The history of founders trying to reclaim what they built is long, occasionally poignant, and almost never successful. Ben Cohen, who with Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream from a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt., in 1978, appears undeterred by those odds.
Mr. Cohen flew to Amsterdam in April with a petition bearing 100,000 signatures, hoping to deliver it personally to Peter ter Kulve, the chief executive of Magnum Ice Cream Company, which now controls the Ben & Jerry's brand. The meeting, it seems, did not materialize.
(One imagines the logistics of intercepting a multinational executive in the Netherlands are somewhat more complicated than flagging down a delivery truck on Church Street.)
Now back in Vermont, Mr. Cohen is preparing what might be called the next phase of his campaign to separate Ben & Jerry's from its corporate parent. Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant, acquired the company in 2000 for approximately $326 million, and the relationship between the socially conscious ice cream maker and its publicly traded owner has been, to put it gently, uneven in the years since.
This time, Mr. Cohen will not be traveling to Amsterdam himself. Instead, he is dispatching what reports describe as 200 anthropomorphic miniature pints of ice cream — a kind of frozen guerrilla army — to make the case on his behalf.
The tactical shift from petition delivery to costumed protest suggests either an escalation in strategy or an acknowledgment that earnest requests were not producing results. Perhaps both.
Whether a battalion of walking pint containers will prove more persuasive to Unilever's leadership than a hundred thousand signatures remains, of course, to be seen. But Mr. Cohen, who has been at this for several years now, appears to have concluded that if you cannot get in the door, you might as well be memorable on the sidewalk.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Ben Cohen Goes Guerrilla In His Next Push to Free Ben & Jerry's"