The credit crunch may be inflicting pain in some quarters, but it has put a
self-satisfied smile on the faces of those who believe that the recent boom
in organic food was God’s way of telling us that we were earning too much
money.
A new report by Verdict research, the retail analyst, says that rising food
costs are adding about £514m a month to the national grocery bill and
similar research by the accountancy firm Ernst & Young warns that
middle-class shoppers may be forced to abandon organic and fair trade food
as inflation continues to climb. After all, such staples as organic chicken
and fair trade coffee are up to 50% more expensive than their mass-produced
counterparts.
If that isn’t bad enough, some scientists are arguing that organic food uses
more energy per ton of food produced because yields are lower, putting a
question mark over its impact on the environment. And the Duke of Edinburgh,
never the most diplomatic of chaps, told Sir Trevor McDonald last month that
organic farming was based on emotion rather than logic: “If you stand back
and are open-minded about it, it is quite difficult to really find where it
has been a real benefit,” he said, ignoring the fact that his son has been
an organic pioneer.
All of which, you imagine, would be depressing, crushing even, for Britain’s
coolest organic couple, Craig Sams and Jo Fairley – founders of Green &
Black’s chocolate, the brand that symbolised the organic movement’s
transformation from hippie to chic. Particularly as they have recently
started a small organic food business.
Perhaps it’s down to the fact that they are sitting on a fortune, won when
they sold out to Cadbury’s three years ago, but they actually seem supremely
relaxed. “I’d be far more worried if I were in a long-haul travel business,”
says Fairley, 51. “People aren’t moving so they’re not spending on sofas or
long-term purchases, but we all have to eat – and once you’re used to good
food, it’s jolly hard to go back.”
The couple run an organic bakery and delicatessen these days, near their home
in the picturesque old town of Hastings, East Sussex. It was supposed to be
a retrenchment, a small business that would give them a bit of breathing
space after 10 frantic years in which Green & Black’s went from just a
handful of sales in health-food shops to outselling Marmite and even being
ranked “cooler than Prada” by a marketing industry survey. But it hasn’t
turned out to be the restful existence they imagined.
They have recently opened a natural health centre which offers everything from
reiki and yoga to a healthy-eating cookery class. On top of that there is
the bakery and shop, plus a nearby allotment that supplies vegetables – and
a total of 27 employees, full and part-time. Now a number of restaurants and
shops want to stock their organic bread (large sourdough, £2.75), which is
being sold at farmers’ markets. In other words, expansion is the name of the
game.
“We’re not overpriced. We couldn’t be – this isn’t Kensington,” says Sams. “We
sell to old ladies and builders and fishermen. Hastings has three of the 10
most deprived wards in England and yet it can support a fully organic shop –
that’s the reality of the market. Lots of people come to see what we’re
doing and I’m amazed they don’t copy it.”
Sams, 64, a child of southern California, may as well have “alternative”
stamped on his organic cotton shirt: his father adopted a macrobiotic diet
(based on organic vegetables, brown rice and nuts) in the 1940s, when
conventional medicine failed to cure a digestive disorder. Fairley jokes
that his must be the only family to have had four generations simultaneously
visiting the Glastonbury festival.
Having lived in England briefly as a child, Sams moved back to London in the
1960s and started importing embroidered sheepskin coats from Afghanistan,
which he sold through Granny Takes a Trip, a King’s Road boutique. With his
brother Gregory he then opened Seed, London’s first macrobiotic restaurant,
which became a favoured watering-hole for the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono
and Marc Bolan. “Despite today’s dour, ascetic image of macrobiotics, our
restaurant rocked,” he says.
Later the pair founded Whole Earth foods, which took organic peanut butter
from wholefood shops into mainstream supermarkets and invented the concept
of “no-added sugar” jams (refined sugar being anathema to macrobiotic food
fans “who enjoy strict discipline”, according to Sams).
He has always had a good head for business. As we start to discuss the extra
cost of organic versus the one-third of food that most people are calculated
to throw away, Sams is instantly doing the numbers: “If you throw away
one-third of the food you buy, that’s 30p in every £1, so in terms of
mark-up, it’s 50% of everything you buy. So what you’re really wasting is
almost half of what you spend on food . . .”
It was Sams who was the driving force behind Green & Black’s. But it was
Fairley, brought up in suburban Bromley, south London, a beauty writer and
former editor of glossy magazines, who provided the magic touch that gave
Green & Black’s its edge and came up with its name. In Sweet Dreams,
their own account of how they created the middle-class’s favourite
chocolate, they admit that it would never have got as far as it did if they
had named it Eco-Choc, one of their early ideas.
The name they finally decided on, incidentally, was meant to convey the
“green” of their eco-ideals and the fashionable “black” of their dark
chocolate. “But people still ask us if there’s a Mr Green and Mr Black,”
says Fairley.
She admits that there is an apparent conflict between her super-eco lifestyle
– recycling everything possible and living in a house carpeted with natural
fibres and decorated with organic paint – and her old life as an arbiter of
fashion and glamorous girl-about-town.
Fairley was best friends with Paula Yates, the late TV presenter – they met
when she interviewed Yates and discovered a mutual love of peanut butter –
and Yates’s daughters still come to stay. (She is indignant at the constant
focus on Peaches, who has been caught dabbling in drugs: “People just can’t
leave her alone. Just imagine how awful it would have been to have cameras
there when you were making your own 19-year-old mistakes.”) But Fairley
insists she has left the gloss and glamour of the fashion world far behind.
“In reality, most women I know over 30 don’t pay much attention to trends
anyway,” she says.
“I’ve always bought classic clothes that I’ve worn to death; and in writing
about beauty my aim has always been to stop women wasting money on stuff
that doesn’t work.
“Our philosophy is all about buying less and better – whether it’s fashion or
food or beauty or whatever: don’t waste your money on rubbbish, basically,
whether you’re putting it into your body or wearing it.”
Which is why they believe that the organic movement is here to stay. “When
times are bad, people actually get more serious about what matters to them –
their health and their children’s health, their children’s education and so
on,” says Sams.
“With vegetarians, there’s a high rate of recidivism – teenage girls take it
up, then go back to eating meat. But with organic food you don’t get that.
“You don’t get parents who’ve started feeding their baby organic food arriving
at a moment when they think, ‘Okay, Johnnie’s ready for his pesticides’.”
Sweet Dreams, The Story of Green & Black’s by Craig Sams and Josephine
Fairley, is published by Random House Business Books, £14.99
