You’ve heard it here first, the term “Embedded Social Venture” that is.

Today, Coca Cola announced that they are taking a 40% stake in Honest Tea. The founder of Honest tea was quoted as saying “You partner with the whole organization, but we’re marketing the part that’s the solution. This isn’t us selling out - this is them buying into what we’re doing.”

I wanted to point out that partnerships such as this or the likes of Burts Bees being acquired by Clorox that I blogged about represent a new bread of “embedded social ventures” that will begin to create “right” within the walls of corporations with less than stellar reputations. By being purchased these “Good/Green” companies can act as agents of change at an unprecedented rate and scale never before attainable by anyone outside these corporations. The positive impact that one Honest Tea executive or team-member, one with the sensibility of what it means to run a company with the belief-set that corn-syrup does not belong in a beverage, and that all the ingredients should be organic and fair trade, can perhaps go much further than I myself blogging about it or even an NGO screaming publicly that they should do things differently. So I hope!

Coca Cola still has the option to purchase Honest Tea after 3 years. We’ll have to wait and see how it all shapes up… If this social experiment fails(If I may be able to call it that) then we’ll just have to find the next honest tea brand that matches our values. I’ll keep hoping that one day Coca Cola goes back to using healthier ingredients so that I can go back to drinking it they way I used to as a child before Corn Syrup and GMOs ..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Green stuff, business, diet, food supply, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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