Bizstartup.ie - ENTREPRENEURS

Jo Fairley

Green & Black’s

The evolution of Green & Black’s is a textbook exemplar of how to get your sales and marketing strategy right on target, but according to the organic chocolate brand’s co-founder Jo Fairley, it wasn’t a conscious decision at the outset.

In 1991 Fairley and her husband, Craig Sams – the founder of the organic food company, Whole Earth – set out to pioneer the world’s first organic dark chocolate, made with 70pc organic cocoa solids.

While being an ethical and environmentally friendly brand is intrinsic to Green & Black’s image, Fairley says it was never their conscious intention to position it as such.

“It was just simply the way we did business. It was so intrinsic and it never occurred to us that what we were doing was anything different to what anyone else was doing,” she explains.

Fairtrade

With regard to Green & Black’s becoming the first brand in the UK to earn the Fairtrade Mark for its Maya Gold Chocolate in 1994, again Fairley says that wasn’t a deliberate mission.

She says Green & Black’s was already paying a higher price because it was paying for the organic premium.

“We were forging long-term contracts with our producers. It was not only for their security but for our own: as dark chocolate wasn’t always available on the global market we needed the security that we could get our hands on the cocoa when we needed it.”

Initially, the founders sourced their chocolate from a supplier in west Africa, while in 1994 they took on a secondary supplier – a farmer they had met in Belize while on holiday in 1990.

One day in 1994, Fairley was watching Oracle on TV – a type of predecessor to the internet – when she came across the Fairtrade Foundation and saw it was looking for a product to put its debut Fairtrade Mark on.

“I read it and I thought: ‘Gosh, we are already doing that’. We got in touch with them [the Fairtrade Foundation] and discovered we did almost automatically, with just a little price increase, qualify for the Fairtrade Mark.”

Design and branding

Fairley’s and Sams’ vision for how they wanted the brand to look also appears to have been naturally effortless.

“It took five minutes to design the packaging. We came up with the name in bed one Saturday night,” she says. “We were green because we were organic; we were black because we were the darkest chocolate on the market. Then we put an ampersand in the middle and it suddenly sounded like we had been there since 1876.”

Initially, Green & Black’s chocolate was sold in the wholefood sector, where Sams was known as being a natural innovator.

“We knew that was going to be easy and then we got a call from Sainsbury's after a couple of months,” explains Fairley. The Sainsbury’s coup came about because one of its directors had eaten the chocolate at a dinner party and asked the founders to submit it for a range review.

Around the same time a book called Dine Out and Lose Weight was lauched in which the author, Michel Montignac, prescribed 70pc dark chocolate as a way of losing weight.

“We did very well on the back of that book. We also got the support of the Women’s Environmental Network. It had a book out called Chocolate Unwrapped, which was about the plight of women in the cocoa industry, so they promoted us.”

Business karma

PR wise, Green & Black’s also profited from being in the right place, doing the right thing at the opportune time.

“We benefited from 20,000 young messengers running from town to town in support of Fairtrade carrying flaming torches. They would get to a destination, find a supermarket manager and lobby him to stock our chocolate. You can’t plan for something like that,” says Fairley.

Another coincidence that would help Green & Black’s was the fact that Christian Aid was an early supporter of the Fairtrade Foundation.

“Somehow, the vicars up and down the country got wind that Tesco had been reluctant to stock debut Fairtrade brands, so they started ringing the Tesco buyer to tell him that he had a moral duty to stock it. We hadn’t done anything. That was just something that was completely left field.”

Over the years, the brand has diversified its product offering to firstly create Green & Black’s ice cream, then biscuits, gift items and chocolate for cooking purposes.

Sale to Cadbury Schweppes

In 2005, Fairley and Sams sold Green & Black’s to confectionery giant Cadbury Schweppes for a reported £20m sterling. Sams has stayed on as president of Green & Blacks, while Fairley is the brand’s ambassador.

At the time of the sale, many felt that Green & Black’s would be swallowed up by the Cadbury giant, but this hasn’t been the case.

Says Fairley: “I think in terms of just understanding the Green & Black’s mindset and customer, then it has been very important to keep it separate. It is a different customer to the Cadbury customer.”

Green & Black’s remains close to Fairley’s heart and she still looks out for the brand, which she calls “her baby”. She says she never made a penny out of the company until she and Sams took in their first private equity after nine years.

“When you are trying to grow a business as 100pc eager as we were, a lot of people can’t give up the day job.”

That day job involved writing for magazines and newspapers, a role Fairley continues today. She has also had a career as a beauty editor and has brought out books such as The Green Beauty Bible. Coupled with this she has a website called Beautybible.com. Fairley was also keynote speaker at the Women’s Enterprise Day in 2009, which was organised by the county and city enterprise boards.