Positive Power of Principled Profit
Volume 3, Number 6—February, 2006

Positive Power Spotlight: Dean's Beans

Despite Starbucks' much-heralded social responsibility commitment, the company gets only 1 percent of its beans from fair-trade suppliers. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, whose partnership with Newman's Own has gotten a lot of press, gets 10 percent. But Dean's Beans, of Orange, MA, manages to find organic fair-trade suppliers for 100 percent of its coffee and cocoa. In other word, every bean this company roasts helps to create a sustainable future for indigenous farmers in developing countries--both in direct income, and in village support services such as medical care and education.

Dean's Beans owner Dean Cycon, who gave up practicing and teaching environmental law to start the coffee business in 1990, co-founded the 17-member Cooperative Coffees, a group of coffee roasters around the US and Canada who have pledged to only buy and process organic fair trade coffee. The company also profit-shares with its growers and invests heavily in locally controlled sustainable development projects in the coffee lands.

Although most coffee companies still try to squeeze every penny out of the price, and don't concern themselves about ripping out native vegetation and saturate the earth with chemicals to increase yield, the movement for socially responsible coffee and cocoa is steadily growing. Cycon says it's actually easier to be ethical in coffee than in many other businesses, and wishes more companies would make the effort. (Cocoa, he admits, is more of a challenge, and even he hasn't been able to bring to market a fair-trade chocolate chip.)

Cycon has other initiatives at home, too. He worked with a local hospital to replace its brew with a custom blend that raises funds to provide medical care for local residents without healthcare coverage, and he's replicating this program with other hospitals around the country.

Find Dean's Beans on the web at http://www.deansbeans.com--or find socially conscious coffee producers in your own area at http://www.cooperativecoffees.com

Another Recommended Book: "Better Ethics Now: How to Avoid the Ethics Disaster You Never Saw Coming" by Christopher Bauer, Ph.D.

A straightforward basic book on ethics in large corporate environments. Dr. Bauer makes some important points, including the differences among behavior that is legal but not ethical (such as working for a concentration camp), ethical but not legal (Gandhi's campaigns against the British), or both legal and ethical.

Other interesting points:

* Lawyer review creates the danger of mealy-mouthed statements that hold up in court but may actually make your company seem less ethical. Make sure the language is clear even after the lawyers go through it.

* Ethics programs are useless without employee buy-in

* Effective modeling of leadership and excellent customer service make ethics problems less likely

* Where to look for ethics challenges before they turn into crises (one benchmark: understanding the difference between a valid incentive and an ethically problematic inducement)

In Bauer's view, most ethics problems have roots outside the workplace, in emotional and financial issues faced by an individual employee; he has some ideas about minimizing their impact. Also about ensuring alternative reporting channels, so if a subordinate has to report a boss, there's someone other than the boss who can receive the message.

If you'd like to buy this book, please follow this link to buy from a BookSense independent bookseller:
http://www.booksense.com/index.jsp?affiliateId=FrugalFun