When the Chunky Monkey Hits the Fan

🍦🐒 When the Chunky Monkey Hits the Fan

Nadine, I loved reading this because I have a real soft spot for Ben & Jerry’s, or perhaps for the Ben & Jerry’s I remember growing up with. Chunky Monkey was my favourite. I loved those ridiculously generous chunks, but I also used to read the pint. You would buy an ice cream and somehow come away having learnt something, laughed at something or been made to think about something you had never expected to find on an ice-cream container.

They were rebels, and I loved that about them.

I think Vermont had a lot to do with why it felt believable. Ben & Jerry’s started in a converted petrol station in Burlington in 1978 and that Vermont personality seemed to run right through the brand (Ben & Jerry’s, n.d.). Even the ice cream was slightly rebellious. Everyone else was making smooth ice cream and they were throwing enormous chunks of chocolate, banana, brownies and nuts into theirs. They thought outside the ice-cream box in almost every sense.

There is also something very Vermont about having an opinion and being prepared to discuss it. Vermont has this centuries-old Town Meeting tradition where neighbours gather, argue their different positions and then vote. Political scientist Frank Bryan, who studied Vermont Town Meetings for decades, described part of the effect as “forced civility”: you can disagree quite strongly with someone, but afterwards they are still your neighbour (Associated Press, 2024). I have always felt that when I have been in Vermont. Politics and social issues can be talked about quite openly. You do not have to agree. Sometimes the whole point is that somebody says something that makes you think.

Looking back at Ben & Jerry’s through that lens, it suddenly makes complete sense. The pint was almost a tiny Vermont Town Meeting in your freezer.

And they really did use it that way. There was Peace Pop supporting peace activism, Farm Aid messages on millions of pints, Rock the Vote and later support for Occupy Wall Street (Ben & Jerry’s, 2014). When Vermont legalised same-sex marriage, Chubby Hubby became Hubby Hubby. Later came I Dough, I Dough for marriage equality, Save Our Swirled around climate change, Empower Mint around voting rights and racial justice, Pecan Resist challenging Trump administration policies and Justice ReMix’d around criminal-justice reform (Ben & Jerry’s, 2018, 2019).

My absolute favourite example, though, might be Bernie’s Yearning.

Ben Cohen created it in support of fellow Vermonter Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign. The ice cream had a huge solid chocolate disc covering the top, representing the concentration of wealth among the richest 1%. The idea was that you had to take your spoon, smash the chocolate into pieces and redistribute it through the ice cream yourself (CBS News, 2016).

I mean, that is genius. 😂 You could agree with Bernie Sanders, disagree with him or think the whole thing was ridiculous, but you understood the argument before you had finished dessert. Political communication had literally become edible.

And this is where your idea of the reputational “bank” becomes really interesting to me, because there is obviously a risk in giving an ice cream this many opinions.

Even people who broadly sit on the same side politically do not come as a matching set. Two Democrats can have completely different positions on Gaza, policing, taxation or how far environmental regulation should go. Ben & Jerry’s itself describes its social mission as progressive but non-partisan (Ben & Jerry’s, 2025). So every time the company puts another opinion out there, it creates another opportunity for somebody who previously loved the brand to say, hang on, you have lost me on this one.

But perhaps that was also part of why we bought it.

Research on Ben & Jerry’s specifically found that perceived authenticity was particularly important in determining how its social advocacy affected corporate reputation (Lim et al., 2021). That makes sense to me. If you have been opinionated since 1978, speaking up feels very different from a company suddenly discovering a fashionable social cause because somebody in marketing thinks it will play well on Instagram.

The difficulty comes when the Chunky Monkey hits the fan.

Ben & Jerry’s spent decades making deposits into the reputational bank you describe: the ridiculous names, messages on the pints, causes, humour and willingness to say things other companies stayed well away from. That history gave the brand an incredibly strong personality, but it also created an expectation.

Once speaking up becomes one of the reasons people love you, suddenly going quiet can feel rather strange. Equally, the more specific and controversial the issue, the greater the chance that even somebody who has happily eaten Chunky Monkey for 20 years will eventually think, I was with you until this one.

Perhaps that is the price of building a reputation around having a voice. If you have spent years encouraging us to debate what you put on the pint, you also have to accept that sometimes we are going to debate back, and maybe you or I will learn something, learn of a different perspective and mold our opinions and find a compromise along the way. I miss that about Ben & Jerry’s. You missed the mark Unilever in being vanilla!