How Paul Newman Was Connected To This Giant Ice Cream Brand

In the food realm, Paul Newman, the legendary actor turned philanthropic food entrepreneur, is known for his salad dressings, pasta sauces, salsa, and more. Movie buffs might also know him for the rumor of his eating 50 hard-boiled eggs in front of a camera. Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry is a Vermont-based manufacturer of ice cream and other frozen desserts with quirky names. Both Newman and Ben & Jerry are famous for their activism: Through the Newman Foundation, 100% of the profits and royalties from the sale of Newman's Own products go to children facing adversity. B&J, as it's lovingly referred to by its fans, supports a whole array of social issues. But there was also a brief period when the two did business together. In 1998, B&J launched Newman's Own Ice Cream, a series of five ice cream flavors.

You won't find those ice-creams in the frozen section today, and that's not because B&J put them in its flavor graveyard. In 1999, after only a year, Newman's Own Ice Cream disappeared, for unknown reasons. The ice cream had a lower fat content than the B&J super-premium (10 grams of fat as opposed to 18 grams), yet it boasted a rich, luscious flavor. It was made with cream and milk without the growth hormone BST. The ice cream was also more affordable ($3.99 per quart as opposed to $2.89 to $3.09 per pint of B&J at the time). The names such as Milk Chocolate Mudbath, Obscene Vanilla Bean, and Lovable Mint Chip were catchy, too. With all this, you would have expected it to last, but it didn't. Still, the profits from the collaboration were donated to charity, like everything from the sale of all Newman's Own products.

The short duration of Newman's Own Ice Cream was an outlier; most other products introduced by the company are long-lived, starting with the Classic Oil & Vinegar Salad Dressing that was launched in 1982. Every decade brought new product lines: salsa in 1991, all-natural pizza in 2008 (one of the lesser-known frozen pizza brands you should pay attention to), and organic pasta sauces in 2016. It didn't stop at food for humans: In 2003, the company came out with a line of organic pet food.

Following the same collaboration pattern as with Ben & Jerry's in 1998, Newman's Own does not own manufacturing facilities and does not make the products itself but contracts the work out to trusted companies while retaining the recipe or formula. In 2025, Newman's Own developed Salad Kits in collaboration with Fresh Del Monte Produce. It supplies the salad dressings and toppings, and Del Monte provides the lettuce greens.