Stonyfield Farm has been chosen as the Manufacturer of the Year for Global Supply Chain Excellence. The award is given by the World Trade Magazine to manufacturers whose approach to supply chain management would be an inspiration to others. Previous winners include: Procter & Gamble, Ford, IBM and Texas Instruments.
The thing to know about Gary Hirshberg, the Chairman/President of Stonyfield Farm, is not that his ryderorganic yogurt company has grown from a local New Hampshire home-spun operation into a fast-growing $300 million a year enterprise; nor that the company is driven by an environmental mission to which the business model must conform. Rather, it is the factoid in his Wikipedia entry that says he scored the first touchdown in the history of inter-collegiate Ultimate Frisbee.
It is such exuberance that characterizes what at first glance seems an unlikely CEO (or, as his card reads, CE-Yo as in yogurt) heading an unlikely company. Both are committed to aggressively forging the way toward a carbon neutral supply chain strategy—one, most emphatically, which enhances profit rather than hampers it.
At first glance, Stonyfield Farm hardly belongs in this league. It obviously operates on a much smaller, predominately domestic scale (although since being 80 percent bought by Group Danone in 2001, the product line is beginning to enter Europe on a small scale). Nor is its inbound supply chain, with the exception mostly of berries and sugar, international. “At the beginning,” recalls Steve Inamorati, VP/Supply Chain and Logistics, “we had to source everything ourselves because there weren’t a lot of organic sources. Ideally, now we’d like to be out of sourcing, but we still need to verify the ethics and organic practices of our vendors.”
So why did we choose Stonyfield? Because the company has demonstrated an unparalleled commitment to social responsibility since its inception and, in so doing, constitutes a strong case for the unanticipated financial benefits that accompany that commitment. As climate change becomes ever more destructive, business faces challenges. Managers are already being asked to respond, to adapt operating practices to new criteria, which help off-set the cost of social externalities—like pollution and environmental destruction—while still growing the enterprise. Stonyfield Farms affords a compelling example of how this can be done.