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By Penny Bonda and Katie Sosnowchik
Cover and Portrait Photography By Jim Robinette
They couldn’t be more different.
Ben & Jerry’s is the quintessential
do-gooder corporation founded by two school chums in a renovated
gas station in Vermont
that has captured the environmental mantle in the food industry.
Chiquita Brands, a huge multi-national corporation, has had a long
and sometimes unsavory history that includes accusations of unfair
labor practices and bankruptcy. Aside from producing two of the
world’s favorite foods—ice cream and bananas, which
just happen to work well together—they are seemingly poles
apart in every way. How is it then that these two ended up as co-winners
of an award for sustainability reporting?
In November 2002, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible
Economies (CERES) and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants
(ACCA) initiated their awards for sustainability reporting in the
U.S. The program’s goal was to reward transparency; completeness,
credibility and communication were the core of the judging criteria.
Nineteen companies submitted sustainability, environmental and
social reports and, at the end of the day, the judges selected
the Ben & Jerry’s and Chiquita entries, though very different
in style and approach, as most credible and worthy of winning the
Outstanding Sustainability Reporting Award.
Both CERES and ACCA have a long history of promoting accountability
as a corporate governance issue through each organization’s
work on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Companies that have
signed on as signatories to the CERES principles have been obligated
since 1992 to complete an annual report, and ACCA has promoted
transparency for over a decade in many countries in Europe, Africa
and the Asia Pacific region. It has always stood for and promoted
the highest levels of accountability within the accountancy profession,
but had not made sought-after inroads into North America. For its
part, CERES recognized that U.S. corporations have not embraced
GRI as robustly as in other countries. Each organization found
the other to be a good fit, a partnership was born and the 2002
competition was launched.
One of the ways to draw attention to quality disclosure and transparency
among companies is to reward good behavior. Encouraging better
reporting and providing guidance to others are among the aim of
these awards. The judges were also cognizant of the messages they
were sending: sustainability reporting is not a reflection of company
size or name recognition. “We weren’t just going for
the Fortune 500 companies, nor were we looking at the little companies
that can, in a sense, afford to do things in a different way than
a great big enterprise could,” said Julie Fox Gorte of the
Calvert Asset Management Co. and a CERES board member. “We
wanted to make sure that everybody understands that there’s
a way to be sustainable, no matter how big or how small or what
business you’re in.”
Another of the judges, Joseph Uehlein of the AFL-CIO and also a
member of the CERES board, had a particular challenge. He had,
for years, been helping human rights groups target Chiquita to
improve its corporate behavior vis-à-vis workers; consequently
he approached the Chiquita report with quite a bit of skepticism. “I
read the report and was amazed,” he remembers. After verifying
its credibility, he now admits that the company has changed. “It’s
equally important that we reward and recognize corporations that
improve,” he believes. “If we don’t do that I
think we’re missing part of the incentive for corporations
to clean up their act. This company clearly did, and made quantum
leaps. I argued strongly for Chiquita to get an award.”
Gorte positioned it this way. “One of the things we’re
trying to say is, ‘It ain’t much of a church if you
don’t invite in the sinners.’ These two companies—one
that everybody thinks is good and one that everybody thinks is
bad—really stood out as having the best sustainability reporting.” Whereas
Ben & Jerry’s was commended for continuing to set an
example of impressive reporting, the judges recognized Chiquita
for its pioneering efforts by a relatively new reporter.
Intrigued by this “banana split,” green@work interviewed
both the CEO and the individual within each company most responsible
for producing their reports in order to gain insights on how two
very different companies—Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader as
Gorte characterized them—ended up on the same pedestal. The
contrast is pronounced in every area but one—through their
transparency they are contributing to the advancement of best practices
for all of corporate America.
Ben & Jerry's... |
