Promoting Peace Is Key Ingredient for N.Y. Food Company
October 16, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Company: Peaceworks, a New York business that sells fruit-and-nut bars, tapenades, and other food. It has 20 full-time employees.
How it gives: The business donates 5 percent of profits to the Peaceworks Foundation, a nonprofit group created in 2002 by the company’s founder, Daniel Lubetzky. The organization supports efforts to promote peace in the Middle East and other regions beset by conflict.
The company also encourages business ventures between people from different backgrounds who live in conflict areas.
How much it has given: The company has donated several hundred thousand dollars to charitable causes since it was created in the early 1990s. Mr. Lubetzky declined to provide an exact amount.
How it got the idea: While in Israel, Mr. Lubetzky came across a tasty sun-dried-tomato spread. He learned that the company responsible for the spread was being forced out of business because of the cost of importing raw materials from Europe.
Mr. Lubetzky, a recent law-school graduate who was studying the role American businesses could play in bringing stability to the Middle East, wondered why the Israeli company couldn’t try importing materials from neighboring countries. He started the Meditalia line of spreads to test the idea.
How the business benefits: Mr. Lubetzky says that the company’s social mission is key to its identity and helps attract a motivated, committed work force. That said, he acknowledges that philanthropic commitment alone will not enable a business to succeed. In a recent survey of consumers of the company’s Kind Fruit and Nut Bars, 90 percent said they chose the bars because they were delicious, 70 percent said they cared about their nutritional value, and 30 percent cited the company’s social mission.
“Our social mission is not what drives our sales,” says Mr. Lubetzky. “What drives sales is taste, quality, and nutritonal values.”
Why it has worked: Mr. Lubetzky’s company remained very small until 2004, when its Kind Fruit and Nut Bars fast became popular. The success of the bars has allowed it to double the number of full-time employees over the past year, and it will hire 20 part-time employees over the next few months.
Mr. Lubetzky now donates half his time to the Peaceworks Foundation, which has received support from other grant makers, including the Ford and Skoll Foundations, for a grass-roots movement it created to involve moderate voices in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
