The Pioneers

They built these businesses back when green was just another color.

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Sustainability manager, staff ecologist--new job titles to consider

When Gary Erickson started Clif Bar, the only ecosystem he worried about was the one inside his own body. He was a cyclist and outdoor enthusiast, and he wanted to make an energy bar that was both healthful and flavorful.

Fifteen years later, the company provides a comprehensive model of what it means to be green. In 2001, Erickson hired a staff ecologist and began working to reduce Clif Bar's environmental footprint. Among the changes: shifting to organic ingredients, eliminating shrink-wrap (that saved 90,000 pounds of plastic and $400,000 annually), and supporting a wind farm to offset fossil fuel usage. Last year, Clif Bar, which now has 170 employees and revenue of $150 million, hired a full-time "sustainability manager," who is conducting an in-depth audit of the business's environmental impact. Based on the manager's findings, the company has moved its warehouse from Reno to Los Angeles, closer to its bakeries, and switched its truck fleet to biodiesel from diesel, which creates 75 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Erickson did a lot of this before it was trendy--indeed, when he started his environmental initiatives, Erickson wasn't sure whether his customers would even want to know about them. But now that green is chic, Erickson hopes that other companies aren't just "greenwashing"--that is, treating the environment as just another marketing fad. "If you start a company, and your goal is to sell your company 10 years later for the highest return possible, there wouldn't be that much motivation for you to make sustainability the bottom line," he says. "The core problem is that we in business don't tend to accept that at a certain point, enough profit is enough."

And the food co-op begat a retail store, which begat a distribution system, and an organic food company was born

In 1968, when a small group of University of Michigan students decided they wanted to eat healthful, chemical-free foods, they couldn't just make a trip to the supermarket--organic food was practically unheard of. So the students hit the road, struck deals with local farmers, and started a food co-op. The co-op quickly became a retail store, and then, when the students started grinding and bottling their own nut butters and vegetable oils, a distribution system. In this haphazard way, with nary a business plan or an investor in sight, one of the oldest natural food companies in the country, Eden Foods, was born.

During the 1980s, the company, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, became the first major distributor of soy milk in the U.S. Today it makes a wide array of soy-based foods, as well as other natural goodies, has 130 employees, generates $75 million in annual revenue, and draws on more than 300 family farms containing more than 40,000 acres of organic farmland.

Michael Potter has been Eden's president and chairman since 1972. Now that healthful food is so readily available, you'd think Potter would be rubbing his hands with glee. But while he's glad that more people are conscious of their food choices, he's decidedly underwhelmed with the mainstreaming of organic foods. The trouble, he says, is that the term "organic" has become so diluted that it's lost all meaning. "Most organic food that's on the market today would not be considered organic by Eden Foods," he says. (Eden products are certified organic by the USDA, but the company does not put the agency's logo on its packaging, arguing that USDA standards are inadequate.) Potter is hopeful that his customers will be smart and separate out real organic food from what he sees as the pretenders. In the meantime, the company encourages everyone to be "an organic skeptic."

"We are making everyone in consumer products think about what they do"

Jeffrey Hollender started his career as an entrepreneur in the 1980s with an audio book company that scored with titles like How to Marry Money. But he soon had an epiphany, sold his company, moved to Vermont, and joined Seventh Generation, one of the first makers of green consumer products.

Two decades and several crests of ecoconsciousness later, Hollender sees interest in greener living at an all-time high. Indeed, after years of being sold exclusively in health food and specialty stores, Seventh Generation's paper towels, toilet paper, diapers, and cleansers can now be found in chains such as Safeway (NYSE:SWY) and Target (NYSE:TGT), spurring annual growth of 30 to 40 percent and driving revenue to more than $60 million.

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