Gary Hirshberg doesn't like George Bush very much.
In his office in New Hampshire, visible to staff and visitors alike, he has a display board counting down the hours until the end of the current administration in 2008. "I can tell you it is 621 days," he says without pausing for thought, as he sits in a London hotel room. "And if I call Mary my assistant she would be able to tell you how many seconds." That was a little over a week ago. Today the count has fallen to 612.
"The fun part about that sign," Hirshberg says, "is that even on my worst day with my worst meeting, you know, if it was an hour, it was a good hour because we're closer to the end of this nightmare."
Hirshberg, 52, is a member of the first wave of social and environmental activists, the hippies, who went on to become successful businessmen and women. He once tried to raise a fund with the help of Gordon and Anita Roddick among others, to buy the counter-culture ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's and help it evade the clutches of Unilever. They failed.
In the United States, Hirshberg's company Stonyfield Farm makes the best-selling brand of organic yoghurt. It carries messages about global warming and even gun control on its lids, sometimes raising the hackles of the supermarkets. Neither is it afraid to directly challenge Washington - in 2001 the lids campaigned against drilling for oil in the Arctic national wildlife refuge. The business began in the early 1980s and sales this year are expected to reach $325m (£165m).
Now the brand is launching in Britain. It has distribution deals with Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose, as well as another American business soon to arrive on these shores with similar values to Stonyfield, Whole Foods Market. The guy who runs Whole Foods is another of Hirshberg's old pals.
In the past month the Democratic presidential hopefuls John Edwards and Barack Obama have made trips to Stonyfield. As one of the biggest businesses in New Hampshire, a critical state in the run off for the presidential race, Hirshberg finds himself feted by candidates. He says he is good friends with Al Gore and that his wife played a key role in the abbreviated campaign to get Howard Dean elected. This time, Hirshberg is splitting his support between Edwards and Obama.
What about Hillary Clinton? "I think Hillary is one of the smartest most admirable people I know. She would make an incredible president. But I am very very worried about her electability - you know as we say in branding she has high negatives. Half the country loves her and half the country doesn't. I think that's a problem. We're also not big on dynasties in the States. Bush, Clinton followed by Bush, Clinton again. It's not going to happen. And I don't think we can afford to have the Republicans win again - when I say we, I'm talking about we as a species."
The augurs before meeting Hirshberg had not been good. According to the marketing material, Hirshberg is not the company's ceo (chief executive officer) but its ce-Yo and the company produces a "moosletter" to promote climate change issues. Bad punning and businesses promoting social change always appear to travel in lockstep. Hirshberg arrives with a Cheshire cat grin and a joking aside about multiple organisms. But he is more of a smart, laid back, east coast liberal than the clues had suggested.
Hirshberg's passion for the environment began when he was growing up in rural New Hampshire. The farms were failing one by one and the state was being swallowed by suburban sprawl. One of his favourite places as a child had been the tallest mountain in the state. From the top you could see the Atlantic Ocean some 60 miles away. By the time he was in his late teens, the coastline had been obscured from view by pollution from the industrial north-east.
He studied ecology and ran a non-profit ecological institute before being introduced to Samuel Kaymen, who was running a school tutoring farmers in organic production. Hirshberg joined them and with a $25,000 loan from a group of Catholic nuns called the Sisters of Mercy they began producing yoghurt. During his time at the institute he had become convinced of the power of business to make a difference.
"I travelled in China and lectured on organics and renewable energy in the late 70s and early 80s. And I can tell you that when I would finish my impassioned speech before 100 attentive scholars or scientists about why they have an opportunity to avoid the hard path and go down the soft path, I can tell you, that most of them were focused on my wrist watch and very few had heard what I had said.
Mistakes
"You know capitalism is extremely charismatic and it's not going to go away. I really believe you know that if we can't prove we can make money saving the planet then we're never going to save it." After making what Hirshberg describes as "a lot of mistakes along the way" Stonyfield found itself with close to 300 shareholders in the late 1990s after a succession of fundraisings and needed to find them an exit.
In 2001 the French food group Danone took a 40% stake, increasing it to 80% in 2005, although Hirshberg retains three of the five seats in the boardroom. He also keeps full control over the marketing of the brand and its campaigns on the environment and other issues - 10% of profits still go to environmental projects. He says he agonised before doing the deal not least after seeing so many organic or ethical companies lose their way after being bought by faceless corporations - Ben & Jerry's was a cautionary tale. Still he says, the "feeding frenzy" among big food companies to buy smaller organic firms is a good sign that they see where the market is heading. With Danone he says it is so far so good.
Hirshberg hopes to use Danone as a springboard to take his brand and his messages global. Scale he says "is absolutely critical" - nothing can change if organic producers "remain on the fringe". Stonyfield bought a stake in Irish organic dairy Glenisk last year, launched in France in the autumn and now Britain, helped by the Danone sales force and using organic dairies in Ireland.
"I looked at the two extremes - the two toughest markets. In France people think all food is organic and there is virtually no organic industry, so you're creating a category. And then the UK where it is very mature - you know, a lot of competitors, a lot of sophistication - I mean the questions we get asked by your multiples we don't get asked by any multiples anywhere. You also have a very sophisticated audience, you are taking it very seriously, you are leading the US and for me this is a dream come true what's going on in the UK right now. Bush finally uttered the word climate last January and then has done nothing since."
But scale brings its own challenges for an organics company. Stonyfield has drawn flak from some environmentalists for shipping in organic ingredients from China or Ecuador. At one point, during an organic milk shortage, the company even considered importing powdered organic milk from New Zealand. It is working to increase the number of organic dairies by paying farmers to help them switch.
"We can't make the perfect the enemy of the good," he says. "That's really the issue. We don't have a lot of time to screw around - in the end it's more important for me to eliminate toxins from the biosphere than to be eco-fascists about how many miles I'm shipping. If I can get everything locally, great, but I just think unfortunately, progressives tend to organise themselves into circular firing squads - you know we just tend to do ourselves in, and you know we've got to keep our eye on the big picture and the big picture is that every piece of food or clothing - we shouldn't rest until they're all organic."
Does he never get disillusioned? "My wife calls me a pathological optimist and I know she's partly right but you have to understand where I am coming from. When I was studying glacial melt in 1973 I would talk to my school mates and everyone thought I was on some kind of drug - I mean what a weird thing to be interested in. It was so far from the public vernacular - I might as well have been talking about crystals on Mars or something. And now to see this stuff on the front pages of papers, it's all good, it's all positive. The problem is that it needs to happen faster. I have this terrible sense of urgency."
Squeezed out
Four of us pile into an SUV for the short trip to Notting Hill, west London, where Hirshberg is about to have drinks with some climate change researchers. It feels like a very modern, new Labour even, form of activism. Hirshberg at least appreciates the irony. "We're here talking about climate change and driving in a car that weighs 2,000lb to move 500lbs worth of humans. You know nature would never allow that - it would be an evolutionary dead end."
It is perhaps also a little surprising to see the gastronomic French buying an American food manufacturer to learn how to produce a product that is closer to nature. Still, the French won't be importing all of Stonyfield's methods. A few years ago Stonyfield introduced yoghurt in a squeezable tube to help consumers on the run. Will we be seeing yoghurt in a tube on British supermarkets shelves?
"It is a very nice product, but I don't think so," Hirshberg says with a laugh. "I think that's a very American product."
CV
Born Manchester, New Hampshire, 1954
Education Derryfield High School, Manchester. Graduated from Hampshire College 1976 with a degree in ecology.
Career New Alchemy Institute executive director, 1977-1983. Joined Rural Education Centre Board, 1980. Stonyfield Farm, 1983, chief executive.
Family Married to Margaret Cadoux Hirshberg, author of the Stonyfield Farm Cookbook. They have three children.
