Food insights from a soap company
In "Honor Thy Label," Gero Leson describes building Dr. Bronner’s sustainable, ethical supply chains around the world.
Coconut oil. Olive oil. Palm oil. Each can be found in desserts, but they’re also the key ingredients in Dr. Bronner’s iconic liquid and bar soaps.
When Emanuel Bronner started the company in 1948, he used his soapmaking heritage to promote a vision of social and environmental harmony that emphasized (via the uncontrolled use of capitalization and exclamation points, among other strategies) humanity’s universal connections. “We are All-One or None!” his voice shouted from the label as customers lathered up in the shower.
But while Emanuel built those ideals into the company’s workplace policies, in the early days, little attention was paid to where the raw agricultural materials came from. 50 years later, his grandson David Bronner took the reins and decided that would need to change if the company was going to truly live up to its ideals. And with the global commodities the company was buying, organic and fair-trade certifications didn’t go far enough. “If we wanted fair supply chains, we were going to have to build them ourselves—which is exactly what we decided to do,” David writes in the introduction to the new book Honor Thy Label, published in March.
Gero Leson, who David hired in 2005 to make that happen, picks up the story from there. He explains to readers how his team helped convert small farms to organic and built a processing plant for coconut oil in Sri Lanka, partnered with sustainable olive oil producers in the West Bank of Palestine, and established organic palm oil production in Ghana that flew in the face of the ingredient’s terrible reputation for deforestation and ecosystem destruction.
Several years ago, I wrote about Dr. Bronner’s steps into selling edible products and the company’s involvement in establishing the Regenerative Organic Certification as a reason to note their burgeoning impact on the food system. But even if they chose to stick to soap indefinitely, the ingredients are the same. Leson’s narrative is about agricultural materials, and it’s essentially a DIY guide for food companies that want to do better. He is open about costs, challenges, and what has and hasn’t worked.
However, many people outside of the business are unlikely to read 300 pages on supply chain building. Since I find it fascinating, I did it for you and then talked to Leson about some of the most interesting takeaways. His stories of painstakingly forging a new path, I think, can help all of us understand more about what it means to participate in a complicated, global food system.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Unwrapped
You were brought in to change the company’s sourcing. Where were the ingredients coming from, and why wasn’t better sourcing a priority before, given the All-One vision? There's a real simple answer. There are certain oils that are very suitable for the kind of soap we make: it's coconut and olive for the liquid soap, and then it's coconut, olive, and palm for the bar soap. That's simply [due to] the technical features of the fatty acids that are in these oils. Those you would simply buy from brokers. There was just nothing you could do as a motivated producer of soap then. In the past, there was no differentiation.
That changed once there was organic certification. So this is what David Bronner took on early on. The first shift was to organic...and fair-trade. And then the brothers realized, “This doesn't mean much, you still buy from brokers, and the differentiation isn't quite there.” You did not have coconut oil that you knew where it was coming from. And the mandate of David’s vision was to buy raw materials that had a beneficial impact ecologically and socially. So that's a tall order, and it just didn't exist at the time.
And this is really what got him started on the crazy idea...that you just start doing things yourself. So we developed different kinds of relationships—sometimes as the owner or oftentimes as a close partner—and by now I think we've got some 10 or 12 projects. Since, the regenerative angle has become stronger and stronger...and it's also about having an impact and engaging in the communities where we work, all of which are in the Global South. That's been really the fun part, but also the headache.
What have been some of the biggest challenges? You need partners. You need somebody to run day-to-day operations. You need to recruit farmers. You need to convert them to organic. Then there's the whole certification routine. Then you build processing. In Sri Lanka, this means we have a commercial coconut oil factory with some 250 employees. So those are sizable companies, and you need somebody to run things on the ground. So finding competent and trustworthy partners who understand your vision and buy into it and don't just look at the money—that has always been, on all projects, a key challenge. In some projects we've been really lucky, and in others, we started out on the wrong foot with the wrong partners and had to make changes over time.
And then each project has its own set of challenges. A real big one is always to get farmers to make changes in their operations and to shift to more than just not spraying, which is sort of the default. We wanted agriculture that also helps improve the fertility of the soil, the productivity of it. It sometimes requires additional investment. And each project is different crops, different settings. So it's just the whole range—processing technology, quality control issues, human resources. We bring our lofty ideas of fair trade to the Global South, but you need to implement this in the local context, and how do you do that? How are you fair to your farmers and your employers? And in a way that then ultimately serves the needs of both parties? We sure had lots of arguments with both farmers and staff about how things should be done, and that's just an ongoing process towards a very rewarding goal.
This all sounds very expensive. How do you focus on these values and do all this work while staying competitive with other companies who use cheaper commodities? There are a couple of things that make it feasible for us. For one, we don't do paid advertising. So we save ourselves the expense of doing print media or TV or radio. That saves a lot of money, and we're pretty profitable overall. This goes back to Emanuel Bronner. He believed in “word of mouth.” It’s a great way to get the message across. It’s a little slower, and Emanuel took a very long time to build the brand. This is where he just drove around the country, showed up at the co-ops and then offered his soap. You can't do that anymore, so we've developed beyond that.
And then ultimately, the Bronners look at the projects we build as sound investments. What you really pay ultimately is a higher price for the raw material. Our coconut oil is 20 to 25 percent more expensive than if you would just buy...normal organic coconut oil. In some cases, it's not even that much because we have eliminated people in the middle. We have economies of scale…and since we're big enough by now, the [higher costs] don't kill the economics of the products. It took a while to get there. Initially, yes, the company threw a few million down in order to get these projects established, and…it was worth it.
Palm oil is a particularly notorious ingredient, in that its production has led to massive deforestation and habitat destruction in Asia. Based on your system in Ghana, is it possible to produce it ethically and sustainably? And are other companies doing it the way you are now, or is this very unique? Overall, our attitude is that it's actually a great ingredient, and it's not the product itself, it's how you produce it that matters. You can produce any agricultural ingredient in an ethical, ecological way. It simply depends on how you do it. That's really become our mantra. But it's not as straightforward as it sounds; the devil is in the details. You need to look at the prices that are paid, what techniques do you use to make it truly regenerative...but you can grow almost any ingredient that way.
That's really one of the messages we have for other companies picking up on this. There are a few companies that are as radical as we are on palm oil, but the fact that there are very few even organic—or let alone organic and fair-trade—palm oil suppliers also shows that bigger users are not willing to be that radical. What they buy is RSPO-certified palm oil, which is palm oil from plantations. They're usually monocultures, like the big ones where most of the damage has been done, but they were established before 2004. Increasingly there's pressure on them to operate in a way that is “more sustainable”...so we see movement even in the mainstream to improve the requirements.
Then there are other companies that come to us...looking for mint oil or coconut oil or cassava flour, which is something we're getting into in Ghana, based on our stories and the commitment to the sustainability and the social responsibility. Is that a vast movement globally? I wish it was. But I'd say we're still pretty early there, and we’re collaborating with other brands on how to make the concept of regenerative more visible and more attractive because there are many small firms who would love to do what we did but don't have the means to. So we'd like to offer them the materials. One of the coolest ideas is to have regenerative or otherwise radical ingredients and to have other companies pick up on those and buy them. [Maybe] they can’t do what we did, which is do this for all of our main ingredients, but at least companies can pick one or two, can buy critical ones, problematic ones, and start using them. I see a movement there.
While Emanuel wasn’t tuned into this exact issue, do you see it as a continuation of his vision? His vision is the concept of constructive capitalism. He hated communism for a whole bunch of reasons. I didn't; I used to be a communist. But the idea that you use a company to clean up the planet in your regular course of operations is very much his, and that's exactly what we do now.
Wrapped up, to go
* Global ingredients are passed through so many hands with so little transparency that Dr. Bronner’s felt the best way to ensure its ingredients were being produced regeneratively and equitably would be to establish its own systems in Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Palestine—from networks of small farms, to processing and distribution.
* “You can produce any agricultural ingredient in an ethical, ecological way. It simply depends on how you do it.”
* Companies that make products from agricultural ingredients can do things the hard way and not only compete with others that cut corners, but thrive.
Still hungry?
“Junk agroecology.” For Civil Eats, I wrote about why advocates of an agricultural movement called “agroecology”—which prioritizes shifting corporate power to support small, sustainable farms—say big companies are co-opting their model. It’s an insider topic that gets into international governance, but it’s also a story you’ll recognize if you’ve heard about companies co-opting “organic.” Once a standard or method is popular and can be sold, companies will always come in and attach it to products and systems that don’t measure up, in the name of profit.
A side of policy
Actual Earth Day action. This is no “we planted one tree because it’s Earth Day so please buy our plastic product!” kind of promotion. President Biden is marking the occasion by convening a “Leaders Summit on Climate” with 40 world leaders invited to participate. And this morning, he announced the most aggressive emissions reduction target to date, pledging “that the United States would cut its emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030.” Beyond fossil fuel transitions, a new emissions goal will undoubtedly affect the future of the many proposals currently being pushed to reduce food and agriculture’s climate footprint. Just yesterday, the USDA announced the expansion of one of its conservation programs, for example.
Currently devouring
What does Big Meat have to say about that? I’ve been paying close attention to all the noise that meat companies and their associations have suddenly been making about how they support climate action, when most have been fighting environmental policies and regulations (often successfully) for decades. And guess what? Researchers at NYU were on the same wavelength. They recently published a study detailing how meat companies have been following Big Oil’s lobbyist playbook for a long time. Vox has the story, here.
Actually eating
I’m not sure why I took such a terrible photo of this farro salad, but I’m sharing it anyway because it looked and tasted great in real life. (Trust me.) I hosted a mini, outdoor bridal shower for my sister over the weekend and made it to go with quiches we served.
Spike (my partner, a chef) suggested toasting the farro before cooking it, and that really upped the flavor. Basically I toasted the raw grains for a few minutes in olive oil in the pan, then added onions and garlic and sauteed briefly. Then I added the water to boil it until cooked. After it was drained and cool, I added chopped, sauteed mushrooms, chopped parsley and basil, and goat cheese. I made a citrus vinaigrette and tossed it all together. It was a great party dish but could be a delicious, healthy, easy meal on its own.