Ben Cohen
speaker
1,024 appearances
9 recordings
7 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 19 Jun
Ben Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And so we had this structure that was called super shares.
You know, the insiders got 10 votes for every share that they held versus everybody else just had one vote per share.
And that essentially kept control of the company
amongst this group of original investors who were bought into the mission.
But then what happened was that we hired the wrong CEO, and he saw a way for himself to make a bunch of money by selling the business.
He made some overtures to Unilever.
They ended up putting in an offer for the business.
You have to make that public if you're a publicly held company.
And then what happens is that the business is considered to be, as they say, in play.
And so other entities can make offers for the business and other entities did.
And, you know, Unilever really wanted it because their arch competitor in the global ice cream business was Nestle.
And Nestle had just bought Haagen-Dazs.
Unilever needed a super premium ice cream to compete.
And Jerry and I didn't want to sell.
So we were very resistant.
And...
Unilever started to understand that the reason we didn't want to sell was because we wanted to maintain the social mission.
We didn't believe that if the company was sold to a company that didn't share that mission, that it would survive.
We're negotiating and we're trying to write the social mission into an acquisition agreement.
and we kind of realized that the social mission needs to evolve as the times evolve over as what's going on in the country and society changes and so the way we found to deal with it was to establish this independent board of directors for ben and jerry's that has legal authority
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