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What It Takes 2007:
Gary Erickson
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What It Takes to Go OrganicGary Erickson, founder and owner of Clif Bar
As told to Kalee Thompson
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"My wife, Kit, had constantly been pushing: Let's put organic ingredients in our products. I kept saying, we can't afford it. We're already using whole grains and natural ingredients—isn't that good enough? But in the back of my mind I knew that we ate organic at home, and that we had a reason for doing so.
"Then, in 2000, we made a big decision to keep Clif Bar private, to buy out our partners and not to sell the company. That led to a new way of thinking about the company's future, including thinking holistically about the environment.
"We knew logically that switching to organic was going to cost more money. We didn't know exactly how much but we knew that it was going to be a hit to our bottom line; sometimes organic can be triple the cost, say for almonds or something like that. But I wanted to be part of a change. Pesticides and herbicides are just killing our land, I see it here in the Central Valley of California; pesticides have killed all the natural microorganisms in the soil. I thought, we need to start cultivating and stewarding our land rather than subduing it.
"What I learned later on—especially as this global warming issue came about—is that organic farming is not only good for the soil, but it's also one of the most powerful ways to reduce climate change. Organic farming cannot use synthetic fertilizers. And synthetic fertilizers are made from natural gas; they're super energy-intensive to produce. When you eliminate chemical fertilizers, you've already reduced fossil fuel inputs to farming by 30 to 50 percent. To make up for that, you need to keep your soil rich in organic matter, and that's where you start storing carbon in the soil.
"Several of our products now are 100 percent organic: Our Nectar bar, some of our performance products, like Shot Blox, our Luna Tea Cakes. We buy 22 million pounds (10 million kilograms) of organic ingredients each year. In 2002, only 17 percent of our ingredients were organic; by 2003, 43 percent were, by 2005, 54 percent. By the end of last year we were almost at 70. We may be at 75 by the end of this year and there is a shot that in the next five years, we could be 100 percent organic.
"Here we were in competition with Powerbar, which just got bought by Nestle, and Balance Bar, bought by Craft. Adding to our cost of goods and increasing our margins when we were trying to compete against the biggest food companies in the world sort of didn't make sense. Still, I said, let's just do the right thing and maybe our consumers will reward us. And they have."
Take Action: Reduce the impact of your diet by choosing USDA-approved organic products (at least 95% of their ingredients were grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers); by buying locally-grown foods whenever possible; and by reducing your consumption of feedlot-raised meat.
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