Following the IPO of The Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC) on Monday, CEO Peter ter Kulve lashes out at Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, who continues to insist on a sale: it is time for him to let go of the brand and hand it over to a new generation.
Ongoing conflict
The stock market listing of TMICC, Unilever’s spun-off ice cream division, is now a reality. However, this does not put an end to the long-running discussions about the future of the activist ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s. Founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield sold their company in 2000 with guarantees of independent governance that would safeguard the brand’s social mission, but in recent years they have seen their brand increasingly silenced.
Greenfield has since stepped down, but Cohen continues to fight for the “liberation” of the ice cream brand and has promised to keep making life difficult for the TMICC as long as they refuse to sell the brand. A month ago, the conflict escalated after a negative report about Ben & Jerry’s CEO Anuradha Mittal, who was said to no longer meet the criteria to fulfill her role.
“It’s just noise”
For TMICC CEO ter Kulve, enough is enough: it is time for the founders – now in their seventies – to hand over the company to a new generation, he told the Financial Times. “Their dedication to the brand, to the goals, has been enormous, but at some point you have to let it go. We have to move on.”
The CEO is not overly concerned about the issue, he told Dutch newspaper FD: “Are we selling less Ben & Jerry’s because the brand is always in the news? When we bought it, the company was almost bankrupt. It’s a very romantic idea of Ben’s to buy it back, but the Ben & Jerry’s management team is absolutely not in favor of that. In America, there may be enough scale to run it as an independent company, but certainly not in Europe. How many people know that the brand has a social mission, and how many people just see the name Ben & Jerry’s on their ice cream? I’m really not worried. It’s just noise.”
