Scott M. Curran: What if a bottle of salad dressing could change the world? That sounds absurd, but stay with me. In 1982, Paul Newman—movie star, race car driver, American icon, and one of the coolest people who ever lived—started what was initially a small, almost accidental idea. He and a friend bottled a homemade salad dressing, put Paul's face on the label, and made a simple decision. If they were going to sell this, they would give every cent of profit away to charity, all of it forever. 

A lot of people questioned if it would work or last. It did. Newman's Own has now generated more than $600 million for charitable causes, and here's where it gets interesting. At the time, US Tax Law actually penalized private foundations for owning too much of a business—the very structure that Newman wanted. Using a company to fund charitable work, it didn't fit the rules at the time, so it took years of effort and ultimately an act of Congress to fix it. The result, often referred to as the “Newman's own exception,” made it possible under specific conditions for foundations to fully own mission-driven businesses that give their profits away for charitable purposes.

That's what a bottle of salad dressing can do, or more accurately what a simple decision to do good can become. 

Welcome to Better Good. The show where you learn how the best do good and how you can too. I'm your host Scott Curran. For 25 years, I've served as a corporate lawyer and in-house general counsel and an advisor to some of the most extraordinary social impact work spanning the private sector, philanthropy and social enterprises. On this podcast, I talk to the innovators re-imagining how the world does good, bringing you candid and inspiring conversations and practical advice, guidance, and tools you can use in your life and at work. If doing good is something you care about, you're in the right place because the world's biggest problems won't wait, and neither should you.

My guest today is Alex Amouyel, President and CEO of the Newman's Own Foundation, the leader stewarding one of the most revolutionary models in philanthropy and working to scale it. Today we're gonna talk about that model, what it is, why it matters, and why it might be one of the most important and underappreciated ideas in American philanthropy.

We're also going to talk about the one in five American children who go to bed hungry in the richest country on earth. And what Newman's Own Foundation is doing about it through their work on child nutrition, school meals, and indigenous food justice. We're also gonna talk about Alex's remarkable career. How did she go from conducting cancer research to working for Save the Children to leading an initiative at MIT? None of it was planned, but she was always asking herself the same question. How can I use my skills to disrupt the status quo? You'll quickly learn why Alex and I have been friends for years and why I continue to delight in collaborating and working with her for going on two decades.

We recorded this episode at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, so the occasional noise you hear in the background is just the sound of people changing the world, just like Alex is. This is Better Good. And here's my conversation with Alex Amouyel.

Scott M. Curran: Alex, thank you for joining me on Better Good. 

Alex Amouyel: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. 

Scott M. Curran: You're the best. And for in full disclosure, we not only have worked together in the past, we still work together now in your role as CEO of Newman's Own Foundation, which we're gonna talk about.I'm super excited about that because it is something that I keep learning more about as we go, but I want to go back to a much earlier story. I don't know the answer to it. Um, you can tell me whatever you want. Um, but I wanna know when in your life the earliest you can possibly remember learning or coming to the realization that doing good was a thing that either people did, and/or that you could do. 

Alex Amouyel: I'm not sure about that, but I remember when I was 10 or 11, I decided I would be a prosecutor to put bad people in prison. But I think I was watching too much Law and Order dubbed on TV in French. So, and I didn't really know about restorative justice and other sort of concepts. And then that evolved in deciding I should be a scientific researcher and that I would rid the world of cancer. So, you know, that was, that was, 

Scott M. Curran: you've done either of those things. 

Alex Amouyel: I did go to college for biochemistry. Did you? My undergraduate at young. 

Scott M. Curran: You're a scientist. 

Alex Amouyel: I'm a scientist, so, and I did start a cancer research PhD. And I quit. 

Scott M. Curran: I'm learning so much in the first minute. 

And I quit the day I turned 21 3 months into their PhD because I really didn't wanna spend my days pipetting like night and day. And it was just not my personality. Love scientists love research leading more than ever, but it was just strongly agree. Not gonna be me. 

Scott M. Curran: It wasn't for you. 

Alex Amouyel: So I quit the day. I turned 21 and, and then went to do a master's in international affairs and. You know, thought I was going to do human rights, uh, didn't do that either. And then ended up first at BCG and then save the children. CGI, MIT. Newman Own’s. 

Scott M. Curran: We’re gonna unpack that though. So Save the Children is the first, so you started Boston Consulting Group? 

Alex Amouyel: Yeah, but I was, I actually, when I was in undergrad, I was working for a number of student charities, you know, as these volunteer things, but one of them I ended up chairing and was a, uh, student charity, which sent, uh, college kids to Southeast Asia to teach English and do various summer camps. So I was like involved in all the student charity movement when I was, I don't know, yeah, 17 to 23. 

Scott M. Curran: So there was a compulsion from early to be part of doing good. You just changed the, the, the vehicle for doing it. And at BCG, what did you focus on? 

Alex Amouyel: I pleaded to be on the Save the Children case from day one, but got stuck on pharmaceuticals, which made sense, given my background for a while, and then did some private equity. And then after about a year and a half, the, there's a staffing lady, which when you are a junior person, is God at these consulting firms. When you get more senior, you realize that you just go and talk to the partners and you sort of get onto their cases, but she finally relented and let me go and do a pro bono case with Save the Children, which is how I met the team and how I ultimately got a job from Save the Children, which is, they don't never, don't want you to do that because they don't want you to go work for the pro bono client. Anyway, I got offered a job 

Scott M. Curran: What caused you to make that move? 'cause most people at a major consulting firm like that are sticking that out for a while and enjoying the benefits of being at a major consulting firm. 

Alex Amouyel: I took a 40% pay up. 

Scott M. Curran: That wasn't the attraction though. So what was it about Save the Children that you wanted to be part of?

Alex Amouyel: Well, because I had wanted to, I had wanted to do that from the beginning, but I, in fact, I remember I, at the end of my master's, I applied for Human Rights Watch and they didn't even shortlist me for an interview. I also applied for a Save the Children position, and it was going to pay you 10,000 pounds for the year, which would've been $15,000 back in those days, and I had already the job for BCG, but I think part of me, I still applied to this job and they didn't interview me either, but I may have taken it had they offered it to me. 

Scott M. Curran: So you, you were at Save the Children for how long? 

Alex Amouyel: Three and a half years. 

Scott M. Curran: How did it occur that you moved from Save the Children to CGI? 

Alex Amouyel: So when I was at Save the Children, I was still acting as an internal consultant for Save the Children. I was pretty cool because fundamentally say the Children is a huge company. It was a two at the time, it was a $2 billion NGO with. I can't, tens of thousands of people, I can't remember how many people there were. And they were going through this major transition, merging all their field offices and regional offices and creating a London headquarters so that there weren't nine Save the Childrens operating independently in Ethiopia because that doesn't really make sense. But there was like Save the Children US. Save the Shildren UK. Srom Sweden. It's all those sort of rich, northern countries coming in, you know? So that was the project was to rationalize all of this and ultimately have more money going to kids and less money going to lots of different country directors and sets, et cetera, et cetera.

So I did that for a number of years. First at the headquarters and then in the field offices. And so traveling to the different countries. And after about, when I was doing the country work, I was traveling three weeks a month from Cambodia to China, to Haiti, to North Korea at some point to Pakistan. And it was fantastic. And it was really, really tiring. And it was a lot of HR, legal, finance, all the back office stuff, which is the bread and butter. 

Scott M. Curran: Some of my favorite things.

Alex Amouyel: But it is like, you know, most of Save the Children's work is they're amazing, but it's, you're not writing policy on child nutrition and dah, dah, dah.You're doing like, we need to move all the set of things, money, resources, people, et cetera, et cetera, from A to B. We're applying for grants, we're doing all that. So it's all, A lot of it is logistics. And yeah, after about three and a half years, and especially the travel, I was like, I'd like to do stuff which is less of the back office and more programming. What are the topics? What are the themes? So I applied for some jobs in Geneva and I applied for a job at the Clinton Global Initiative. 

Scott M. Curran: What year was this? 

Alex Amouyel: Uh, 2012. 

Scott M. Curran: Okay. So well into the life of CGI although— 

Alex Amouyel: Maybe I was interviewing in 2011, but yeah. 2012. Okay

Scott M. Curran: Well into the life of CGI. Which had started in 2005. 

Alex Amouyel: I got some of the jobs in Geneva. The jobs in Geneva were gonna pay twice as much mm-hmm. And be tax free. The jobs in the job, in the job in c. At CGI required me taking a 40% pay car to move to a more experie ct. But I was like, I wanna be in New York. I wanna be where the action happens. I wanna be working for CGI, not for some multilateral organization and, and Geneva. 

Scott M. Curran: Those were some pretty exciting days for CGI too. 

Alex Amouyel: Yeah. And, and that I did get what I was looking for, which was Yeah. Setting. Setting the agenda for the people, setting the agendas and what are indeed the big topics and the big, the world of ideas and programs and, and less the back of it stuff. So that was really, that was really great. 

Scott M. Curran: And for those who might not know what CGI is, it's a, it looks like a conference from the outside, but it got its birth by being not the average conference because the goal was to engage people who were interested in the world's most challenging and or intractable issues. Uh, but who weren't just interested in coming and talking about it, but we're interested in coming and making a commitment to action to do something about it because it was born outta the frustration that too many smart people go to too many conferences and then come back and do it again the next year. And so, CGIs model was, we'll do the same thing as far as highlighting the right issues and inviting the right people. But you can only come if you make a commitment and you can only can come back if you've lived up to that commitment in whole or in part. So you weren't just setting an agenda for a conference about the issues, you were also setting a roadmap for people to be able to take action on these often regarded as intractable challenges or certainly hard to address challenges. 

So you and I both left CGI in similar timeframe. Uh, I'm sorry, the Clinton Foundation as a whole of which CGI was one of its initiative Around a similar time you went to, you took it another turn and you wound up at MIT. Tell us about MIT and Solve and what you did there. 

Alex Amouyel: One of the foremost, if not the mo, foremost. Tech university in the world. Really interesting. We, I was just at the MIT Solve conference on Monday as well, and Eric Grimson, who's the Chancellor of Academic announcement, did start that way. He says the mission of MIT is quite different than a number of other universities, and it's true. If you google the mission of your alma mater, you might see different things, but they have a sort of, um, three part mission and one is obviously educating the other one. Is research, but then the bit that was always the most interesting is how do you apply the research and knowledge to the world's greatest challenges? And it says that in the mission. And it also says that there's this dome at MIT if you ever go there inscribed on the dome, it's really the practical applications. I can't remember. They use some, they talk about agriculture, industry, etcetera. Words of the 19th century. It was founded right in 18 61, right after the Civil War. MIT also helped in like the reconstruction, building the railways at that stage. About development, but it was always a school of practical application and always a school of, yeah, like what are the challenges facing the community? One of the big things that also MIT did, uh, in, its sort of in the 2010s, was really, sort of start the massive online open courseware with Harvard, like EdX, how do we say, you don't have to be in an MIT classroom to learn, you just need an internet connection and you can take all these courses. And that was a huge boom. EdX was hugely successful, it was sold on, et cetera, et cetera. And that now we all think it's normal that you might take a course online on Zoom, et cetera. But at the time, that was like didn't exist. 

Scott M. Curran: Pretty cutting edge. 

Alex Amouyel: And so MIT and its reflection about how do we think about. Innovation in the 21st century. How do we think about our mission? Say again. You don't need to have an MIT ID card to have a, to be an innovator, to have a good idea to work on solving the world's challenges. How can we open, just like we opened up the doors when it comes to education and learning, how can we open up the doors of MIT to innovation and solving world challenges? And so they started this thing called Solve. I was the first executive director. And I started the program, recruited a bunch of staff, raised a bunch of money, recruited a bunch of entrepreneurs, gave them a bunch of money. I think to date they've supported 500 entrepreneurs, from all around the world. And, they've catalyzed over $80 million, both grant funding and investment funding. And it's ed tech, climate tech, health tech, economic prosperity. There's an indigenous communities fellowship, which is also really interesting because as much as all of this is about how do you use AI and drones and satellites to map the Maldives coastal erosion? Like super cool. It's also saying. Technology is ancestral indigenous irrigation techniques that have been passed on orally for thousands of years. And you know, when we talk in this meeting, probably people have been throwing around the words regenerative agriculture, food is medicine and XYZ. This is in fact like indigenous technology that has been in existence. And so some of this is also reminding ourselves as MIT and other birds over the worl,  that we don't always need to go invent some new gadget. We can also like re reclaim and rematriate technology that already exists in community.

Scott M. Curran: What's the through line for each of the choices you made between B, c, G and that point in your career for you 

Alex Amouyel: Doing interesting. Things where I'm learning something, uh, and where I can best contribute my skills to changing and disrupting the status quo. 

Scott M. Curran: So then you make a move into the private sector, kind of, 

Alex Amouyel: Kind of, yes.

Scott M. Curran: And we're gonna spend some time on this one. You go to Newman's Own Foundation. Which most people know, um, because they're familiar with the first two words of that name, Newman's Own. A popular consumer brand that started with salad dressings and pasta sauces, and have grown, has basically grown into a food company. But the, the difference being it is wholly owned by a nonprofit and all of the profits from the proceeds of the sale, of the products of Newman's own go to the foundation, uh, to serve. A greater good that we're gonna unpack and talk about, 'cause I keep coming, becoming a bigger fan of Paul Newman. Um, the more I get to know about this work, so what made you take that leap? Why leave solve, um, and go to New York? 

Alex Amouyel: So I'd been at Solve for six and a half years and I was starting to have conversations about what was next and was hoping to do less event based work. Because I think that's a lot and maybe less also fundraising best work, because that was a lot of, was what I was doing still at MIT Solve, um, but also during. During Solve and during the pandemic I wrote a book called, The Answer is You: A Guide Book to Creating a Life Full of Impacts.

Scott M. Curran: And a wonderful book, strong recommend. 

Alex Amouyel: I was going there after that, but we can can, we can talk about it. Let’s, but one of the things I was reading about in this book are sort of what are companies and brands and there's a chapter there on how to use. Your time and your money for good though. You don't need to quit your day job. You don't need to quit your career. But what, how could you use some of your money and how can, what can you do in your purchasing decisions, uh, around this? And I said, Newman’s Own is like, you know, there's a lot of greenwashing out there, right? There's a. Fake stuff, but Newman's Own is one of the great brands. They give a hundred percent of their profits to et cetera. 

Scott M. Curran: And for people who dunno what that means, that means there's a lot of corporations in the world that say they're doing good and that may use some, 

Alex Amouyel: It's just for marketing good.

Scott M. Curran: they're doing may legitimately be doing or not, uh, in some cases.But it really is just a marketing play or a marketing play. 

Alex Amouyel: Yeah. Because people know, especially among millennials and GenZers, but all around people. One of buy products and work for companies that are doing good in the world and corporations have cottoned onto that. And so they say a lot of things, some of which are true, some of which are, I mean, I'm not sure true, but sort of certainly exaggerations of really the good that they do.

But I was saying Newman’s Own is not one of these companies. And then the book came out and then two months, you know, sometimes you manifest these things as they say. Two months later, an executive recruiter emailed me saying, “I'm looking for a new president and CEO for Newman’s Own Foundation. Do you even know who we are?” And I was like, “I wrote about you, my book.” It was like, one of the best things. Uh, so, so I did the interviews, uh, and, and yes, it was a way to return to working, uh, on children's topics, which was what I had done at Save the Children. Uh, and that was very exciting, but it was also a way to indeed put into practice a, you know, an innovative model of how you do both business and philanthropy very differently. And that was a lot of what I was circling about. Um, also at CGI and at MIT solve, we put on a lot of these panels on blended finance impact and investing, innovative finance. How do corporations do shared value? How do, and this was the opportunity to be in one of the first, and also in that sense, one of the most oure or one of the best examples of how to do, how to do that differently and to to say, okay, that's. I get to run this and I get to hopefully inspire other companies and other foundations to think about their role differently. 

Scott M. Curran: So a natural extension for you plus a step up because you get to diversify the ways in which you're engaging both programmatically, substantively, and also from as a business model. And I would love to unpack that if you, we could two parts of it. Yeah. One being what are the core focus areas of the Newman Own’s Foundation? Driven by, as I now understand, Paul's really cool and very sincere desire during his life, long before his passing. This wasn't something he set up in his estate planning documents and didn't live before he passed. He was super involved and super engaged. Would love to have you walk through sort of the, the program focus of Paul when he was living and the work he did, which now the foundation still carries on and supports, as well as the larger grant making portfolio of Newman's Own Foundation. Then we'll go into sort of the model of, and the tax code implications, the current, the tax code implications, current events. Well, there's, there's dynamic components tax code right now. And you're a pioneer. 

Alex Amouyel: Are, are you talking with all of your, uh, interviewees with about the tax code? 

Scott M. Curran: Only the best ones. But programmatic focus area first. 

Alex Amouyel: Absolutely. Well, so yeah, so Paul started Newman Zone with his longtime friend Hotch now in 1982. And it was just, they put $40,000 into it. They started selling. Salad dressing. They started making profits almost immediately and they decide, part of it was like, “I don't wanna put my name on the label.” The, my face on the label, it's sort of embarrassing. So if we're gonna do this, I'm going to give all the profits away. And so from the beginning you started giving all the profits away. Every year it grew and grew. There was lots of different issue areas. It was, you know, when he was alive, it was. There wasn't the foundation at the beginning in 1982. It was sort of like, whatever profits we made this year, I'll take out my checkbook, me Paul Newman, and just write checks of the equivalent amount. Um, but they did start focusing, they did support a lot of children's causes. There's um, I was just watching sort of some footage and he says, “Children can't vote.”So, you know, somebody ask him, why do you care so much about children's cause? And he says, “They don't get to vote.” So. You know, it's, I wanna support that. Um, and they did a bunch of children's hospital. They funded a bunch of children's hospitals and some of the people he was talking to sort of made him realize that there was at the time in the eighties, um, which comes back to my PhD in cancer research.

I'll say this I was the PhD. I quit after three months, was around a childhood cancer. And when we say childhood cancers. It's usually because children die, like you don't survive. They're not adult cancers, partly they don't survive. And, and that was the case in the eighties. There was a bunch of kids dying of leukemia, dying of different childhood cancers and, and so, but the mortality rate was unfortunately, huge at the time. And long story short, Paul, because of these, hospitals he was supporting, decided that there should be a place where the kids could be kids, could Zipline, could go fishing, could have some time away from the hospital because they were stuck in the hospital and he, and so he built with a whole bunch of people were involved. The hole in the wall gang camp after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, if anybody remember or have watched the movie. With Robert Redford, you should go watch it. And they, uh, and that sort of became huge. Other people wanted to open other camps, et cetera, et cetera. And now this is a network of summer camps and programs both in the US and across the world called the Serious Fun Children's Network. And it's, it's huge. And it's amazing. It supports children with cancer, with rare blood disorders, with HIV/AIDS with other. Serious medical conditions. The good news is some of the research around cancer, for example, and as you know, HIV/AIDS as well, has evolved dramatically. And so now, um, luckily the mortality rate, you know, some of these cancers killed 80% of the kids. Now it's 80, now it's 80, 80% survival. So the good news is the medical progress, has sort of shifted that a lot, but it's really quite amazing. 

But yeah, he supported lots of other things. And then the foundation only started, existed, I think it was formed in ‘98. It only really got started in 2005, and he passes away in 2008. And he gifts the food company to the foundation, something which is actually not quite legal at the time. And I'm sure you can now we can talk about taxes. 

Scott M. Curran: Well, let's, let's stay on the substance for a sec. But it wa so, so he passes. Leaves the the food company to the foundation so that the revenue of the food company can benefit all, all ladder up to the foundation. And not only continue to support the work you just outlined, but then also be used to make grants to other organizations Yeah. That are mission aligned with some of that work and also other priorities. Yeah. Of the foundation, which is. 

Alex Amouyel: Oh yeah. And I should say we, he didn't always just support the Serious Fun camps, right? There's lots of other, he gave money. They gave money to a lot of other things even before he, he passed. 

Scott M. Curran: And then the grant making portfolio today looks like.

Alex Amouyel: So now our mission is to nourish and transform the lives of children who face adversity. One of this is still supporting serious fun, uh, with quite, with quite a large grant, but most of their money comes from, from other sources, which is fantastic. And then the two other portfolios are nutrition education and school food and indigenous food justice in the United States. So it's really how do we ensure kids. Have the nutritious food they need to learn and thrive when they're at school, when they're outside of school, uh, how do they know what vegetables are? How do they appreciate them, cook them, gather them? How do they, uh, you know, having school gardens thinking about, you know, indigenous agriculture in community and things like so that the next generation, of kids is, you know, our incredible food citizens. 

Scott M. Curran: So, all right, now we can pivot into model, which again, I, the more I get to know.Who Paul Newman was as a person and what he did, because this is a guy who, who was a superstar. I mean, he was a superstar, he was a heartthrob, he was a cool dude. Everybody loved him. He raced cars. He was cool Hand Luke, which was a movie I even watched in school. So when he passes away, he leaves the food company to the foundation and he sets this great example of somebody who was incredibly famous, had an incredibly impactful life, and he is now got this model. But it turns out that the tax code doesn't really allow for a company to exist in perpetuity and leave its profits untaxed because they go to a foundation. And so effectively colloquially, we call it the Newman's Own Rule, right? Yep. And that the IRS basically makes an exception for this type of business, which we now see becoming increasingly popular. Patagonia is another great example of a company that has a very similar mission of selling a product to the consumer and then taking the profits. And in this case now they've actually converted to a nonprofit. So they've taken a different approach. But this model that, that Paul was one of the pioneers of, has persisted for both Newman's Own, but also has created an example for other people to follow. And you're expanding that. We'll get to that next, but but, but go ahead.

Alex Amouyel: So, from the beginning, as I mentioned, Paul gave all the profits of the food company away, but that was, he could do that as a personal individual. That was easy. He just sort of wrote checks at the end of the year, uh, to do this. But indeed, when he dies, he gifts the food company to the foundation and there. Congress had passed a law in 1969, making it impossible for a foundation to own more than 20% of a business without paying massive excess business holdings and paying even more tax than if you were an individual, you know? And so technically this couldn't happen and would've had to. The foundation would've had to sell, divest from the food company or sell most of it away. We get a five year exemption from the IRS to be able to continue operating. And then, while, you know, we to hope to influence, um, the passage of a law, we get another five year exemption afterwards because, passing new laws take time. And finally in,  2018, Congress passes the Philanthropic Enterprise Act, which allows, foundations to own, for-profit companies without having to divest under the right circumstances with a number of provisions to avoid sort of tax evasions or some, some of the criticisms that that could have.

So, we exist under this model, the Philanthropic Enterprise Act. There are other models around the world, right? So. I wanna give credit to people even who started at the same time or before Paul, you could say Muhammad Yunus with Gramin Bank, the Self-Employed Women's Association in India there. There's Brack in Bangladesh as well. There's a few others around the world who have. Done this. And even in the US there's like, um, a real estate company called Cummings who's been doing this since the mid eighties. But again, they've been doing this, the, their founders are alive, so it's sort of easier to do in this case. But we are seeing some new. 

Renewed interest in, uh, in people doing this in different jurisdictions in Australia, in and also in the US and in, and as you mentioned, Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, decided to con to give Patagonia. To, in his case, it's slightly different. It's a perpetual, uh, purpose, trust. This is for the geeks among you. Uh, but it fits the voting rights from the profit rights and the profit rights go to a 5 0 1 C four gain for the Geeks among You, which is called Whole Fast Collective, which fights for climate. Um, and so slightly different model, but very similar in its intent. Uh, and this is part of work we're doing to really try and inspire this next generation of companies, whether they're just starting out or whether.

You know, 50 years later, like Yvon, you say, I want to convince I don't, I want to convert my business and give all the profits away. Um, that's a lot of the work we're doing at the moment is how do we inspire this next generation of companies to follow in our footsteps or Paul's footsteps and also follow in Patagonia's footsteps, which is a great way of extending legacy of someone who's no longer with us and keep the work at the foundation fresh, which leads us to a hundred percent for purpose. 

Scott M. Curran: Which is an extension of that. So I want two things. One, I would love for you to explain a hundred percent for purpose, but before that I would love for you to weigh in on something that I hear a lot, um, that I think a lot of people hear a lot. Maybe people, some people feel it because they think it is all marketing, but the thing I hear a lot is that, that I almost have a Pollyanna-ish view about that corporate good is anything but greed nasquerading as good and that it's all just marketing and that it's all just fluff. Well, here's the, the first example I give is Newman's Own because it is such a clear cut, obvious answer that this is obviously not the case. That this is a corporate enterprise, a business enterprise, a product sold, um, to the public where the profits go to a foundation that simply does good.

So then that, that might be the first part where someone's like, “Oh, okay. Well, other than them.” Except there's a, there's sort of, it's either in vogue to attack corporations 'cause they're all imperfect. Um, none of them are perfect and we. There are some serious and legitimate concerns about how some do business, uh, in one facet, which does not preclude them from doing good in other ways. Sso any thoughts or feelings about being in this world? You have neen in and outta the private sector and, and the, the philanthropic sector. And you are now in sort of a perfect hybrid of the two. But what do you say to somebody who's super skeptical that corporations can do any true or meaningful good at all?

Alex Amouyel: So I think you have to read the labels a little bit and you have to, um, you know, you can't lump all corporations together. Uh, just like you can't. Lump all government, you, on General Assembly week, you can't lump all governments together and say governments are all bad and, and corporations are all bad. All good. I think the or purely profit driven. Yeah. I think that issues are, and no sort of alluded to it, is that there is a real desire, um, for people, everyday people to yes, buy from and work for companies that that have values, that do good, that have products that are healthy and you know, local and that minimized environmental footprint, lots of good things and that, who really care about their employees and their community and give back and everything. And that was something that I think in the US was popularized in part by, by Paul Newman and Newman's Own leadership and sort of others as well. And because of that then everybody started saying, “Oh yes. If you buy this t-shirt, it will it will solve world peace.” I mean, I take photos if I'm walking in the street and I see some of these things. So one of the issues I think we have is that when we say we give a hundred percent of the profits away, pike people don't believe us. Like people are like, “You can't, how do you pay your employees?” And you're like, “it's sort of, revenues are not the same as profits.” So it comes out of that, but also people just like, but it's like, but how does it work? And it's like, well, it works because the ownership is a foundation, so we don't have shareholders who are trying to enrich themselves to do, you know, to buy another boat or whatever they wanna do. The foundation is the sole shareholder and so yes, all of the profits then go to good cause. But it's like, because the message has been so confused and whittled down and just, you've just added so much water and fluff to it that doesn't help.

So I think people are the, have a right to be skeptical because sometimes the people who are shouting the loudest, who are the biggest marketing budgets and they're shouting the loudest, are not the people who are doing the best work. And the people, in the case of Newman's Own, we're not spending more dollars on marketing because we want to maximize how much we can give away.

Scott M. Curran: All right, so in pursuit of a better approach to good, you and Newman's Own have created a new initiative. Mm-hmm. Um, not only the Newman's own brand, but adjacent to it. Yeah. Called “a hundred percent for purpose.” Share what that is and what it seeks to achieve. 

Alex Amouyel: So it started us because we met Humanitix partly who's, uh, Josh and Adam are the co-founders out of Australia, and they grew up with Newman’s as a salad dressing in their refrigerator. Fun fact, in Australia, they call it Paul Newman’s because they were like. They wouldn't know who Newman is. Let's call it Paul Newman's Own. So that's what the brand is known out of Australia, and they were inspired and they said, we want to do this with a tech company. We think, how could we do this with a high growth tech company?

And they saw that everybody hated ticketing platforms. I'll not name them, but you know, that was a high margin, hopefully high growth tech business that they could, that they could maybe get into because of the dissatisfaction of the products and the things. And then they would give all the profits away. And they've been doing this for eight years. I think they've probably, now the numbers have changed, but at the time they'd lost, I check they'd given away $10 million to good causes, uh, which is pretty incredible for how young they are as a company. They're now also in the US and also just opened up in the UK. So if you're hosting events and or you know, you should think about using Humanitix for sure. We've been hosting different talks. We heard a working group at CGI here we've been chatting to a whole host of different people to see what are the challenges, how can we. What are some solutions we can start building? How can we help, um, advance this movement so that be they founders or owners at whatever length of their journey they're at, know that this exists as an option. They don't have to pick between for-profit or non-profit, or they don't have to say, “okay, I'm, uh, I have to build a company and then I'll sell the company and then create a foundation.” And then that company may be, you know, my intent with having good products is, whoever buys it is then gonna do something bad with it and fire all on my employees and etc. So, which is a very big concern for people who spent their lives building a company. They, they don't want somebody else to then destroy it afterwards.

So yeah, and it's been fantastic to talk about this and, and to, to start building this. And hopefully at some point we all joke that no matter what we say and what we write, you know, the marketing is still when you can never break from, from like people truly. I think the noise that exists out there to really say, say this, but one day, one day, consumers will know and, and, and, and really say, “Oh yes, this, this brand is different from, from this other brand because of its va, because of its values and it's radically different.”We're still working on that. 

Scott M. Curran: Well, and as the work continues, what's your vision for scale at the highest and best evolution of Newman's Owns work, a “Hundred percent for purpose,” and others who wanna buck the trend of what seems to be other bigger news these days, which is that we're moving towards, you know, common control of every corporation, and there'll be, you know, pure oligarchy, at least in the United States. What's your vision? What's, what's your counter of that? What is your vision for what is possible? 

Alex Amouyel: So, I don't think we unfortunate, I would like every. Business out there to be, to be in our model. You know, you can still pay your employees well, you can still make high quality, good products at fair prices.You, you know, it, it doesn't have to be a, I'd love if I could have all the companies in the world do this and radically change how we do business, how we do philanthropy, how we do capitalism. This would be great. I don't think we'll quite, maybe I'm already throwing in the towel, but I think it's gonna be really hard to, to get every company out there to, follow in our footsteps. But if we can have more and more of these, I think it shows that there's a different, that this is possible and that there's a different, you can do this in food, you can do this in tech, uh, with, with, um, you can do this with apparel and other things. Uh, so more and more morals out there. And then again, sort of some people that we talk to are doing 90%, some people are doing 50%. There's also all these other things that, you know, we could get into about employee ownership, mutuals, cooperatives. I think those are really interesting as well. To me, they're cousin friends of ours because those, those are still about, you know, changing where the profits are going, the profits are going in the hands of the employees, the profits are going in the hands of the customers,or they're going then to charity. All of those are super interesting to me as well, and I think if the more and more we can see this, the more, we have an economy that works for everyone, then that is about justice.

Scott M. Curran: What gives you the most pause right now and what gives you the most hope right now? 

Alex Amouyel: We work a lot, as mentioned on food justice for kids in the us. Um, the numbers have been going in the wrong direction for a while. That's very concerning that, you know, for me it's quite unconscionable that the richest country in the world that I am, you know, a proud citizen of is, is saying children going to school or to bed hungry. 20% or now more probably that, “That's okay.” It's not okay. 

Scott M. Curran: It's not okay. 

Alex Amouyel: It's not okay. It's unconscionable. 

Scott M. Curran: And it also knows no political party or persuasion or, yeah. I mean it does share some geo geographical tendencies, but we will find that reality in urban environments, suburban environments, and rural environments as well.

Alex Amouyel: Yeah. And it, we know what works and what our solutions are. And I think that is the good news is that where there is, um, that you know. We're losing this war when it comes to child food insecurity, but we're winning some in some great battles. You know, and so in the places and the nonprofits that we support, and there's some fabulous ones all around the country, we do a lot of community based work, but also some, we support some national NGOs as well. Food has the potential to transform these kids and to transform these schools and these communities. 

Scott M. Curran: What gives you the most hope? Our grantee partners who are doing this day in, day out and, and who, you know, who are not gonna stop no matter what is, no matter if their budget is cut, if their school is impacted, if they're. They're there, they're there. And they're going to be, they're gonna continue doing this because, because they know it's tremendously important for their communities, for the future of this nation and everything in the world. 

Scott M. Curran: Alex, I also am inspired with a lot of hope when I get to work with you and your amazing team at Newman's Own Foundation, which gives me a lot of hope because you have some of the greatest people working with you. 

Alex Amouyel: I agree. I agree. 

Scott M. Curran: Um, it is a tremendously great team. Great team. I love the work that your, um, grant recipients do. It it relates to my early days in philanthropy. Were focused on rural communities in the United States. Which, um, and especially pervasively poor. Communities in the United States, which, which are predominantly all rural and are located in the deep South Appalachia, native American communities and border communities. And the food insecurity concerns there are serious, which is, is really unfortunate given that rural America is what feeds and close the rest of our country. But when I think about leaders who give me hope, the answer is you. Thanks for joining me on Better Good. 

Alex Amouyel: Thank you. 

Thank you for tuning in to the Better Good podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to rate, review, subscribe, and share. You can watch the show on YouTube or Spotify, and for those who prefer to listen, we're on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts. If you wanna learn more about how you can do more good, better in your life and work, you can also find me on Instagram threads, LinkedIn, or subscribe to my substack.

You can find links to all of these at www dot Scott M curran dot com. Better Good is a Beyond Creative production. My executive producers are Kieron Banerjee and Aaron Shulman. Production is by Echo Studios in partnership with Palm Tree Island. 

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