Matt O’Hayer had a history with eggs. He sold them from a cart when he was in college. After hearing his friend, Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, talk about pasture-raised hen laying farms, O’Hayer went all-in, founding Vital Farms in 2007 with 20 humanely treated hens on 27 acres. Now the company processes and packs up to two million eggs a day from 200 farms, all of which must meet stringent standards for animal welfare and grazing practices. Vital Farms is also working towards developing a scalable method to avoid egg culling, the process of destroying male chicks that’s standard for most egg-laying operations. As at-home cooking surged, the company's emphasis on maintaining a clean pipeline free of harmful chemicals, including herbicides and pesticides, allowed it to adapt its production easily to sanitized pandemic conditions. Vital Farms, whose revenue is north of $140 million, has also donated over 1 million eggs to food pantries this year.

Before the pandemic, Sweetgreen's fastest growing business arm was its no-fee delivery service, which had become popular with office workers. When offices shut down, Sweetgreen pivoted and began delivering free, fresh, and healthy meals to hospital workers across the country. Within two weeks of launching the Impact Outpost initiative, Sweetgreen received more than 20,000 inquiries from people who wanted to help, so the company started a fund which has since helped to serve nearly 400,000 meals to more than 400 hospital partners nationwide. The company's partnerships with local vendors help sustain a network of regional farms, and just about every aspect of its operation is built with sustainability in mind. Sweetgreen's market research firm, for example, provides pro-bono research for local charities and gives back a percentage of profit from every project, its software development partner mentors aspiring entrepreneurs and volunteers at an inner-city high school, and the company's office furniture is purchased from an organization that hires individuals seeking a second chance. The company also provided up to 3 hours of paid-time-off for all hourly employees to vote on election day and to vote early, so team members do not have to choose between work and casting their vote. 

Africa grows 70 percent of the world's cocoa but produces less than 1 percent of the world's chocolate. Beyond Good is the only U.S. company producing ­chocolate—from bean to bar, plus packaging—at the source, in Africa. By doing so, it has replaced a fragmentary and exploitive supply chain with a streamlined system. This model offers bean-to-bar production in 10 days and allows farmers to earn six times the industry standard. Additionally, Beyond Good partnered with the Bristol Zoo to research agroforestry’s effects on endangered lemurs.

Esri's ArcGIS software has long been used to track natural and human-made disasters. This year, the software was used by the Johns Hopkins University and became the national standard for visualizing the Covid-19 infection rate. As the virus spread across the globe, Esri provided JHU access to leading cartographic experts and data scientists, and even helped JHU make infrastructure enhancements to the tracker to support a record-breaking 4.5 billion requests per day. Esri employees also were actively engaged in supporting voters during the 2020 election. An employee resource group at Esri called Black Girls M.A.P.P. spun off a volunteer advocacy initiative that saw 150 staffers donate 1,200 hours toward building data-driven narratives about policies affecting communities under-represented in the political process.

Proscia is helping drive advances related to Covid-19 by working with the Joint Pathology Center, the premiere pathology reference center for U.S. authorities, to digitize the world’s largest repository of human tissue data. Making this tissue data accessible helps pathologists, researchers, and clinicians improve their understanding of infectious diseases. Proscia also leverages artificial intelligence to improve its suite of diagnostic imaging tools, helping laboratories and researchers make more accurate diagnoses.