They were bought out by a unilever subsidiary. Most of their ingredients were replaced with cheaper, less healthy, less flavorful additives. It's funny to say the ice cream got less healthy, but it's true.
Also the shareholders overrode Ben and Jerry against their objections to sell. They didn’t want to. Of course they probably shouldn’t have gone public in the first place but if they hadn’t you never would have heard of them. Unless you grew up in Vermont. Like me. It was kinda weird seeing a beloved business become huge. Like watching Phish go from a local band to something giant.
I dislike the texture of various gums and food science additives in my ice cream, I'm there to eat sugar and fat. If you have to enhance those you're doing it wrong. I suspect my digestive system dislikes them as well feeding the wrong species of gut bacteria or triggering some kind of imbalance or another.
I generally agree, buy it's a small amount compared to just about any other store bought ice cream flavor I've found, and way less ingredients than general. It tastes and feels different.
If the flavors are permanently dead, it would be fitting if the grave markers included recipes for those mourning the loss of this flavor and who wish to recreate it at home.
Ben & Jerry's actually adds/discontinues like 5+ flavors / year. I was told that flavors don't go to the flavor graveyard unless they have an interesting story, but it seems like they just haven't been adding any for a good while now.
Agreed that was a good one. They used so much Kahlua that it caused the price of Kahlua liqueur to rise at liquor stores because they were buying so much of it. So they stopped the flavor.
Millions of years from now when sentient machine swarms from now nascent civilizations descend upon the ruins of Earth, they'll stumble on this actual physical ice cream flavor graveyard and ponder our frivolous whimsicality.