A Dutch journalist once turned himself in to the police and demanded to be charged. His crime, he said, was eating chocolate.
His name is Teun van de Keuken, and he hosted a consumer watchdog show.
An investigation into the cocoa trade led him to an ugly place. Most of the chocolate the world ate, including the bars he loved, traced back to child labor and slavery on West African cocoa farms, and most of it still does.
He reported the story, and nothing changed. So he ate a few of those bars on national television and declared himself an accomplice, daring prosecutors to either charge him or admit the whole system was complicit.
Prosecutors declined to take the case. He went further still, tracking down boys who had been enslaved on Ivory Coast cocoa farms to testify to what they had endured. No charges ever came.
So he stopped asking the industry to change and set out to prove it could. He started making chocolate himself and called it Tony’s Chocolonely, a nod to how alone he felt in the fight.
Profit was never the point. The mission was, and the mission built the business. Tony’s traces every bean back to the farm it came from, signs multi-year contracts with the cooperatives they buy from, and pays those farmers well above the market price to help close the gap to a living income.
These choices cost more, but they serve the mission. They have never claimed a perfect record, and they’re honest about it. Every year they publish their own child-labor figures, which recently ran under 4 percent inside their cooperatives, against an industry average closer to 47.
Today Tony’s is the best-selling chocolate brand in the Netherlands, ahead of giants like Mars and Nestlé. It recently crossed $260 million in annual sales, growing about 20 percent a year, and now goes head-to-head with the world’s biggest chocolate makers in the US and UK. Much of that came from word of mouth and the strength of the story itself.
Tony’s reached that scale without aiming at it, and the economist John Kay has a name for that. He calls it “obliquity,” the idea that big goals are often reached indirectly, by aiming at something else. He named the business version the “profit-seeking paradox”: the most profitable companies are usually not the ones most focused on profit.
Kay points to the pharmaceutical company Merck as an example. Its longtime leader, George Merck, put it plainly in a 1950 speech: “Medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow.”
The company lived that out in 1987, giving away a drug for a disease called river blindness to anyone who needed it, for as long as they needed it, and it has donated billions of doses since. That generosity didn’t sink the business. Merck became one of the most admired and successful drugmakers on earth.
These days, we can all name companies that chased profit relentlessly, with little regard for impact or stewardship. They may spring up quickly, but they’re also the fastest to fall.
But if you take care of the work, the numbers tend to take care of themselves.