Jerry Greenfield Net Worth

What Is Jerry Greenfield's Net Worth?

Jerry Greenfield is an American businessman, activist, and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $100 million. Jerry Greenfield earned his fortune as the co-founder of the Vermont-based ice cream company Ben & Jerry's. He co-founded the business with his best friend since seventh grade, Ben Cohen. The founders, who were born four days apart from each other in 1951, started Ben & Jerry's with $8,000 in savings and a $4,000 bank loan. After opening their first shop in the late '70s, today Ben & Jerry's is sold in more than 40 countries. Ben & Jerry's earns roughly $1 billion annually. In 2000, the company was purchased by the food giant Unilever for $326 million. At that point, annual earnings were $237 million.

For the next 25 years, Ben & Jerry both received a salary from Unilever, but neither was involved in the operations or management of the brand they founded. In September 2025, Jerry announced his resignation from the company, citing a complete breakdown in the values-driven independence they were promised when they sold the business in 2000.

In 1995, Greenfield and Cohen created the Ben & Jerry's Foundation, a social justice organization that was established to "fund organizations here in Vermont and around the country that are working for progressive social change." In 1988, Ben and Jerry were named U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. The duo has published the books "Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book" (1987) and "Ben & Jerry's Double Dip: How to Run a Values Led Business and Make Money Too" (1997).

Early Life

Jerry Greenfield was born on March 14, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York. He is from a Jewish family, and he was raised on Long Island. Jerry met Ben Cohen in a middle school gym class in 1963, and they both attended Sanford H. Calhoun High School. After graduating from high school, Greenfield enrolled at Ohio's Oberlin College, where he studied a pre-med curriculum and worked in the cafeteria as an ice cream scooper. He graduated in 1973 but didn't get into medical school, so he returned to New York and moved in with Cohen. Jerry took a job as a lab technician, and in 1974, he moved to North Carolina with his then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Skarie, after failing to get into medical school again.

Ben & Jerry's

Greenfield and Cohen initially wanted to open a bagel shop, but after realizing how expensive the equipment was, they took an ice cream-making course at Pennsylvania State University that cost $5. They opened Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream Parlor in May 1978, and their first location was in the college town of Burlington, Vermont, which didn't have an ice cream shop. Ben and Jerry each put in $4,000 to start the business, and they got a $4,000 bank loan as well.

Cohen suffers from anosmia, which limits his taste and smell, and this led to the signature chunks Ben and Jerry's ice cream is known for. He told "Delish" in 2021, "When Jerry and I first started creating the flavors [in the 1970s], he'd give me something to taste. He'd say, 'Well, how do you like it?' I said, 'It's good. But I can't tell what flavor it is.' So he would just keep on adding more flavoring until I could guess."

In 1980, Greenfield and Cohen began selling pints of their ice cream in grocery stores, and by 1987, the company was worth $30 million. The first franchised Ben & Jerry's shop opened in 1981 in Shelburne, Vermont, and today there are 615 Ben & Jerry's locations.

The company is known for flavors such as Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream, Half Baked, Phish Food, Chunky Monkey, and Cherry Garcia, and they use ingredients that are Fairtrade certified, non-GMO, and from Certified Humane cage-free farms. Since Unilever bought Ben & Jerry's in 2000, Greenfield and Cohen have not been involved in the management or operations of the company. In an interview with "The Boston Phoenix," Jerry stated, "We have no responsibility, no authority, and very little influence….It's very different. We're somewhat goodwill ambassadors for the company, which I like, because — and I think this is true for Ben — we both want to help promote the values of the company, not simply to sell more ice cream, but the other things that the company stands for and works for."

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Unilever Acquisition

In April 2000, Unilever acquired two brands on the same day. The first, Slim-Fast Foods Co., was purchased for $2.3 billion. The second was Ben & Jerry's, acquired for $326 million—an amount that, while significantly smaller, came with far more strings attached.

The deal had been in negotiation for over a year. Jerry Greenfield was deeply skeptical of selling to a multinational conglomerate, fearing the brand's social mission would be diluted or abandoned. At one point, a competing offer from Dreyer's Ice Cream proposed a stock-swap arrangement that would have granted Ben & Jerry board seats and a 25% stake in the resulting company.

Unilever ultimately won out by offering more cash—and by agreeing to a series of unusual contractual concessions. These included: maintaining Ben & Jerry's progressive social mission, continuing to source milk exclusively from Vermont dairy farmers at above-market prices, and preserving the company's commitment to donate 7.5% of its pre-tax profits to charity.

Crucially, Unilever also agreed to establish and protect an independent board of directors tasked with overseeing the company's social values. The agreement even stipulated that if Unilever ever violated the deal's terms, the independent board could sue, and Unilever would have to pay their legal fees.

As part of the deal, Unilever also provided Jerry with $5 million to jump-start a venture capital firm focused on supporting low-income entrepreneurs.

Resignation

Although neither Ben Cohen nor Jerry Greenfield held operational roles after the Unilever acquisition, both remained on the payroll for 25 years as brand ambassadors. They appeared at scoop shop openings, helped train employees, and continued to represent the company's values through public engagement.

But behind the scenes, tensions with Unilever steadily escalated. In 2021, Ben & Jerry's announced it would stop selling products in Israeli-occupied territories, calling it incompatible with the brand's social mission. The move sparked intense political backlash and led Unilever to circumvent the independent board by selling the Israeli distribution rights to a local licensee. Ben & Jerry's sued its parent company, alleging a breach of the acquisition agreement.

More disputes followed. Unilever allegedly blocked public statements from the brand referencing abortion, universal healthcare, climate change, and critiques of Donald Trump. In early 2025, Ben & Jerry's accused Unilever of unlawfully removing CEO David Stever without consulting the independent board, prompting a staff walkout that Ben Cohen joined in protest. Cohen also launched a campaign to buy the company back from Unilever—though Unilever insisted the brand was not for sale.

On September 17, 2025, Jerry Greenfield announced he was resigning from the company entirely. In a public statement shared by Cohen, Greenfield said the decision was "one of the hardest and most painful" of his life, citing the collapse of the independence promised in the 2000 deal.

"It's with a broken heart that I've decided I can no longer, in good conscience, and after 47 years, remain an employee of Ben & Jerry's," Greenfield wrote. "Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important. And yet Ben & Jerry's has been silenced—sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power."

Personal Life

In the '80s, Greenfield left Ben & Jerry's to move to Arizona with Skarie while she worked toward a Ph.D. in psychology, and after they moved back to Vermont in 1985, he became the company's Director of Mobile Promotions. Jerry and Elizabeth married in 1987, and they welcomed a son, Tyrone, the following year. Greenfield and Cohen are known for supporting social causes and philanthropic efforts, and the Ben & Jerry's Foundation has helped organizations such as The Street Vendor Project, Denver Homeless Out Loud, RISE St. James, and the Anti-Displacement Project.

In 2016, the pair was arrested at a Washington, D.C. Democracy Awakening protest. Ben & Jerry's released a statement about the arrest on their website, writing, "Jerry and Ben and hundreds of others felt that they had to do something more, once the marches and the speeches came to an end. As Ben said, there's a powerful legacy of direct action in this country. From mass protests like the March on Washington and 2014's People's Climate March in NYC, to incredibly powerful if quieter, and more personal actions like the 1960 Woolworth sit-ins started by four African-American students in Greensboro, North Carolina, or the protest against Shell Oil's plan to drill in the Arctic by kayakers in Seattle. Sometimes, when something really matters, you have to put your body on the line. You have to take a stand." In July 2021, Greenfield and Cohen announced that they were supporting the boycott of sales of their ice cream in Israeli settlements in the West Bank's occupied Palestinian territories and wrote an op-ed for the "New York Times" in which they stated, "While we no longer have any operational control of the company we founded in 1978, we're proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history."

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