July 23, 2009

The can-do Crusader
A conversation with Stonyfield Farm’s CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg
By Heidi Masek hmasek@hippopress.com

Gary Hirshberg still calls himself a “CE-Yo.”

The head of Stonyfield Farm yogurt producers, Hirshberg started out living at the farm where the organic yogurt was produced. Now after more than two decades and a purchase of the majority of Stonyfield shares by Groupe Danone, Hirshberg is still at the helm of Stonyfield but he also has time to pursue his interests in sustainable energy and food, the latter of which is the focus of his part in a new documentary, Food, Inc.

The documentary’s director, Robert Kenner, with authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), show how food production has become concentrated in the last 40 years and the problems with this quest for “efficiency.” Food, Inc. was released nationwide June 12 and opens in southern New Hampshire this weekend. When Food, Inc. comes to Red River Theatres (11 South Main St. in Concord) on Friday, July 24, Hirshberg will be there for post-film question-and-answer sessions. The movie will also begin a run at Wilton Town Hall Theatre on Friday.

I talked with Hirshberg at the Stonyfield Farm facility in Londonderry on Thursday, July 9, about Food, Inc. and the growth of Stonyfield Farm.

How did you get involved with Food, Inc.? Were you interested in what the filmmakers were doing or did they approach you?
No, they approached me. Robby Kenner kind of conceived of the whole thing, this whole project, with Eric Schlosser.

Eric Schlosser’s an old friend of mine, he wrote Fast Food Nation. And Michael Pollan’s an old friend. … the way they tell me the story is that when they started brainstorming, they realized that … this couldn’t all be about beating up on business. They needed somebody to speak about the other side, and apparently, at the same exact moment, Michael and Eric both suggested me. So Robby called. ...

To be honest, we get filmed a lot and I get asked a lot to do these things. But when he mentioned Eric and Michael it was pretty easy to say yes, because I’m a big fan of both of them.

I’m assuming you’ve seen the film, yes?
Would you like me to narrate every line?

So you’ve seen it once or twice?
Probably 50 times.

Does it address everything you hoped it would? Is there anything that was cut from your filming?
Well, let me step back with you for a minute and say that I think the main reason I was excited about the film is the food system is obviously broken. Stonyfield was founded on the belief that the food system was broken. We believe that it is possible to feed ourselves in a manner that actually improves our health, not just threatens it, and also improves the planet, but … in my several decades of work here, [it’s] become very clear that the power rests with the consumer to change the system. 

I sit here, and those guys are able to play pool out there [employees were shooting pool in a sunlight-filled atrium and cafeteria area], and we’re able to do what we do, because a lot of consumers vote for us every day. And I saw the film as a way to get those votes out — to stimulate those votes, to reach a larger audience than we were reaching. That’s a tall order because organic food, on the one hand we’re very proud. It’s about a 24-and-a-half-billion-dollar industry now, has grown around 20 percent annually for a long time, but on the other hand, it’s only 3 and a half percent of total U.S. food. So in other words, until we can get back to 40, 50, 60 or 100 percent, which is where I feel we need to be, we have a long, long way to go.

So when you ask is everything covered, I wish that the film had offered a little bit more of the positive reasons to eat organic food.

Instead of just the negative ones?
Yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s just the negative ones, because Joel Salatin — you’ve seen the film? — the farmer at Polyface, you know, he makes a very good case.

But the Stonyfield part, we don’t really — except for a couple of small references when I talk about the tons of pesticides that can be avoided — we don’t really talk about the benefits.

And I can tell you Robby — the cutting room floor was deep. ... I bet I spent 12 hours filming with him, maybe more, for what, like 15 or 20 minutes? And much of that was old film footage. As you might have known, that wasn’t exactly recent, those pictures of me. So he did a lot of cutting and reducing.

And honestly, I think there could be a Food, Inc., 2, a sequel, which would really focus on the whys and what people can do.

I sit on the boards of I think eight organic food companies, and every one of them has a compelling argument about the positives.

The problem is, as you know being in the media world, is it’s the bad news that tends to sell. So the movie is dominated by the problems. And I think that’s important. I don’t think that people have any idea. I can tell you as a father of a 16-year-old who thinks she knows everything like all 16-year-olds do — I should say who does know everything — her eyes really got opened, and so too have the kids’ who she hangs with.

So I think the film was very successful. It’s now hit over a million dollars [$2.2 million as of July 19, according to Yahoo! Movies]. A day doesn’t go by without some more media attention on it. Secretary Vilsack, Tom Vilsack, was here on Monday — Secretary of Agriculture. He and I had breakfast — he’s a friend of mine — before he went on to the public meetings. And he told me, he said, “You can’t believe the amount of buzz going on at the USDA about this film.”

So is it perfect? No, but none of us are.

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm — his philosophies about keeping his operation small seemed to be contrasted with yours...
You noticed...

You said that instead of being David against Goliath, you need to be Goliath, right? Can you contrast those two views, and sort of give your thoughts on them?
Sure. What I always tell people is if you can buy everything organic and local, then of course you should do that. But unfortunately we Northerners have discovered the banana, and coffee, and tea, and cocoa, and vanilla, and citrus, and a lot of other things that aren’t grown in New Hampshire ­— although climate change may take care of that. ... more to the point, that system is not available to most people.

And so I belong to our local co-op, and we were members of the first CSA in America [community supported agriculture, in which consumers buy shares directly from a farmer early in the season] and we have a huge organic garden and raspberry patch and so on, but I recognize that the vast number of people get their food in the supermarket, or at Wal-Mart. And if you’re really serious about organics, which is not just to say to make money from it, but if you’re really serious about eliminating toxins from the biosphere, from the air, water, soil and our bodies, then in the end you have to be serious about selling food everywhere food is sold, so whether that’s Wal-Mart or on airlines or in schools or in convenience stores, or in the poorest neighborhoods as well as the richest ones, you wanna find a way to get it sold.

So when Joel says, “I have no interest,” that “you give up on your values,” well, people can judge whether I’ve given up on my values.

I think I’m a more effective environmentalist today than at any point in my last 35 years.

That’s one man’s view.

And you talk about supplying Wal-Mart in the movie. How did that come about?
That’s a good question. I honestly don’t remember. It’s been a while. Well, it’s been seven years ... They are the largest seller of food in America, and by the way, they’re the largest seller of organic produce in America, too.

So we believe that organic food has to be everywhere, and they are part of everywhere.

And how do you bridge that culture between Wal-Mart and some of your organic farmers, like in the scene where the farmer says ...
...Where the farmer says she’s never shopped there?

I think that was sort of self-explanatory. I mean Amanda, I thought it was a great moment for her to be able to say that to those guys, and frankly to be responsible for putting that together, I mean I think that’s kinda cool.

[In, Food, Inc., Hirshberg brings Wal-Mart representatives to visit a farm. Both parties have deer-caught-in-headlights expressions. Amanda had essentially boycotted Wal-Mart.]

But I don’t worry about that. My number-one interest is more acres converted to organic production, more farmers converted to organics, and more bodies, especially young bodies, eliminating toxins from the environment and from their tissue...

The problem that we’ve got is ... in my parents’ lifetime, all food was organic, right up into the 1940s, all food was organic. Every famous person in history ate organic food, George Washington ate only organic food. Thomas Jefferson, Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ — ate only organic food.

And the food system, we, in the interest of, as Joel says, “faster, better, cheaper,” ... we’ve moved, in only 70 years, very, very far. But that says to me we can get back very, very quickly if all we’re lacking is the willpower. And I think the film helps to stimulate, because, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know about anybody who’s seen the film who doesn’t then think twice about how they eat afterward.

So we can all debate how we’re going to get there. And that one guy who drove five hours to get his four chickens [at Polyface Farm], that’s, God bless him, the carbon footprint of those chickens is pretty big, but that’s not a worthwhile debate to me, how we get there. The only question is whether we get there.

Growth of a company
Before Stonyfield Farm, Gary Hirshberg directed the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, a nonprofit that researched organic gardening and agriculture, aquaculture, “bioshelters” and other “ecologically derived human support systems” (nature.my.cape.com). Stonyfield Farm started as a seven-cow yogurt business and now does about $340 million in annual sales.

On the company, what was your philosophy about business when it started, how has it changed over the years? And can you talk about going from the whole concept of preaching to the choir at New Alchemy to selling organic products at Wal-Mart and teaching others in business how to be sustainable and profitable?
A lot has changed since we started … you can imagine what it was like to sell organic food in the early ’80s. No one knew what I was talking about and … the people who did know always thought that organic meant that you had to chew extra. Because the early organic foods were sold in sort of dark, dingy natural food stores and were not grown for your appetite.

... And nowadays of course organic is equivalent with gourmet. It’s better-tasting, fresher, and healthier and so on. So now we’re having a different kind of discussion than we had back then. ...I made the comment earlier, and it’s true, that we’re more environmentally sound than we were back then. Because I have more purchasing power. Because, frankly, I can hire the right people to do the right things. Because we can invest, for example, in a solar system on the roof here. Or this office is made of 100-percent nontoxic materials I couldn’t afford — I had to buy whatever was available back then. And now … I can buy from a larger number of farms and therefore there’s greater efficiency, so I can be a better customer for them and more reliable.

So my advice to other business people — do you know I run an institute every year at UNH once a year for entrepreneurs? It’s called the Stonyfield Entrepreneur Institute. So I do this on a routine basis. I try to share the lessons that I’ve learned over a couple of decades with others so they can avoid some of our mistakes. They can make their own mistakes, but they don’t have to make mine.

And my basic lessons are believe in yourself, believe in your mission, believe in your dreams, because when no one else did — that’s really the difference between us being here and not, is that we just didn’t listen to the doubters.

Also, be sure your quality is superior to what’s out there. Beause the problem is if you go out with the same quality as everybody else, you’re going to get killed because whoever’s already there is going to have more money than you.

And then the third is, don’t be afraid to talk about really important stuff. Like what’s in Food, Inc. A lot of businesses shy away from controversy or from issues that might offend or make people uncomfortable. But we’ve got a lot of problems out there. We’ve got a healthcare system that’s failed. We’ve got a relationship to the planet that’s failed. We have epidemic rates of cancer, obesity, diabetes.

So I’ve really learned in the final analysis that business is the most powerful force. But business exists … to satisfy our consumers. So … our consumers have the power. …

I just tell people, every time you shop, you vote. Just what I said in the film. And so whether we’re showing the film in Concord, N.H., or Los Angeles, or in the Secretary of the USDA’s office, or to Martha Stewart — I’ve become very boring and repetitive. I just say, look, just what the farmer said at the very end [of Food, Inc.], “We’ve gotta demand healthy food.”

If we do, it’ll come. Stonyfield is living testament to that. I think we’re the largest private company in New Hampshire now, according to Business NH [magazine].

Minority rule
Hirshberg was constantly raising money from scores of investors during the first years of Stonyfield Farm. French company Groupe Danone bought about 85 percent of the shares of Stonyfield Farm between 2001 and 2003. That allowed original investors, including family members, a way out with a good return, according to Meg Cadoux Hirshberg in Inc. magazine (“Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream,” September 2008). 

And how did Stonyfield change once Danone owned a majority? Have you merged the two cultures of the company? Have you had to?
Ah, it’s a dance. We have an unusual deal, where we’re completely independent of them. So they have majority ownership but we have majority control. I have three of the five board seats, so we function independently. We don’t — we agree to certain financial objectives, but beyond that, we do our own thing. But I spent an hour this morning with their worldwide head of sustainability, going over a number of projects that we’re doing. ...Food, Inc. is being viewed at the headquarters of Danone tonight actually, by people who run 20-plus billion dollars of business. And we’re talking about having it viewed at their executive meeting of all their worldwide executives as well.

They’ve adopted a carbon footprint methodology that we developed, here. We’ve adopted a strategy for feeding cows that reduces methane production that they developed, so it’s a lot of give and take. They’re a pretty cool company, I have to say.

Stonyfield Farm was founded in 1983 by Samuel Kaymen, who studied chemistry and electrical engineering in college and founded a company that made clean rooms for the aerospace industry in the 1960s. He changed focus and, among other things, founded NOFA (the Northeast Organic Farming Association) and the Rural Education Center in Wilton. Hirshberg joined Kaymen at Stonyfield a few months after it started in 1983.

And going back to the beginning of the company, why yogurt?
Well, believe it or not, that’s a really good question, because at the time, my partner [Samuel Kaymen] was making beer and pickles and kim chee. Do you know what that is? It’s a Korean dish. And yogurt. And we actually had to have this discussion: “Which one?”

He was running a nonprofit farming school [Rural Education Center] and was really struggling for financial support, and I was one of his trustees. And I was running a similar institute down in Cape Cod, although mine was a bit larger.

I grew up here, I grew up in Manchester, but I would come back up for these board meetings and we’d sit and we’d eat his yogurt and drink his beer, and eat his kim chee and talk about this. And frankly, the pickles were probably the best thing, but thankfully, we picked the right one.

... We wanted to launch a business that would fund the farming school, so that we would not be dependent on grants. Of course, in the end we became more effective educators as business people than we ever were running that farming school. But I wore two hats at the beginning; I was the director of the farming school and the president of the company. Which meant I paid all the bills.

How has the yogurt business changed over the years? Like there’s the sudden interest in probiotics, and I don’t know what a probiotic is.
Well it’s funny that you say that, because we started as a probiotic yogurt company in 1983. But you’re right, nobody understood what it was. And it wasn’t until Dannon came along and put in big letters, huge letters, “probiotic...”

Probiotic is a culture, a beneficial culture that provides aggressive defensive benefits. It boosts your immune system, and so, if you will, it is pro-biology. It helps your own system to function.

But the fact that there’s this big push for probiotics or Greek yogurt, these are consumer trends that result from … consumers saying, “I want something better.”

So, if I can put it sort of simply, the consumer has kinda moved exactly to where we are, so it’s pretty neat for us.

And Stonyfield’s seen strong growth, but getting the company going took years of hard work. And not everything works when you’re building a company. I read about a Russian deal that went bad, and products being pulled from UK shelves. You’ve had recalls. What did you learn and what did you change? And have you learned from other people?
Well, every one of those — you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes for sure, and so therefore I’ve had a lot of learning.

You learn a lot about yourself. We went through nine years before we made a nickel of profit, and I had to raise money constantly for nine years. ... Every single Wednesday night, I would face a payroll the next day and I wouldn’t know where I was going to get the cash for it. That happened for years. One year we lost $25,000 every week.

In Russia, we not only had a challenging business environment, but a guy was shot and killed in the restaurant that I had been in 20 minutes earlier, and [one of my partners was] taken hostage, by thugs with Uzis.

What have I learned? I’ve learned when you do good the world rewards you, and when you are generous and thoughtful about others but also humbled, that there’s always more to learn, then life and business can be a really rich experience.

I coach a girls’, under-17 girls’ soccer team, so that really keeps me humble. Because they know everything.

And you have an environmental science degree. How did you develop your business and management skills?
Right here. At Stonyfield business school. Stonyfield U. I was the son and grandson of shoe manufacturers here in New Hampshire.  … I grew up kinda watching them, but I hated everything about business then.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg’s September 2008 Inc. article “Hitched to Someone Else’s Dream” also talks about some serious scares about the company going under and doesn’t gloss over some of the difficult experiences they had in their early years of building a company. In the article, she describes their rustic living conditions and their constant concerns about money, such as her feelings after she learned a potential partnership (which would have brought in cash and helped to take care of debt) fell through: “When they arrived back in New Hampshire late that night, I excitedly greeted Gary at the door, eager to get confirmation of the newly minted deal. ‘Oh, no, that didn’t work out,’ he said, ‘but for just over half a million, we can build our own plant!’ I wept that night, pressing the damp pillowcase against my nose and mouth to filter out the stench from the yogurt waste still souring in our backyard.”

And this is more of a look-back question. But last year in Inc. magazine, your wife wrote about what it was like to smell fermenting curds in the leaching field next to your bedroom window in the summer in Wilton...
Yeah, you should see the article that came out this morning. In Inc. She’s got one about the BlackBerry. She calls it [Hirshberg’s BlackBerry phone] The Bond Girl. ... it’s brutal.

I’m sorry.
No she’s really a good writer.

She is.
She wrote one last month — she’s got three. Just Google, I mean get the issue this week, because it’s devastating, but yes, anyways? [“Living with a BlackBerry Addict,” July 2009, Inc.]

Well, what’s it like to look back on those struggle-filled years, because she describes them in a detailed way...
Yeah, she calls them the bad old days.

And now, from the standpoint of where you are now?
Well I don’t look back longingly. I mean we were raising our babies at the same time as we were raising the business.

The article she’s got coming out in September in Inc. is called “There’s never a right time.”

I look back and I think I’m not sure I could do any of that today. You really have to be young and immortal. Because we basically just didn’t sleep for a lot of years. But at the same time, I look back sort of philosophically, and I can say everything ... from the blouse you’re wearing, to the pen you’re holding to the recorder you’re using, to the yogurt you’re gonna eat after this interview — everything began somewhere...

Everything happens one step at a time. And we got into this mess, this psychological mess, one step at a time, and we can get out of it one step at a time. So I look back and at our history... with mostly a sense of optimism, that boy, if we can get through that then you can do anything.

On food
This might be a large question, but since the authors of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma in Food, Inc. are concerned with where food comes from, where do Stonyfield’s ingredients come from?
Oh sure. Well, 100 percent of our milk comes from the largest organic farm cooperative in America. It’s called Organic Valley. It’s only family farm milk. And that’s stipulated in our agreements.

All of our ingredients of course are certified organic .... We probably buy 150 ingredients here, so I’d have to take you through every single one, but they’re all certified by third parties, and in some cases multiple parties. We try to buy from as nearby as we can, but as I mentioned with something like sugar or cocoa, that’s not possible — yet.   

You’ve had trouble with organic milk shortages in the past. Some farmers say they pretty much are organic, but the certification process is too costly. How have you handled this?
I think the ones who say that, we just need to educate, because 1,400 farmers have switched and they are all making more money than the conventional farmers especially right now as you’re probably well aware.

Conventional farmers at this very moment right now are in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in in all of human history. They’re getting paid way below their costs, and they’re in many cases losing thousands of dollars a day. And we’re going to unfortunately see a great many of them go under this year.

And that presents a problem. The economy presents a problem for them, it presents a problem for organic farmers also, because although we pay our organic farmers almost three times what the conventional farmer gets for the same gallon of milk...because of the economy, organic foods has slowed down, so our demand is slowed. ...A lot of those farmers have surplus supply, and they’re having to sell that at conventional prices. So it’s a very, very bad situation, but the costs of conversion is not the problem. The issue is we need to keep on growing consumer demand.

When you say in the movie, about voting with your dollar — what about the folks who feel like they can’t vote with their dollar, or don’t feel like [they] have the options readily available? ’Cause in the movie it showed that low-income people are the people that are really hurting.
Yeah — on the other hand the fastest-growing trend in organic right now is private label. So there is organic private label, store brands, more available now than ever.

The issue is that with more demand, there will be more supply, and with more supply, the price gap will come down.

But the other side of that is you don’t have to change your entire diet tomorrow. You can start with buying one item. If everyone in America bought one organic apple tomorrow, 200, 300 million apples would change the nature of agriculture.... You can take little steps. ... I’m not saying everyone has to go all organic all the time. That’s unrealistic. ...It took us years to become 100-percent organic, too. But every purchase makes a difference.

Why Londonderry? Why do you stay in New Hampshire, and why did you pick this town?
I grew up here, it’s home, to me. We picked Londonderry because of the really good access to transportation. Because the town was very welcoming. At the time, it offered us a lot of benefits in terms of waste management, waste treatment, but since then we outgrew the capacity of that system, so we had to build our own. So we have a completely ecological waste treatment system in the back. We actually produce energy from our waste water.

And we were in Wilton at the time, which is you know, over by Peterborough. ... It was not as easy to find talented people, as many people as we needed, over there. So by moving close to Manchester that helped us to.

You offset energy used in your facility — explain what that means and what that does.
Sure. What it means is that we measure, and equilibrate our carbon footprint from our natural gas we burn and from the electricity we purchase. And we turn that into tons of CO2 that we’re generating through those purchases. Then we figure out, with outside agencies, activities that would take a similar amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. So the simplest version is planting trees, because of course trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. But there’s a lot more complicated examples than that.

And we invest in those things so that essentially, it offsets, it negates the impact we’re having in that first, with our purchases.

The biggest part of our footprint is not our plant, though. The biggest part of our footprint is the milk, is the cows. And that’s why the methane project I mentioned to you before is actually very important. ’Cause a big bulk of our carbon footprint is not the end of the cows as you may think. It’s the burping, because when cows are consuming grain, they burp out methane. And so we’ve actually found that we can reduce that by up to 18 percent...If that was taken across the country, it would be the equivalent of taking a half a million cars off the road permanently.

Can you tell me about some of your other environmental efforts like reduction of packaging and waste? [Stonyfield Farm’s sustainable practices are explained in detail in “Earth Actions” at www.stonyfield.com.]
... My background is actually not just environmental studies, it was actually climatology. My actual thesis work was on the causes of Alpine tree line on Mt. Washington. So I learned early on about carbon footprint modeling. Long before Al Gore was talking about this stuff.

And so we have a carbon footprint tool here that we use, and it enables us to know our biggest impact from the largest down, let’s say the top 10.

So as I’ve already mentioned the cows are the biggest. Packaging is our second. Our facility is our third. Our transportation is our fourth.

So we have a bunch of teams, each dedicated to one of those 10 major footprints, and all of the teams work on a program of setting goals and then getting bonused as they reduce their footprints. ... A lot of people are obsessed with recycling as an important environmental effort. And you can see the recycling buckets all over, and we believe in recycling, too. But if you want to really be honest about it, recycling means that you failed to reduce or reuse in the first place.

So it turns out that by lightweighting, by making our packaging lighter in weight, by shipping and transporting less around, we have a far, far lower carbon footprint than by just collecting and turning the cups into spoons, and birdfeeders and lasers and toothbrushes, as we do.

You, clearly have a very unique way of running a company. Do you think you’ll ever be able to actually retire?
You should ask my wife that question.

She’s not letting you?
No, quite the opposite. She would love me to sit still for an hour, let alone retire. You gotta read this BlackBerry article, you’ll get the whole picture. I’m thoroughly exposed.

I’m pretty high-energy. I got a lot of ideas, and a lot of dreams, and it’s funny. You’re going to laugh at this ... I just came back from vacation, and usually I come back with a list, and it’s when people hate me. ’Cause I come back and say, I’ve got an idea. They’re already overworked, and so people go hiding under their tables when they see me coming.

But I do have an idea, which is that this old parking lot — I don’t know if you know but [the new one] is made of porous pavment. It’s the first parking lot in New Hampshire that the water actually percolates down through. But this one is useless, this old parking lot. We built the new one ’cause we were planning on expanding the building. But now we’re not expanding the building for a while, so I actually am planning to tear it up and turn it into either a garden or an orchard. I’m working with a couple of farmers to figure that out. But it should be very interesting because soil under pavement is very compacted — trucks and cars have been driving on that for 30 years. And so if you can reclaim land under pavement, to turn it into food production to, say, feed the employees here, for example, that is, I think, a real statement.

So do I expect to retire? No. Not from doing this kind of work. Might I stop being CE-Yo someday? I’m the chairman, and president and CE-Yo. So might I give up one or two of those titles? Yeah... It’s going to happen, I mean we’re all compost eventually, you know?

If you could change the country’s food policy, what would be on your wish list?
I’d eliminate corn subsidy. I would eliminate the subsidies of corn, but also of bad practices. Right now we subsidize volume, and the problem is when you do that, you’re endorsing a lot of practices that really aren’t ecological. I’m not arguing for more subsidies for organic ... I just think there should be less subsidies of doing it the wrong way. Unfortunately, that’s politically going to be very challenging, but it’s exactly what’s going to have to happen.

Now here’s the little secret. It’s not all going to happen through policy. It’s going to happen through consumers demanding these kinds of foods, and then the market conditions will actually favor, you know, farmers are going to move in these directions with or without the subsidies...

What’s most on your mind right now when it comes to food?
I would say the national obesity, diabetes and cancer epidemics. I’ve lost three friends in the last nine months to pancreatic cancer. And I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have someone in their lives suffer from cancer.

Hirshberg in New Hampshire
I followed up with Gary Hirshberg via phone July 17 to talk about his contributions to causes (and possibly politics?) here in New Hampshire.

You almost ran against Sununu — why? Do you see politics in your future?
Well, I’m not sure I would say almost ran. There was the little matter of a primary that would have happened first. But I was and am very upset about the lack of progress, particularly on climate change, and his own sort of private filibustering against it. ... I have to say I don’t think I would be all that happy in Washington. So it would take a lot for me to want to go there, but I can’t rule it out.

The reality is just this week alone, I’ve talked to probably  seven different federal officials. ... I’m in a fortunate position of having access and influence. And so I would say for the near term, I don’t really have any thoughts of running. But I am politically very involved. And I am disturbed that our so-called leaders don’t often lead.

From what I could gather, you’ve donated $160,000 to Red River Theatres in Concord, created an interest-free loan fund for New Hampshire farmers to go organic, and helped get an organic research farm started at UNH, ... Is there any guiding principle to the projects you get involved in in the state? And did I miss many?
Yeah, there’s a few others. But I think my main interest area is in preserving not only the character of New Hampshire, and to me that means the agricultural integrity, but also in supporting projects that can help show people the potential for all of us, the potential for greater, more sustainable practices. And so the common denominator, whether it’s energy or agriculture, is ways that we can use local non-polluting and more renewable resources. …

Have you given any input to the NH Climate Change Policy Task Force or the P.U.C.’s Energy Efficiency and Sustainability board, or any other renewable energy or energy-efficiency efforts in the state?
For the Climate Task Force, Stonyfield and I not only had extensive input, but we actually hosted one of their meetings, and gave them a full briefing on our energy work ... I’m a member of the [New Hampshire Energy and Climate Collaborative] that came out of the task force.

Hirshberg and Mac McCabe created O’Naturals, a natural fast food restaurant chain.

When will New Hampshire get an O’Naturals?
The first 10 years of O’Naturals was spent really polishing the concept. What we’re now doing is we’re selling franchises. ... We just opened one at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. By the way, hospitals make great places. And so we are entertaining proposals and interests from anybody who thinks that they’d like to open one...

We have the one full-time, permanent restaurant in Falmouth, Maine. And otherwise, right now we’re in discussions with quite a few locations around the country.

But any in New Hampshire, or not so much?
This is a tough economy to open a new restaurant. And I wouldn’t expect to see much interest in the near term, but in the long term I’m sure somebody is going to be smart enough to open one, just as I’m sure Whole Foods will sooner or later come to the state.

Which businesses or business people in New Hampshire or New England do you admire?
In New Hampshire, I’m a big fan of Dean Kamen. I really enjoy Dean’s kind of bipartisan approach. And his out-of-the-box, his innovative mindset. He and I have collaborated on a bunch of things ...

The guy who started Cape Winds [Jim Gordan] ... he’s fantastic...And boy he’s really challenged the status quo including the Kennedys, and all kinds of powerful interests.... I just really admire his determination and his vision and his desire to do some good, and his willingness to put it all on the line.

You spoke at the UNH commencement this year, I believe. And it’s a tough economy, and new grads frequently are looking for advice. So what do you think they need to do to see both personal success, and help build a stronger economy and healthier environment?
The short version, is ... everything starts somewhere, every car they drive, every drink that they drink, every piece of clothing they wear, was created by somebody asking my two favorite words, which are “Why not?”

This is the time ... that the sort of conventional economy is broken, and yet we see signs everywhere of incredible opportunity if we’re willing to think a little out of box, as Dean and Jim have. To think about ways of providing food or energy or treating our waste that are more sustainable.

And there’s nothing easy about this, but it starts with dreaming bold and dreaming big ... and I went on to tell them about some of the incredible odds that we’ve had to overcome over the years to build Stonyfield. And I’m actually optimistic in these times because I see the companies that are surviving ... and beginning to prosper because they are reinventing themselves. They’re getting rid of inefficiency and they’re thinking about new ways of doing things.

And I’ll just give you one example. Stonyfield was investing in conservation, energy reduction, obviously 20 years ago. Those savings — we did a calculation this morning of ... — this is ballpark — just the current financial savings that we are receiving for current environmental investments that we’re making, and they total about four and a half million a year.

To summarize ... the idea that the environment and economy is in conflict is a dinosaur. It’s dead. It’s over. And young people who recognize that this is how money’s going to be made in future, this is how we’re going to do commerce, by reducing our carbon footprint and using resources of the Earth more wisely — they’re the ones who are going to win.

See Food Inc.
Food, Inc., the documentary featuring Gary Hirshberg, is currently playing in the greater Boston area but it opens this week in southern New Hampshire.

The movie opens at Red River Theatres in Concord on Friday, July 24, with screenings that will feature discussions with Hirshberg at 6:45 and 8 p.m. that have been sold out, according to the theater (www.redrivertheatres.org, 224-4600). Tickets are available for screenings on Saturday, July 25, and beyond. A screening on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 6:30 p.m. features a panel discussion with local food producers.

Food, Inc. also opens at Wilton Town Hall Theatre, Main Street in Wilton (www.wiltontownhalltheatre.com,  654-FILM) on Friday, July 24, and will screen at 7:30 p.m. nightly through Thurs., July 30, as well as at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 26.

 According to Magnolia Pictures (www.magpictures.com) on July 21, Food, Inc. was also scheduled to open or screen at Colonial Theatre in Keene (352-2033) Aug. 7, at the Music Hall in Portsmouth (433-3100) Sept. 24, and Hopkins Film Center at Dartmouth College in Dartmouth (646-2422) Oct. 2.

Gary Hirshberg

The early years
• Born: Manchester, 1954
• Background: “Father and grandfather owned shoe factories in Pittsfield, Newmarket, and Laconia” according to Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World, by Gary Hirshberg (Hyperion, 2008, page 72).
• High school: The Derryfield School, Manchester
• College: Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass., Class of 1976
• Married to: Freelance writer Meg Cadoux Hirshberg. They have three children and live in Concord.

Gary Hirshberg, pre-Stonyfield
(Mostly the late 1970s)
• Executive director of New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, “a research and education center dedicated to organic farming, aquaculture, and renewable energy” in the late 1970s until 1983.
• Water-pumping windmill specialist
• Environmental education specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• Manager of environmental tours to the People’s Republic of China
• Founding president: Cape Cod Environmental Coalition
• Founding chairman: Cape and Islands Self-Reliance Corporation
• “Authored books on wind-power and organic gardening”
Most info taken from his company bio.

Nonprofit and for-profit boards
• Applegate Farms
• The Dannon Company
• HonestTea
• Peak Organic Brewing Company
• The Full Yield
• Climate Counts
• Express Soccer Club
• Stonyfield Europe, Ltd., Glenisk, Ltd.
• Danone Communities Fund
• Hirshberg also co-founded natural fast food restaurants O’Naturals

The sporty side
• Head coach of a girls’ under 17 travel soccer team
• Assistant coach of the Concord High School girls’ varsity tennis team

Visit the yogurt
Behind the Manchester Airport, among other industrial ventures on wooded roads, is the Stonyfield Farm manufacturing facility and its Visitors Center.

Diane Coghlan, a former school teacher who works there, said the Center’s purpose is to educate the public about Stonyfield Farm, its organic principles and ideas like “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

“We’re so happy to answer any questions,” she said.

Staff will show a video about how the yogurt is made, visitors can sample products, and kids can play games. At the Center you can buy cases of yogurt or cups, and prices for many products are a little less than you would find at the grocery store, such as for their organic milk. Harder-to-find items, like Stonyfield Farm ice cream, are available, plus things like the Stonyfield Farm Yogurt Cookbook, by Meg Cadoux Hirshberg. They also stock products like HonestTea — Gary Hirshberg sits on that company’s board of directors. Call ahead (437-4040 ext. 3270) to bring a small group of any age.

About three years ago, Coghlan said, Stonyfield Farm stopped offering tours because the facility went under construction for expansion. Currently, the building doesn’t include an observation hallway, she said. The original hallway had windows at various points of the yogurt-making process. Coghlan said since the tours are still on hold, they’ve had trouble getting the word out that the Visitors’ Center is still very much open. (And the aforementioned video shows what you would have seen on the tour, she said.)

The Stonyfield Farm Visitors’ Center is generally open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays at 10 Burton Drive in Londonderry. Directions are at www.stonyfield.com/contact/directions.cfm.

Shopping Stonyfield
Stonyfield Farm products are organic and kosher, and most are gluten-free. Some of the products include:

• Organic yogurts
• YoBaby, yogurts and drinkable yogurts for babies six months and older
• YoKids yogurts and squeezers
• Yogurt Smoothies
• O’Soy, soy yogurts
• Frozen yogurt and ice cream
• Organic milk
• Oikos Greek yogurt (added in 2007)

New products include YoBaby Meals, yogurt, fruit and vegetable purees. They recently added a strawberry flavor Greek yogurt to their Oikos brand. (I tried the vanilla Greek yogurt. It was tasty.)

As with any business, not all of Stonyfield’s products have worked out. Here are a few that have gone to that big dairy case in the sky:

• “Garden salad” flavored yogurt (1985) which Hirshberg used to say would put his kids through college, according to Carmelle Druchniak.
• Prune Whip flavor (1992)
• Frookwich, a vanilla frozen yogurt between two whole wheat, fruit juice sweetened cookies.
• YoSelf yogurt for women  
• Moo-la-la!
• YoMommy
• Shift, an organic energy drink

Stonyfield farm through the years
• The Rural Education Center in Wilton opened in 1979 by Samuel and Louise Kaymen, a nonprofit to teach rural farming and homesteading, focusing on organics. Hirshberg became a board member a few years later.
• Stonyfield Farm yogurt opened in 1983, creating yogurt from the Wilton farm’s seven cows as a venture to fund the Rural Education Center. Hirshberg joined the company that year, and immediately had to start borrowing money from friends and family to get some bills paid, (Stirring It Up, page 22), which apparently he had to continue to do for years.
• Boston radio DJ Andy Moes said on air that he would rather eat camel manure than yogurt, as recommended to him by his healthier co-host in 1985. Hirshberg and fiancée Meg drove to WROR with camel manure provided by Benson’s Animal Farm in Hudson. Moes ate the yogurt and declared it better than camel manure (Stirring It Up, p. 89-90). Stonyfield continued to look for quirky ways to market products such as giving Stonyfield smoothies away at Boston subway stations “to thank them for choosing public transportation” in 2004.
• Stonyfield started having its yogurt made elsewhere in 1986, but when that company went bankrupt in 1987, Stonyfield had to quickly reopen production in Wilton – and lost $400,000 in a weekend doing so. When an investment deal with a Vermont company went wrong, Kaymen and Hirshberg decided to open a plant, which opened in Londonderry in 1988. By 1989, they were at about $2.5 million in sales, up from $56,000 in 1983.
• Stonyfield started exporting to Europe in 1993, and tried a joint venture with a Russian plant. That didn’t go well, but otherwise, annual sales were at about $12.5 million that year, and  the company started a sort of environmental tithing program, “Profits for the Planet.”
• Stonyfield started selling certified organic yogurt in 1995.
• In 1997, Stonyfield put out a “Guide to Offsetting Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” for free. Basically, it sounds like it was enough of a challenge for Stonyfield to figure out its  carbon footprint and how to offset it, that they put what they learned out there for other businesses to use to save others the trouble, according to Stirring It Up (page 61). (Also called the “Climate Cookbook” it’s a 22-page PDF available from their Web site.)
• In 2000, Stonyfield became the fifth leading brand nationally, with sales at about $66.4 million annually. Kaymen retired, but stayed on the board of directors.
• French company Groupe Danone bought 40 percent of Stonyfield in 2001. Hirshberg had been trying to find a way to let Stonyfield’s 297 shareholders (including family) get out of the fray with a good return, according to Meg’s September 2008 Inc. piece. Danone owned about 85 percent of Stonyfield Farm by 2003.
• Stonyfield bought California all-natural yogurt company Brown Cow Farm, in 2003.
• In 2003, Stonyfield started a program in which it gave away Stonyfield Farm vending machines to about 50 schools. However, there were 2,000 schools on the waiting list, and Stonyfield couldn’t handle the demand. They came up with a program for people to convert their own vending machines instead, according to Carmelle Druchniak, senior communications manager at Stonyfield. The program raised the debate on healthy foods in schools, she said.
• Hirshberg was named managing director of Stonyfield Europe in 2005, according to his company bio. The joint venture between Danone and Stonyfield has brands in Canada (Ferme Stonyfield, www.stonyfield.ca), Ireland (Glenisk, www.glenisk.com) and France (Les Deux Vaches, “The Two Cows,” www.les2vaches.com).
• Stonyfield Farm products went totally organic in 2007.
• Stonyfield is now the world’s leading organic yogurt producer with $340 million in annual sales and 400 employees, according to the company. 
— Much information above comes from www.stonyfield.com.