Ben & Jerry’s board in December 2025, including the intended departure of its chair Anuradha Mittal and two other members, Daryn Dodson and Jennifer Henderson, when their terms expired in 2026.
The changes are intended “to preserve and enhance the brand’s historical social mission and safeguard its essential integrity”, Ben & Jerry’s said at the time.
Meanwhile, TMICC said the findings of the audit were disclosed to the Foundation last year.
The spokesperson said that independent audits across the ice-cream business and the Foundation were conducted as part of its listing process, adding that Bankowski had “agreed to the scope of the audit and the retention of E&Y as the independent auditor, and a summary of the findings was shared with her last autumn”.
The lengthy response from TMICC continued: “The findings found clear conflicts of interest and a lack of governance and financial controls, with the Foundation making grants to organisations where board trustees held senior positions and even received compensation.
“As Liz will recall, Ben & Jerry’s invited the trustees to work with them on implementing a stronger governance framework, which they declined for reasons that remain unclear, and the paper policies that the Foundation put in place did not fully remedy.
“The Foundation has since initiated legal action, again for reasons that are unclear, and more recently took the position that its staff are not Ben & Jerry’s employees, despite utilising Ben & Jerry’s offices and systems, and not bound by Ben & Jerry’s policies.”
Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2020. However, following the spin-off of Unilever’s ice-cream business into TMICC, one of the original Ben & Jerry’s founders, Jerry Greenfield, resigned.
His co-founding counterpart Ben Cohen had suggested Greenfield was disenchanted over a lack of independence from the parent company, particularly around expressing its social values.
According to yesterday’s statement from the Foundation, the takeover agreement with Unilever in 2020 “established an independent board to oversee the company’s product integrity and historic social mission and provided for Foundation funding under an annual formula”.
The legal case is still pending in a New York court, brought by Ben & Jerry’s independent board and the Foundation against TMICC to honour its obligations under the original acquisition agreement.
“We are a $6 million foundation,” Bankowski said yesterday. “TMICC is a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation. This is exactly the kind of David and Goliath fight our grantees face every day – and like them we are not backing down.”
For its part, the TMICC spokesperson responded: “To date, Unilever/TMICC has given $60m in grants to grassroots causes through the Foundation, and TMICC is firmly committed to funding a grant-giving foundation, supported by appropriate governance controls to ensure it is living by its values.”
