Chapter 2
What Could Be More Inspiring Than a Crusade?

Hirshberg found his calling long before his moment of illumination. As a boy in New Hampshire, he was entranced by the Technicolor wastewater that flashed from green to yellow to red as it gushed into the Suncook River from his family’s shoe factory. But then he learned that the mesmerizing hues were the product of pollution, and that pollution in all its forms was endangering the planet. Before long, Hirshberg was a fervent environmentalist who earned a degree in environmental science and began traveling the world to build windmills and teach others how to build them, too.

By the late 1970s, he was executive director of the proudly named New Alchemy Institute, an ecological research center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its solar-heated, wind-powered greenhouse produced enough food to feed ten people three meals a day, year-round, showing that food production could be sustainable without using fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizer. Huge fish tanks soaked up sunlight during the day, and the water produced enough heat to warm the place at night. Each tank supported about 100 pounds of fish per year, and the fish waste fertilized the plants that were then turned into fish food. Even in midwinter, the greenhouse was warm enough to grow bananas, figs, papayas, and other fruits. The New Alchemy Institute was earnest, ingenious, and successful. Nearly 25,000 admiring visitors trooped through it every year.

In 1982, Hirshberg’s cozy world was shattered when he visited the Land Pavilion at Disney’s EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, and encountered Kraft Foods’ vision of the farm of the future. Kraft’s dream display was an ecologist’s nightmare: Plants were grown hydroponically, suspended in plastic tubes, while streams of petrochemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides washed their naked roots. Not a grain of actual soil was to be found. Anything but sustainable, this kind of farming relied on plundering the Earth for carbon-based chemicals stored as fossil fuels eons ago, and then spewing carbon back into the air. And for Hirshberg, fossil-fueled insult was added to chemical-injected injury by the center’s conventional lighting and air conditioning. He was doubly appalled when he realized that Kraft foisted this unsustainable fantasy on more people every day than heard New Alchemy’s message in a full year.

Hirshberg felt powerless and outgunned. Faced with Kraft’s smooth marketing and publicity machine, well oiled by its huge stash of corporate dollars, he and his green colleagues seemed little more than puny innocents preaching to the already converted and making little headway in an uncaring world. Against such odds, how could they possibly save the planet?

That’s when inspiration struck, and he blurted it out loud: “I have to become Kraft.”

As Hirshberg explained years later, he was still convinced that “Kraft was crazy and only sustainable practices could save the planet.” But now he knew that for him and his like-minded brethren to be heard outside their own, already-committed congregation of true believers, they needed the clout of profitable and powerful businesses behind them. What Hirshberg didn’t know, though, was how his work to save the environment would evolve into an effective way to engage customers.

Hirshberg left New Alchemy, went home to New Hampshire, took some business classes, and became a partner in a quixotic yogurt-making start-up that, in time, enabled him to prove the correctness of his epiphany. Today Stonyfield Farm is the world’s largest maker of organic yogurt—a company that has grown by more than 27 percent a year for 18 straight years and regularly turns a handsome profit. Hirshberg, who calls himself the CE-Yo, still runs the business.

Like any small company, Stonyfield lurched from crisis to crisis in its first years, repeatedly facing make-or-break decisions. Perhaps the most pivotal decision was how to engage customers.

Hirshberg and his partner, Samuel Kaymen, were convinced from the outset that their yogurt was its own best marketer: One taste would tell any yogurt lover that this was a truly exceptional product. The problem was determining how to get people to taste it. The pair had no money for advertising or conventional marketing. Organic food stores might be persuaded to carry Stonyfield yogurt, but they were few in number back then and their reach ended with the minuscule market of health fanatics. Luckily, a friend of Hirshberg’s was an executive at the Stop & Shop supermarket chain, and he wrangled a test promotion that gave Stonyfield dairy case space in five stores and permission to hand out samples to customers for 12 weeks.

Even that tiny inroad wasn’t easily navigable for Hirshberg and Kaymen: They and their families were the entire crew at Stonyfield in those days—milking 19 cows twice a day, making yogurt, sweet-talking nervous bankers, and handling all the paperwork. Unless they could persuade a neighbor or Kaymen’s wife, Louise, to do the milking, they had to take turns passing out the samples and pitching their amateur sales spiel to customers at one of the five stores. Plain yogurt was their only product at first, so they flavored each sample spoonful with a drizzle of locally produced maple syrup. Their total sales kit was made up of a folding table, a homemade sign, the yogurt, the maple syrup, a stash of paper napkins and plastic spoons, and an apron.

The yogurt makers pressed their samples on every passerby—shoppers, store operators, dairy managers, even brand representatives checking their shelf stock. Hirshberg later quipped that he and Kaymen had “all the innocence of Cub Scouts selling chances for a free car wash.” But somehow it worked: Their missionary zeal about planet-saving, sustainable business practices combined with the yogurt’s extraordinary quality attracted enough buyers to persuade Stop & Shop to carry the yogurt in every one of the chain’s several hundred stores throughout New England.

Best of all, the partners had made what Hirshberg came to call Stonyfield Farm’s “handshake with the customer.” The handshake wasn’t physical contact; it was instead an implied contract—a guarantee that the yogurt was both delicious and made in a way that furthered the cause of saving the planet. It was pure and organic or all natural; the milk used was free of preservatives, and most of it came from cows that hadn’t been exposed to chemicals, pesticides, and drugs. Happy shoppers soon passed the word about Stonyfield to their friends, and the brand began to take off.

Chicago was the scene of one of Stonyfield’s biggest successes. A major supermarket chain offered to give Hirshberg space in its dairy cases if he could quadruple Stonyfield’s market share to 3 percent within three months. But he was told that achieving that kind of growth required a $10 million advertising campaign. Stonyfield didn’t have the money; instead, it passed out 85,000 free cups of yogurt to the city’s public transit riders, along with coupons that read: “We salute your commute! Thanks for doing your part to help save the planet.” Accompanying brochures informed riders that every person who commutes by train instead of car prevents 44 pounds of particulates from flooding into the atmosphere annually. Only three days into the campaign, a freshet of newspaper and television coverage bubbled up, lifting Stonyfield’s market share to 2.5 percent and assuring that the goal would be reached. The whole effort cost under $100,000.

Hirshberg used a variant of the same technique to invade the Houston market—but in a city with hardly any public transit, Hirshberg had to reach—and engage—drivers. He theorized that many people feel at least a little bit guilty about their impact on the planet, and they would be glad to know they could do something to lessen the blow. So Stonyfield enlisted Houston’s drivers in its crusade by reminding them to keep their tires properly inflated to save gasoline. Brandishing a Texas-size sign proclaiming, “We Support Inflation,” the Stonyfield crew waved in curious drivers at a busy intersection, pumped up their tires, and explained that if every car’s tires were properly inflated, our national fuel efficiency would increase by 2 miles per gallon of gasoline. They said the savings would equal the potential oil production from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Drivers also got a free cup of yogurt and a tire gauge with the Stonyfield logo. Again, Stonyfield’s clever promotion won it news media attention and a healthy rise in market share.

Sampling is a powerful way to turn a contact into a customer, Hirshberg points out, because it opens a path to the figurative handshake—the emotional connection—that creates true customer engagement. In Stonyfield’s case, he says, customers pay a few extra pennies for a cup of yogurt to know that the producer is doing “what’s right for the health and well-being of themselves and their families, our farmer suppliers, and the planet.” And with that knowledge, they can feel that they, too, are doing the right thing in buying the yogurt.

Stonyfield’s method of educating its customers about its planet-friendly initiatives is both ingenious and self-evident. It puts environmental and other messages on its yogurt container lids—more than 100 million of them every year. The messages vary monthly, sometimes quizzing customers or inviting them to join environmental initiatives—and sometimes directly exhorting them to measure up: “Your car choice makes a difference. Live larger, drive smaller,” urged one lid.

From the beginning, Hirshberg and Kaymen used their cartons to send messages to customers. One quart container promoted Kaymen’s Rural Education Center, which predated the yogurt operation and aimed to teach sustainable farming methods and recruit new organic farmers. The back of the carton proclaimed the company’s “reverence for life” and said its cows received “lots of tender loving care” and were fed a wholesome diet free of chemicals and pesticides.

Stonyfield has also used the lids to mobilize political pressure for the cause. A few years ago, it printed a lid for customers to sign and send to their representatives in Congress: “I believe in efficient government, but not at the expense of my children’s future. If you vote against the planet, I won’t vote for you.” According to Richard “Dick” Gephardt, the House Democratic leader at the time, 15,000 of those lids found their way to Capitol Hill.

Stonyfield.com also reinforces customer engagement by posting environmental news and messages, and updates on the company’s donations to the cause. Its “Have a Cow” feature lets kids become make-believe co-owners of cows on farms that supply Stonyfield (after the company outgrew its own herd, it began contracting for milk from organic farmers). A new “owner” downloads a photo and history of a real cow and gets quarterly updates on its health and activities, along with news of happenings on the farm where the cow lives.

Stonyfield’s marketing is about “making our customers feel good about us and our product,” Hirshberg says. The company supports causes that consumers care about and invests in educational initiatives that will help improve and sustain the planet. “And even if they don’t think that Stonyfield is making their lives better,” he explains, “we believe they will have a sense of well-being that, at some innate level, will connect them to us and our yogurt.”

Clearly, the marketing works and Stonyfield’s other counterintuitive tactics further engage customers. For example, by sharing the company’s wide-ranging activities on Stonyfield.com, customers learned that when the company’s wastewater overburdened the local municipal facilities, Hirshberg pitched in to build the company’s own pretreatment plant. Typically, he opted for a less conventional but more efficient anaerobic system. It cost 15 percent more than a conventional plant to build, but it produces 90 percent less solid sludge, uses 40 percent less energy, and generates methane as a by-product that fuels the process. The plant will save $3.6 million during the system’s first 10 years. Similarly, by improving efficiency in the plant, including updating lighting, installing good insulation systems, and updating heating systems with natural gas-burning boilers with sophisticated controls, Stonyfield saved 46 million kilowatt hours during a 10-year span—enough to power 4,500 homes for a year. The savings to Stonyfield was a cool $1.7 million.

Even when environmentally friendly investment sounds financially foolish, it can turn out to be profitable. In 2004, for example, Hirshberg spent a few hundred thousand dollars to put a rooftop solar array on his New Hampshire factory. Oil was much cheaper then, and the payback time was more than 20 years. He forged ahead anyway, because he wanted to underscore the company’s environmental mission. In today’s environment with high oil prices, it’s not a stretch to see that the payback time will be faster. Hirshberg’s single-minded emphasis on reducing waste has paid off handsomely as well. Ditching plastic lids in favor of foil saved so much energy, water, and materials that it grew the bottom line by $1 million. “Waste is nothing less than incontrovertible evidence of inefficiency,” Hirshberg preaches. “It’s self-evident: When you become more efficient, you save money.”

By enlisting his customers to join his crusade, Hirshberg has achieved an impressive measure of success: Stonyfield Farm is a model of sustainable business that others are increasingly imitating. Two juxtaposed facts neatly sum up Hirshberg’s achievement: Stonyfield was the first company in the nation to offset 100 percent of its CO₂ emissions from its facility energy use. And more than a decade ago, Stonyfield not only became Kraft-like in its business reach, but also surpassed the food giant with U.S. yogurt sales that left its Breyers brand far behind. That is a testament to the power of customer engagement that Hirshberg has taken all the way to the bank.

Rules of Engagement