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In late September 2009, Green & Black’s won the food category in the 2009/10 CoolBrands UK survey, a clear indication of how the organic chocolate brand has retained its groovy, ethical authenticity and appeal through the eyes of the consumer, despite being around since 1991 and having been taken over by chocolate giant Cadbury in 2005.

The Green & Black’s evolution is a textbook exemplar of how to get your sales and marketing strategy right on target, but according to the brand’s co-founder Jo Fairley, it wasn’t a conscious decision at the outset. Rather, there appears to have been a collision of coincidences and relationships that merged to propel the brand to its current position as the No 1 organic chocolate brand in the US, with sales of its chocolate products reaching US$39.7m in 2008.

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.

Unknowingly, perhaps, Fairley and Sams were tapping into an ethos and an ethical way of living that many people would really start to embrace in the following years.

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.

And, 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 and the knowledge 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.”

Package design

Fairley 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.”

They decided to play on the old-fashioned theme by creating the rich brown packaging, which remains synonymous with the brand.

“It’s always been evolutionary with the packaging. It started out as brown with gold and it’s still brown with gold.”

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 the chocolate for a range review.

At the time, Sainsbury’s was the UK’s No 1 supermarket, so this meant that Green & Black’s was taken on by Safeway without even needing to see a buyer.

Fairley says there were also a series of magical events that came together at the same time to help Green & Black’s make its mark. One was the launch of a book called Dine Out and Lose Weight. In this book, the author, Michel Montignac, one of the pioneers of the low GI diet, 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.

As Fairley explains: “Things happened that I would love to tell you to write into a marketing plan, but you couldn’t.

 “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.”

Another coincidence that would help Green & Black’s was the fact that Christian Aid was an early supporter of the Fairtrade Foundation, due to its links with the developing world.

“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.”

Fairley’s reasoning is that these events were as a result of business karma, which she strongly believes in.

“When we realised that actually we were helping to create a blueprint for a better way of doing business, then it became something we were much more conscious of and more proactive about. I think that when you are trying to do good as well as help the bottom line, then the universe does help.”

Organic growth

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.

Fairley says the decision to go down the ice-cream route was a strategic one because chocolate sales dipped during the summer.

“We thought it would allow us to keep the brand alive over the summer months, so Green & Black’s was still in people’s minds, making it a 365-day-a-year brand.”

Then, 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.

It has managed to remain standalone, with its marketing and product development completely independent of Cadbury.

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.”

The Fairtrade route

Cadbury Dairy Milk became Fairtrade in 2009, with a massive marketing campaign in tow. I ask Fairley if she thinks Green & Black’s influenced Cadbury in going down the Fairtrade route.

She ponders her response carefully. “I would love to think that we have. The answer is I don’t know, but what we certainly did do, by being Fairtrade for the past 15 years, is we helped to create a more questioning consumer – the kind of person who wants to know where things have come from and whether anybody was exploited. It’s just a case of ‘people power’, as more and more people embraced that idea.”

With the Fairtrade market worth over £700m sterling in 2008, she says Cadbury Dairy Milk will amplify that figure.

“That’s what puts pressure on a company like Cadbury to follow because a whole different genre of customer has grown up since we launched Fairtrade.”

New packaging

Fast forward to today and Green & Black’s has just unleashed a revamped packaging to the consumer, with Fairley indicating how it’s good to give your brand a facelift every now and then.

“If you look at the evolution of our packaging, it’s really had a lot of refreshment over the years and you can barely tell the difference. We didn’t want the customers to be able to tell the difference; we just wanted them to reach automatically for the chocolate.”

She believes the new rainbow packaging will excite people all over again.

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 recent Women’s Enterprise Day, which was organised by the County and City Enterprise Boards.

Finally, does she have any marketing advice for other owner managers out there? While Fairley doesn’t think she has ever received any herself, she does say that everything she has done has been shaped by her experience as a consumer.

“If I like something – I am my own reference point – then chances are other people are going to like it too. I’ve always just stayed in my own shoes and asked myself: ‘Is this the best I’ve ever tasted? Is that how I would want it to look on the shelf?’ I think you have to tap into your inner consumer. I’ve never had a marketing lesson in my life,” she concludes.

This article originally appeared in Owner Manager magazine.