MISSION-DRIVEN BUSINESS  

Seth Goldman is the President and TeaEO of Honest Tea, the company he co-founded in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. Under Seth’s leadership, the company has become an innovator within the beverage industry; Honest Tea was the first tea company to introduce a USDA-certified organic bottled tea as well as the first to make a Fair Trade Certified bottled tea. He currently serves on the boards of several companies and non-profits, and is preparing the September release of his first book, a graphic novel titled Mission in a Bottle. @HonestTea


Secret to Becoming a Resilient Entrepreneur

This one activity can give you the mental toughness and a will to win that every entrepreneur needs.  Read story

Why I Enjoy Working for My Company's Acquirer

Most CEO's of acquired companies stick around less than a year, but Honest Tea's Seth Goldman explains why he's staying put at Coca-Cola.  Read story

How to Protect Your Mission as You Grow

How do you make the right decision when your new business idea doesn't align perfectly with your current mission?  Read story

How to Thrive (at a Big Company) After Acquisition

Can a mission-driven enterprise accelerate impact within a larger corporation?  Read story

Honest Tea's Seth Goldman Addresses Congress

Does the U.S. government help, or hinder entrepreneurship? I spoke with Congress to let them know how they did, and didn't help Honest Tea's growth.  Read story

I Love You, You’re Fired

What do you do when the product you conceived, nurtured and loved, fails to thrive?  Read story

Changing Our Look Without Losing Our Brand

Growing up we’re always told that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  And while that’s certainly true with respect to per...  Read story

Dos and Don’ts of Raising Money From Angels: The Devil Is in the Details

Honest Tea president, co-founder, and TeaEO Seth Goldman highlights the Honest dos and don'ts of raising money from angel investors.  Read story

After You Close a Deal

Selling a business can be a surreal experience. For Honest Tea founder Seth Goldman, it involved an investor call, a gong, and Erin Brockovich.  Read story

IPOs Aren't the Only Way to Access Capital

Seth Goldman reports from the Treasury Department's conference on access to capital.  Read story

Ownership Matters

Yesterday we informed our shareholders that Coca-Cola intends to exercise its right to buy the remainder of Honest Tea. While that development on its own ...  Read story

A New Generation at Seventh Generation?

Jeffrey Hollender's ouster at Seventh Generation serves as a cautionary tale for today's ambitious green entrepreneurs.  Read story

Changing the Status Quo

It's official.  Today I was elected a board member of the American Beverage Association, which means that either we've changed or the Beverage Establ...  Read story

What Earth Day Means to Me

In 2004, I took my family to visit the Makaibari tea garden in Darjeeling, India, the supplier of our oolong tea.  My oldest son Jonah, who was 11 at...  Read story

The Big Brewer

When Honest Tea took on Coca-Cola as an investor in 2008, many skeptics were concerned that Coke would force us to follow the same strategy that so...  Read story

The Plan-o-Gram Scramble

"Plan-o-gram" may sound like the newest board game to hit the toy stores this past holiday season, but it is no game at all in the beverage industry. A pl...  Read story

A New Home for Green Companies

Earlier this month, we opened Maryland's first green business incubator. It is housed in the offices of Bethesda G...  Read story

Don't Judge a Drink by Its Bottle

We learned an interesting lesson this month about the danger of hiding your light under a bushel. Over the past few years, we had been working hard with b...  Read story

A Crash Course in Social Entrepreneurship, Part 2

Earlier this week, I posted some of the most common questions I get from entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs -- a list that was inspired by a lengthy...  Read story

A Crash Course in Social Entrepreneurship, Part 1

Every week, I talk with lots of entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, or students of entrepreneurship. I recently had a lengthy correspondence with a gro...  Read story

Promoting from Within

Despite all the grim unemployment data, we've been on a hiring spree for the past two years -- from 23 full-time employees in 2007, to 52 last year, and 9...  Read story

A Seat at the Transition Table

Earlier this week, I had the chance to participate in a discussion at the Obama-Biden Transition Office with other leaders of the sustainable business com...  Read story

How Do You Grow an Organic Fish?

I had lunch recently with representatives of our certifier, Pennsylvania Certified Organic, who were in town for a meeting of the National Organic Standar...  Read story

Why Change Comes in Many Shapes and Sizes

A few years ago, an article that mentioned Co-op America and Sam's Club and Wal-Mart in the same paragraph was usually about activists protesting the nati...  Read story

The Customer Is Always Powerful

We met last week with Sally Greenberg, the new head of the National Consumers League to discuss some ideas about how we could inform and mobilize consumer...  Read story

For Honest Tea, Coke Is It

We've recently hired more than a dozen new marketing and salespeople to support our expansion out West with Coke's distribution network. I saw our newest ...  Read story

Just A Tad Bittersweet

Growth often has a bittersweet element to it. Last month, we announced plans to switch the distribution of our plastic bottles for most of the West Coast ...  Read story

The Value of the Right Partner

My co-founder Barry Nalebuff celebrated his 50th birthday last week. Since we started the company almost exactly 10 years ago, the occasion gave me the ch...  Read story

Barack Obama Drinks Honest Tea (But We're Not Elitist!)

We had some fun this week when our Black Forest Berry was Read story

Honest Tea and Coke Begin to Work Together

Bethesda Green, the local sustainability initiative we helped launch in January, recently unveiled the first public recycling bin in Bethesda. At the time...  Read story

Ring The Gong!

Even though Honest Tea has enjoyed an annual compound growth rate of 66% for the past ten years, there's never been a day or a week where I've walked in a...  Read story

So, Where's the Bridge?

Last month I had the chance to visit one of the tea gardens that supplies us with our chun mee (translation: "spring's eyebrows"), a variety used in most ...  Read story

Was Partnering with Coke the only Option?

Here's a very legitimate question I got from a reader named Renee in response to my recent exchange with Read story

"I Hope Your Values and Integrity Inspire Coke"

Here's my last exchange with Julie, the Honest Tea customer who is disappointed that we made a deal with Coke. Julie wrote: H...  Read story

"I Will No Longer Purchase Honest Tea Products"

Here's another exchange with Julie, the Honest Tea customer who is disappointed that we made a deal with Coke. Julie wrote: I...  Read story

"We Want Coke To Be More Like Honest Tea"

Here's another exchange with Julie, the Honest Tea customer who is disappointed that we made a deal with Coke. Julie wrote: Optimists wit...  Read story

Organics Need to be Democratized

Here's another exchange with Julie, the Honest Tea customer who is disappointed that we made a deal with Coke. Julie wrote: By partnering...  Read story

The More We Sell, The More Good We Do

Here's another exchange with Julie, the disappointed Honest Tea customer who is critical of the deal we made with Coke. Julie wrote: ...  Read story

Will Honest Tea be Corrupted by Coke?

Earlier this month we announced that Coca-Cola was making a 40 percent investment in Honest Tea. Though most of the feedback from consumers has been posit...  Read story

Why We Sold a Stake to Coke

Today, Honest Tea and Coca-Cola announced that the world's largest beverage company is buying a 40 percent stake in our much smaller enterprise. While Cok...  Read story

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