KIND Nut Delight got a nice endorsement from NY Giants’ nutritionist Heidi Skolnik on the Today Show earlier this month. She recommended it as an energy boosting snack whose natural ingredients you can see and pronounce.(tm)
KIND was the only nutritional bar to make it into Good Housekeeping’s listing of the 100 best convenience foods.
This follows on KIND Mango Macadamia being chosen as the Best Product of the Year out of all thousands of natural food products introduced at the Natural Products Expo earlier this fall (Oct 2008).
Gretchen Morgenson wrote here an excellent piece in the New York Times about how Merrill Lynch executives systematically dismantled all risk-control mechanisms while pursuing unfettered profits, and how this led to the company’s downfall.
Smaller businesses have to similarly navigate between the drive for profits and the need for caution.
Many years ago I realized how important this tension is to the proper management of a company. Our sales team always wants (as is correct) to sell more, and will complain that the Operations team sometimes won’t grant enough credit to a customer, or will freeze shipments to a customer that is late on its payments, causing sales to slow down.
Our team managing accounts receivables has the opposite instinct – be conservative, be cautious, and do not ship to delinquent customers till they pay, even if that hurts sales.
A short-sighted entrepreneur will dismantle this protection, and may override its credit department at its own peril. The temptation is certainly there. Why aren’t we shipping product to customers that are asking us for it? Isn’t this what we are in business for?
But sales are not real sales unless you are able to get paid. And while the credit department has to be professional and know how to work with its customers to ensure good relations, steady payments, and steady shipments, it is important to respect the need for these safeguards.
I just learned from Daniel Sachs about this think tank – the Glasshouse Forum – to encourage serious thinking towards a more enlightened version of capitalism, one that reflects on the dangers of rampant consumerism (same which we can now witness more clearly with the current financial crisis, not to mention related environmental consequences from consumerism) and related problems like short-term financial objectives and behavior, as well as the impact of globalization on the middle class.
A couple of provocative thoughts about the studies they are setting out on:
…the fact that capitalism is a necessary basis for a free society does not mean that it is a sufficient basis.
…There are tendencies within capitalism itself which cause it to saw off the branch on which it itself is sitting. (ie, the reduction of the Middle class and its buying power)
Capitalism has constantly to stimulate our desires and encourage us to want to satisfy them immediately. This stimulates an infantile character, whose attitude to life can be summed up in three words: I. Everything. Immediately.
[Under unfettered capitalism], Is it our duty to consume more and more in order to keep the economy going, even if we then as households live above our means? While we are focusing on the bubbles in the financial markets – sub-prime, asset-backed securities and others – the largest bubble in terms of long-term impact is the consumption bubble. At some point, the Western world will come into a period of considerably lower consumption levels. This is a structural change that will obviously have a dramatic impact on retail and consumer goods companies as well as on advertising, media and ultimately on our standard of living. Can we cope with such a development?
Has the time come for not-Only-for-Profit models like PeaceWorks to become the rule rather than the exception not just in business but in our economic structures and frameworks?
From San Antonio Express News on the business of peace:
Yvan Cournoyer, business development manager for H-E-B, said the South Texas grocer had known of Kind bars for some time and began selling them in select stores in 2002. “The bar became more prominent in the energy bar segment,” Cournoyer said. “Last year, it was one of the best sellers for the H-E-B stores that had it. So at the beginning of 2008, we made a strategic decision to bring it to the vast majority.”
…
“So in a few short years, it went from being this obscure product to mainstream,” Cournoyer said. “It’s a very sought after energy bar that tastes great and is very healthy for you. At the same time, there’s a great story behind the Kind company.”
Rachael Ray, host of the second highest rated daytime show behind Oprah with an average daily audience of 2.6 million people, discovered KIND bars and passionately praised them:
These are DE-LI-CIOUS… …Yum. They are sooo good… …And they are delicious and very nutritious.
- Rachael Ray
In fifteen years since founding PeaceWorks I’ve never seen a line get such swift wide acceptance.
KIND PLUS is gaining such traction because it’s the only line in the functional and nutritional bar category made of all wholesome ingredients you can see and pronounce.(TM)
What does this mean? All other lines in the category are "slab bars" – made of emulsions of hodge-podges of blends of undetectable ingredients. Why? Well, it’s much less expensive and easier to make a bar from emulsions – from date paste (in the more noble cases) down to chemical compounds and artificial ingredients like high fructose corn syrup. But you lose integrity, nutritional value, texture and taste.
It seems deceptively simple to provide functional properties – like Omega-3, Anti-Oxidants, Protein, B-Complex, or Calcium – in a bar made of all natural fruits and nuts, without adulteration or emulsion. But it was a challenging effort. After several years of development, we achieved it.
You can learn more about KIND PLUS here.
Pom Wonderful just came out with a new product that seems sooo weird to me – coffee drinks with pomegranate juice – but you can’t say they are not extraordinarily innovative and that their marketing is not at the cutting edge and refreshing.
Copywriters will admire the site: http://healthybuzz.com/
The product reminds me of when we launched many years ago at PeaceWorks the Raging Raspberry Chipotle sauce from Azteca Trading Company – which flopped for many reasons including that the flavors were a bit too "ahead of their time" (a year or two later a ton more Chipotle-infused spreads came into the market, but they eventually also died out).
But POM has such an awesome marketing muscle, has been such a remarkable leader in the food industry, and consumers seem to be looking for "buzz (energy) plus health," that this could be a big hit. On the other side it could hurt POM’s parent brand – which I associate with all natural fruit, not with coffee.
I am curious how consumers will react
Suzanne Vita Palazzo of Grocery Headquarters wrote an article surveying some of the leading food companies with a social mission and mentioned KIND and PeaceWorks as a pioneer "revolutionizing the business model for an ethical brand."
Mike Edwards questions whether the trendy concept of philantrocapitalism exemplified by Bill Gates is as effective as the uncritical buzz it is generating. And he raises questions worthy of consideration, including this one in his q&a:
…what are the actual effects of business involvement in activities that are intended to promote social change? Where is business involvement useful, where might it be damaging, and do we have the evidence to separate one from the other? Here’s a list of things that business could usefully do:
- pay your taxes
- don’t produce goods that harm people
- pay decent wages and benefits
- stop subverting politics
- obey regulations in the public interest
The problem is, philanthrocapitalism does none of these things.
Well, business actually has a pivotal role to play beyond the basic code of decency Mike Edwards lists above. As the primary force in the 21st century, the private sector can make enormous positive contributions into our lives.
I am a strong advocate of engineering market forces to achieve positive change, marrying the business model to the social mission, as we’ve endeavored to do for the last fifteen years at PeaceWorks.
And I am similarly an advocate of using entrepreneurial and creative practices commonly found in the private sector to maximize impact in civil society, as we try to do at OneVoice.
But beyond critical appraisal of "philantrocapitalism’s" effectiveness advocated in Mike’s article, what most resonates and troubles me about the unexamined noise with this and the broader concept of "corporate social responsibility" is that often it is used to mask dishonest or noxious behavior from corporations, to create bland appearances about business contributions to society while hiding under the carpet abhorrent behaviors that may be the primary driver of a business.
Certainly, a company cannot justify or sugarcoat ruthless practices, or an underlying business model that harms people just by affixing the "csr" motto to its ads. Unlike when people purchased indulgences from the medieval Church to swiftly absolve them for abominable sins, you cannot (or should not be able to) donate your way into brand heaven in the 21st century.
In sharp contrast to Mike’s provocative article, take a look at this piece in TIME Magazine where Bill Gates discovers the field of social entrepreneurship for humanity, dubbing it "creative capitalism." Gates first announced this discovery in Davos back in January, where he was given 45 minutes to share how he conceived a utilitarian servile version of social responsibility. It struck me he had just discovered and repackaged a field long in existence, just as he appropriated the netscape browser and apple’s operating system.
Social contributions should have a soul, a sentiment, and a sincerity of purpose. Corporations are driven by human beings, so hopefully they will be driven to make our world better because this too is their world. I have yet to meet a business person (or a human being) that does not care about the world. But the trouble is that sometimes some corporate business models or junctures present people with concentrated profit-maximizing opportunities that cause harm to society overall. And no amount of "CSR" should exculpate taking the wrong path – whether by lobbying the government to help a specific industry at the expense of the community or the environment, or by undermining competition, or any of the items in Mike’s list.
In the end, consumers will see through corporate efforts to manipulate causes just to make them look hip and responsible. Alas, along with the unscrupulous corporation so too will fall the credibility of this important space – the sincere intersection between doing well and doing good.