Transcript:

Lova

Welcome to the Impact Talks Podcast. Today, we have a cool guest with us today, Ynzo, introduce yourself and for which company do you work for?

 

Ynzo

Hi. Yes, it’s great to be here. Thanks for that. My name is Ynzo van Zanten.

 

Ynzo

I’m the Choco evangelist of Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch choco company that’s trying to change the cocoa industry from within to make sure that chocolate becomes 100 percent slavery-free. So that’s our mission. And my role as an evangelist is to simply spread our values towards the consumers of other businesses to make people more aware of the issue in the cocoa industry, but also to show the way we want to change the industry from within and also mostly to inspire other organizations to change their ways and hopefully also consumers to change their buying behaviors.

 

Ynzo

So that is my role within the company.

 

Lova

Ok, so I’m super interested in specifically more, I guess. First, let’s go into the background of the company because it’s growing a lot. And then I would also love to know kind of your background, but so how big are you guys and how many countries are you active and how global are you?

 

Ynzo

Right. So we’re I would say we’re small and big at the same time. So because even though we became the market leader in the Netherlands in chocolate in a very short timeframe, we launched our first bars in 2005 and as a business started picking up in the last seven or eight years. And we do about a 70 million euro turnover and we’re available now in Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, France, the UK and the US, and some exotic places like Dubai, Japan, and Taiwan.

 

Ynzo

And that sounds big.

 

Ynzo

But on the grand scheme of things, if you look at the total cocoa that is bought in the whole world and our part in that, I mean, we now work together with about 6600 farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast alone. But in those two countries, there are more than two and a half million farms that grow cocoa. So there’s a long way to go for us, we are a drop in the ocean, if you look at the total industry that we want to change from within, but we’re working hard on that.

 

Lova

And how do You fit into a company? How did you start? What is your background? How did you get recruited or did you just join it?

 

Ynzo

So I ages go… let me go back in my personal nutshell, I studied economics in Groningen, and there I became friends with another guy. And after our university years, he first started working for Heineken and I became a management consultant. And after about five or six years, I literally burned my grey suits and started traveling the world. And during my travels, I ran into a guy, a British guy in Belize who was on holiday.

 

Ynzo

And he told me about a little British company called Innocent Drinks. And they are a company that makes fruit smoothies and now bought by Coke. And it was very inspiring to me. It was fast-moving. It was very sustainable. It was very positive and young. And I brought a business case together with a university friend of mine. And well long story short, we launched Innocent Drinks in the Benelux and ran that together as country managers for about four years, five, almost five years.

 

Ynzo

And in the end, we got this entrepreneurial urge again to do different things because we were growing so fast. And for us, it was slightly too much at the end being led by the British. So we decided to sell our stocks and go our way again. I became an independent consultant in the field of strategy, sustainability, and communication. And that friend of mine, after about two years search of what he wanted to do, he bought the minority share and then the majority share in a company called Tony’s.

 

Ynzo

So that is the chief chocolate officer, Henk Jan Beltman.

 

Ynzo

And from day one that he took over at Tony’s, I became involved as an external advisor. So I set up the whole brand values and the HR handbook, all that part. And I always used to run the quarterly meetings as a facilitator, et cetera, et cetera. So I knew the team inside and out, but I wasn’t officially on the payroll of Tony’s. And then about four or five years ago, Henk Jan gave me a call and asked, Ynzo, you’re busy?

 

Ynzo

I said, Yeah, is that you want a job? I said, no. And then we got to talk about the fact that at Tony’s, we don’t do any paid media. So it’s always been word of mouth. And the mouth used to be well, Henk Jan, our former CEO, Eva, our value chain bookie, and sometimes the people that would do marketing at Tony’s, but it became almost a full-time job doing in that way.

 

Ynzo

So, Henk Jan asked me to come on board as the Choco evangelist or the chief evangelist of Tony’s to have somebody that is well then part-time but not full-time involved in spreading those values of Tony’s.

 

Ynzo

So in a sense, my job is that some companies would call it the spokesperson or the word for in Dutch. But we say that everybody at Tony’s needs to be the spokesperson of Tony’s. And also the job is slightly different because it’s one of the channels to also just engage other organizations and consumers. So I tend to say that we communicate on-pack, which is our packaging, which is our brand story and individuals.

 

Ynzo

It’s online. So we have a social team that’s constantly engaging with people online and it’s on stage and that’s my part. So there’s a lot of conferences, there’s a lot of podcasts, a lot of interviews that I do, which is part of being a spokesperson, but also, well, broader and also different in a certain sense.

 

Ynzo

So that is my job and how I got involved with Tony’s.

 

Ynzo

And in the meanwhile, a couple of years ago, I also was head of people and culture. So that’s what some people would call the HR department at Tony’s. So I’ve been around the blog within and outside of Tony’s for the last years.

 

Lova

super interesting!

 

Lova

A lot of terms packed here, but my interest mostly fell… Well, I’ll start with the culture and the HR, because you said that you have laid out that, one of the things that scale-up, I mean myself as well as big changes happened in the company, there’s so much trouble happening in HRs, especially when you make big jumps, doubling a team over summer. That’s something that happened here. It was quite hard to establish something, which I always look up to people with more experience.

 

Lova

So where were the first steps, especially coming, being a country manager for Innocent and everything? How then you now,  restarted with this new company and you were laying out the HR principles. What were you exactly doing?

 

Ynzo

Right.

 

Ynzo

I mean, honestly, the first thing we did is to realize that HR in itself might be the lamest word you can imagine because human resources to me have always sounded like the most dehumanized word you can imagine. Right, is if you could turn humans into resources as if you want to turn humans into resources like tin, copper, lead, etc.. So the first thing we did, we tend to do at both industries but also Tony’s Chocolonely is to get rid of the words.

 

Ynzo

So, at Tony’s, we call it people and culture. And I think those are the two pillars that are so essential in that part. And it’s also it means it’s a lot more forward-looking proactive kind of thing than in my experience, where human resources tend to have been over the last decades.

 

Ynzo

For me, it sometimes feels like a very reactive part. Whilst at Tony’s, it feels like it is the one team that is not working in the company, but it’s working on the company. So it’s forward-looking at how to create and establish a company culture and maintain a company culture that makes sure that, well, in my opinion, culture and company culture has always been that the invisible glue between the separate parts of the company. Right. It’s the lines that connect the people within the company that makes sure that together you are more than the sum of the parts.

 

Ynzo

So it has to do for us with making sure that there’s a well, let me put it like this.

 

Ynzo

One of our core values at the company is making you smile. So you’re working on a very serious subject, which you need to make sure that for the team, it’s the most fun experience that you can have. I mean, you spend more time at work than you tend to spend at home and in an awake state. And so you better make working on that serious subject as fun as possible. So make sure that when people come to the office on Monday they actually come to the office skipping of happiness, so it tends to evolve around three pillars within the culture.

 

Ynzo

I would say there’s a personal purpose that you have as a person, which I would normally tend to call meaning in English. So what is your personal meaning within that company purpose that you have? And we try to really connect those two things. There is a sense of personal growth so that you can actually achieve and grow as a person and as a soul within a company, and it tends to evolve around personal relationships. So, for example, a very clear ritual that we have at Tony’s is our lunch.

 

Ynzo

I mean, we don’t lunch with a melted cheese behind your laptop to be able to continue working. No, lunch is an institutional thing. So you come down, you sit at lunch with the people around you. We have the most amazing lunches made by Titsi, our cook at Tony’s, to make sure that you actually relate with people, see how they’re doing, see what they’re doing and what they’re up to from all different teams and all different places within the company.

 

Ynzo

So it tends to evolve around these rituals, the fun things. And sometimes for people, it sounds like, you know, the fun things we do are just fun things. But I disagree. If you keep connecting fun things consistently, your whole job and hopefully, therefore, your life becomes more fun.

 

Ynzo

So this is the rituals that we do.

 

Ynzo

But it’s also the symbols, that you have. Those are the visual things that you have. So everything at Tony’s is utterly tonified.

 

Ynzo

Our tennis table is actually completely branded Tony’s and says ping pong on both sides. It’s just a stupid fun thing that we have that makes everything. Well, it makes you smile, which is important, I think.

 

Lova

And what are the second and the third pillar?

 

Ynzo

So it’s your personal purpose, so that’s your meaning, how does your meaning connect to the purpose of the company? Our purpose is first and foremost within the company and in these times where sometimes there’s an exceeding amount of purpose washing

 

Ynzo

I would say ours is as authentic as it comes. So for us, our purpose is 100 percent slave-free chocolate and that is first and foremost in everything that we do. For us, our financial success isn’t an end goal. I mean, don’t get me wrong, why commercial is hell! but it is a means towards a goal.

 

Ynzo

The goal is crystal clear, 100 percent slavery-free chocolate. And in everything we do, we relate to our purpose. We relate to our mission.

 

Ynzo

So in the question, we could do, we could say, so how does that help us become closer, get closer to our mission? We also look at that.

 

Lova

Where did the mission come from? Because we were just talking about laying out the practicalities of HR. But…

 

Ynzo

yeah,

 

Lova

I can imagine, you know, the founder didn’t just come up with the idea. Oh, that said, I want to make a chocolate slave-free or something. Maybe like what’s the background behind the mission?

 

Ynzo

But then we need to go back. Yeah exactly, we then need to go back to the day to the why we were launched because, in the early 2000s, there were journalists from an investigative Dutch television show looking at the reality behind certain food marketing. It’s called “Keuringsdienst van waarde” which is like an equivalent of the 60 Minutes of food or the Food CIA. And they saw a very tiny article on page 12 of a newspaper that spoke about child slaves in Mali, being sold to work in the cocoa industry.

 

Ynzo

And they were like they were flabbergasted. They were like, how can this not be front-page news? How can this not be a full-page article? So they started investigating and realized that there’s a very bitter reality in the cocoa industry, which has to do with more than two million children alone in Ghana and Ivory Coast working under illegal circumstances, of which tens of thousands work in situations that we consider modern slavery, which is ridiculous in it, in the industry, in a value chain of a product that we all eat almost daily in Western society.

 

Ynzo

So they wanted to shed much more light on this. But the cocoa industry wasn’t very open and prone to speak to them. So long story short, in the end, they just simply launched their own chocolate company to change the system from within to show that it could be done with them.

 

Lova

Who is them? Who was it?

 

Ynzo

So this is “Keuringsdienst van waarde” a television show with the journalist “teun van de keuken”

 

Lova

Oh. So the television show launched their own chocolate company?

 

Ynzo

Exactly. Exactly. So Tony’s Chocolonely is derived from the first name of Tony, the international version of Tony’s, and Chocolonely for our lonely battle in the chocolate industry. So he simply launched his chocolate brand to show that it could be done differently. And that is Tony’s Chocolonely, which was launched in 2005. So you could say some people sometimes ask us, so where did your purpose come from when you were a company?

 

Ynzo

It’s been the other way around. Our company was launched, was born out of this purpose. That was to change the industry from within.

 

Lova

But how can you say… this is extremely interesting. So I don’t know how much you were involved with that, but how are you just like that and train what I can imagine being a very traditional market?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, I wasn’t involved in that at that moment. Nobody was at Tony’s because this was launched from and within the production company of the television show.

 

Lova

Yeah,

 

Ynzo

 and it is. And we still see that it’s hard to change such a huge and a traditional and slightly rusted down industry from within as a small company.

 

Lova

because it is still happening like, is it getting better, or is it there today?

 

Ynzo

It is still there today, unfortunately. And in absolute figures, it’s even become worse over the last two decades because there’s more demand for chocolate. So you could say in relative terms it’s diminished, but in absolute terms, it has even increased. So it means, even more importantly, for us to make that difference and showed that it can be done differently and inspire other companies to follow suit. It is still there. Today is there still more than two million children working in illegal circumstances. Today there are still more than 30,000 children and grown-ups working in situations that we consider modern slavery, which is ridiculous.

 

Lova

Yeah, but then ok. So let’s shift back to the practicality of it. So the company starts and then obviously, I’m assuming it’s started growing because people started buying, so teams now started growing, so, ok, the first question that pops up in the whole thing, why not start as a charity? Why does it have to be a commercial company? And then how do you onboard people that for such a mission? But then explain oh, no, but it is a commercial company.

 

Ynzo

I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, honestly, so that is an important message, I think. So, I think you can be a commercial company and have a very clear purpose to change the world. We consider that the only way we could actually change this system is by showing the system from within, that it can be done differently. So we are a commercial company. We have shareholders. We have very clear KPIs and how we want to grow, where we want to grow to and we need to make a financial profit because we are convinced that we can only make that impact year on year again if we are simply commercially viable.

 

Ynzo

So we have three very clear performance indicators and one has always been a 50 percent year on year growth. The second one has always been a 40 percent gross profit and a third one and that is where we slightly differ from the rest of the industry has for us always been at least 4 percent net profit, where the rest of the industry is always working towards 20, 25, 30 percent net profit, we think, to divide that that financial success within your value chain.

 

Ynzo

So making sure that the farmers at the beginning of that value chain actually earn a living income and are fairly paid, which we call a living income reference price for the cocoa beans that they grow, that is a much more equal and fair division of that value within the value chain.

 

Lova

But so if everybody striving for 20 percent profits and then you guys are striving for 4 percent, doesn’t that beat the whole purpose of you? I mean, I guess then you. Well, I don’t know exactly how it works, but I’m assuming you’re making less money. So then if another chocolate company looks at you, they think, oh, but, you know, we want 20 percent.

 

Ynzo

But if we grow 50 percent year on year, isn’t that the more interesting number?

 

Ynzo

Isn’t it in the end, the absolute amount of euros that you have in your bank account as a commercial company, that might be more interesting than a relative amount, isn’t it a note about doing business where only you profit in your value chain and other people are actually working in situations like modern slavery? So I think for me, as from the human perspective, it is absolutely unacceptable to be in a business where people are actually suffering on the other end of the value chain.

 

Lova

I agree.

 

Ynzo

 And I think those things are much more important than financial figures on your bank account today.

 

Lova

But so when it got started, how many years after it got started, did you start joining in?

 

Ynzo

 Me personally?

 

Lova

 yeah,  when you started writing the plans that you said.

 

Ynzo

so let me think back, I think overall that must have been about 10 years ago. I think.

 

Lova

So that is …

 

Ynzo

Because I got involved …

 

Lova

into the inception of the idea.

 

Ynzo

Exactly. Exactly.

 

Ynzo

So it is about five, six years into the start of Tony’s when Henk Jan Beltman as a chief chocolate officer first took over the minority share and then the majority share.

 

Lova

Ok, and so you walk in and what do you see? How big was the team? What were they struggling with?

 

Ynzo

I think the first time I was got involved was when the team was about five, or six people I think.

 

Lova

 Wait, they were five years old as a company, but there were only five people.

 

Ynzo

Yeah,

 

Lova

How? Because obviously when you look from the outside, it looks so big, so then you assume, which is, by the way, what happens all the time when we run our events, you see all these successes and they have all exponential growth. And somehow I don’t know why, when you look at Tony’s, you also think, oh, my God, this is exponential growth.

 

Lova

But yet now it’s like, oh, five years later into the inception, there were only five people.

 

Lova

How…. why was it only …

 

Ynzo

Ok, But if you take the technical term of exponentiality, you think back from today and then you end up at about five people after five years.

 

Ynzo

So if you start with half and you go to one and then to two to four and into eight.

 

Ynzo

So we were I think there in a year, four or five at around that amount of people.

 

Ynzo

And now we’re at about 160 people.

 

Ynzo

So I think that line is more or less exponential.

 

Lova

Yeah, so so actually five people after five years, you would say is a pretty steady and healthy growth?

 

Ynzo

Well, it depends on, No. It depends on where you come from. And for us, you know, growth in a sense isn’t our goal. Our goal of growth isn’t just to grow. Our goal of growth is to make an impact. So for us, growth has to do with making more impact year on year. And it’s been a while.

 

Ynzo

I mean, in the first years we were struggling as a company and only in the last six, seven, eight years have we grown so incredibly fast.

 

Lova

And what changed?

 

Ynzo

 I think the change was when Henk Jan took over as chief chocolate officer. I think then did the whole entrepreneurial side of the business much more accelerated. It was then that we realized that we needed to grow to make that impact, to make sure that we could show the industry that it was a proper, viable business that you could run in the chocolate industry.

 

Lova

But so what were the changes that you saw happen? Because of our experience, it was very much ok, so we could start as a small kind of charity event, give back wherever possible. But then on the other side, it was very much like, yeah, but if we don’t go as big as we can, then nobody will see or hear that these changes are possible and what I’m hearing from you is a very similar thought process.

 

Lova

Like it has to go big just to prove a point.

 

Lova

But then …

 

Ynzo

exactly

 

Lova

Why?

 

Lova

And especially when it’s so impact-oriented…

 

Ynzo

because in the end, you need to show within, and I mean, if you need to show in an old system that you can change towards the new system, but still within the parameters of the old system. So we need to show the chocolate industry, which is a very competitive and commercial industry, that you can change within their parameters, which still has to do with being commercially sound, being on shelves in the supermarkets, being visible.

 

Ynzo

We need, it’s our end goal in our strategies to inspire other companies to act themselves and to take their responsibility when it has to do with human rights when it has to do with eradicating any form of forced child labor within your value chain. And by showing that you can do that, being a very sustainable company, being one of the best employers within the Netherlands, that you can also move within those parameters of the old economy.

 

Lova

Ok, so let’s go a little bit back because obviously, we can talk quite long about the growth and the impact, which I truly believe will eventually happen, uh, because you cannot ignore when it’s being done. So you’re mentioning things like becoming one of the best employers in the Netherlands, as well as walking in when I was five people. How do you go from walking in five people to now one hundred sixty people and these clear culture? Well, I guess shifts or you know, there’s a clear culture that you can see even when you walk into supermarkets and you see everybody’s packages. How do you go from five people to 160 and the best employer, like what are the practicalities of it? Do you write a business plan? Do you go to the CEO and say, hey, like what are the tiny experiments that someone like me with a small team can, you know, really implement in the company?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, and I can imagine the question. The thing is, we always get asked, what is the magic trick? Right. What are the three key things to you, what makes you successful? And I gotta honestly say much of the stuff we have experience has all come from the gut and didn’t have a clear pre-written strategy behind it. So a lot of our growth has been organic.

 

Ynzo

But I would say that if you are looking for the magic wand, I think one of the most important things is this very clear mission that we stand behind, this purpose that we have that is such a huge driver in everything that we do, they can use as an acid test for anything that we do.

 

Ynzo

The second is to realize that your team is key here. So we always say for us it’s two pillars, team and impact. Yes. In the end, it’s making that impact, but it’s by having the most inspired and motivated team that you can imagine. So that’s why there’s so much focus on our team. And often when I speak about what we do within our team and what we do in our company culture, people are sometimes challenged by saying, yeah, but in the end, it’s got to be the sales figures, right?

 

Ynzo

In the end, I got to make a profit. And then you see that often those entrepreneurs, the first thing they cut is the effort, whether it’s financial or time, towards making sure that your team is as good as it is. And I think that should be the other way around. So I always take this quote by Richard Branson, who tends to say, I’m not happy because I’m successful, I’m successful because I’m happy and I don’t put my customers first.

 

Ynzo

I put my employees first because they create happy customers. And I strongly believe in that.

 

Ynzo

So by keeping folks on our team and that doesn’t mean always throwing shitloads of money against it.

 

Ynzo

It has to do with a focus on your team, on those company values that you have on that mission that you have. So it’s always first and foremost and you see that everywhere within our team. And it’s really on focus on each other. You see it in these times, in strange times that we’re all working from home during the Corona happening around us. It’s constantly this focus on the team, on each other. Is everybody ok?

 

Ynzo

How are you doing? Checks, body checks, friendship, love, and empathy around you.

 

Ynzo

So it has to do with focus, I would say one having your purpose. So that is the impact. Side two is that team and making sure that you’re right within the details. I think everybody is so focused on making sure that everything is authentic until the smallest detail.

 

Lova

Yes. So I want to cover a little bit of the whole Corona situation, because obviously with a bigger company, it’s different. But, a little bit later, I guess my question was right now, so what I ask maybe in these type of situations because obviously, culture is very hard to explain, but have you done experiments that were really like pivoting or I can imagine when you’re hiring, we have a recruitment funnel that is almost three weeks long for employees. And in there we test personalities and not specifically their grades or anything. So what were the experiments that you did where you thought, whoa, ok, this is really going to be pivotal or, and what do you do when you know somebody slips through? How do you catch the person that doesn’t live the mission or the vision?

 

Ynzo

Well, I think those are a lot of questions in one. Honestly, I think, yes, onboarding, but onboarding is also such a strange term.

 

Ynzo

But that has also grown organically.

 

Ynzo

I mean, in the last three years, three to four years, we’ve grown from, I have 30 people to 160 or something, so you have to set up some kind of processes for people and we call that in our case, the typical Tony’s time. So for at least one week, you get a deep dive into the background of cocoa, into how you make chocolate, into how we work as a team. You have this body assigned to you that helps you through any technicality.

 

Ynzo

Where can you find the files you need, etcetera… and how do things work within Tony’s and you drink as much coffee with as many Tony’s as you can.

 

Ynzo

You can within a week just have an automatic deep dive into the company culture. That is one. But it’s also about having these four company values that we have.

 

Ynzo

So that has to do with being entrepreneurial, being willful, being outspoken and Tony’s makes you smile to use those as, I don’t know, the bar’s measurements to see how anybody would fit anyhow within it, within the recruitment process. And obviously, with it, I mean, sometimes there’s not a fit and we do this constant check every year, you know, is it still a good fit for where you are within your job?

 

Ynzo

Because it often doesn’t have to do with you being a quote-unquote wrong fit, it also has to do with the company around you evolving and changing. So your job might change more quickly than you could change or maybe you change more quickly than your job does. So there’s a sanity check on you or your job also very often. And within the company, there are people that go sideways, go up ways, go everywhere and it has to be with it just plain sanity check on there as well.

 

Lova

And you do that check every year or every …

 

Ynzo

At least. So you have at least once a year. But we used to have two moments a year that you really had this check. But I think it’s an ongoing process between you and the people you work with around you, your team, anyhow.

 

Lova

Ok, so, just out of curiosity, would you ask them then and what happens if the person says, yeah, I don’t really like it here, my boss sucks or something like…

 

Ynzo

[Laughing]

 

Lova

yeah, how do the conversations go?

 

Ynzo

Oh, it’s a conversation like you would have with anybody else. I mean, there isn’t a very huge rigid structure behind it. You just make sure that at least twice a year you have this chat and this check-up with how you’re doing.

 

Ynzo

And we used to have a rating that was linked with it. We dropped the rating and just to have a sanity check on how are you doing?

 

Ynzo

But we do have what we do, for example, we work with annual goals and we work with quarterly goals for you personally.

 

Ynzo

And we see whether how you set up those goals together with your manager and see how they actually work out every quarter and every year.

 

Ynzo

And I would personally advise people to have this almost on a weekly level so what you are focused on. So that also helps you with your focus. We call those the big threes and we see how that works out and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

 

Ynzo

And then we see how anybody can help you around you to make you reach those goals.

 

Ynzo

But the discussions, the checks that we have are just discussions, literally.

 

Ynzo

You just have a cup of coffee with your manager and or the person that works with you and see how that’s working out.

 

Lova

Why did you try to rate though?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, because it was a bit too rigid in an old school, we felt it just needed a more open discussion. We do have 360 evaluations around the company as well. We also ask input from people around you that you can use in these discussions and see how people can measure up to company values and their own goals and how it works out for them.

 

Lova

Ok, cool. So it’s a pretty much a checkup twice a year maybe to make sure that everybody fits

 

Ynzo

Exactly.

 

Lova

Yeah. And then within the teams, obviously you probably have the lunches and the talks and then things like that happen. Interestingly, you dropped the ratings, though. It’s very interesting that it became just like a discussion. Which kind of shows also a little bit of a rebel spirit against the traditional? um. Yeah, things which are good because that’s obviously within the industry needs.

 

Lova

So, again, back to the start, you walk in,  five people there. What was the kind of the first things you were doing?

 

Ynzo

Now that you shouldn’t ask me, you should Henk Jan ask the question, because he was the entrepreneur walking in and what I did when I saw the team, in the beginning, was work with them to establish those, for example, those core values that we just spoke about.

 

Lova

So you were the facilitator behind those core values?

 

Ynzo

Exactly what we worked. It came and comes still from everybody within Tony’s. I got to tell you, I think things like the core values of a company never stand still, right.

 

Ynzo

You need to always keep evaluating them and see how it works within the time frame that you’re living in as a company at that moment in time.

 

Lova

So, ok, then you were facilitating those processes and they came. Yeah, usually those core values come from the employees or the founding team. So you were pretty much in the next 10 years of that growth facilitating most of it, or were you also part of some pivotal moments that changed the course of the company?

 

Ynzo

Both, I would say, I mean, I was there externally and then internally and I think the biggest pivotal moment that I would name in the last five or 10 years was real this realization that we’re working towards becoming a global movement. I mean, five years ago, I could not imagine speaking to you today, talking about actually literally becoming a global brand.

 

Ynzo

And in the end, for me, it’s not about Tony’s becoming a global brand. It’s about the thought, the thought leadership that we have that the changing the industry from within, and that movement that comes behind it. That is what is changing at the moment. I see that as a very pivotal moment.

 

Lova

 And, maybe an interesting part for me, how do you see Tony’s being, you know, based in the Netherlands? Is that something that is because the Netherlands is very small. So,

 

Ynzo

yeah,

 

Lova

considering the mission

 

Ynzo

or not even the biggest chocolate consumers.

 

Lova

Yeah. So and considering the mission, would you want to be in a place like San Francisco or in…

 

Ynzo

Yeah, but you can’t choose where you’re born. Right. So this is we were simply born in the Netherlands.

 

Ynzo

But that is the reason why we went, for example, the first country we went to outside of the Netherlands was and is the U.S.

 

Lova

 Really?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, yeah. And that is not the most logical step normally from Holland, you would tend to first go to Belgium and Germany, Scandinavia. First was the other way around. We realized that some of the biggest chocolate producers had their headquarters in the U.S. and we figured, if you want to be copied, you need to be noticed, and to be noticed, you better make a sound in the backyard.

 

Ynzo

So that’s why we went to the U.S. and launched in Portland, Oregon, and as a first place outside of the Netherlands.

 

Lova

But, I mean, Oregon doesn’t sound like L.A. or New York. Why?

 

Ynzo

But Oregon is a very food conscious area of the US.

 

Lova

Really?

 

Ynzo

Portland is a city where there are very conscious foodies. Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of early food movement comes from Portland, Oregon.

 

Lova

So you were part of that growth when you were going to the US? What was happening when you first decided to scale there?

 

Ynzo

We launched in Portland, add several natural chains, so these are supermarkets that are focused on very well, for example, organic food, very conscious food, delis, and we launched there same as we would do in any other country, honestly.

 

Ynzo

And also in Holland is a ground-up movement. It’s a lot of reaching out to consumers, reaching out to people that are involved in the food industry, showing this, telling the story at any stage you can find, and grow it from the ground up. And that is how we launch from Portland in the US. So it’s going around with chocolate and telling the story.

 

Lova

But so you guys flew there or did you hire an agent or?

 

Ynzo

 [Laughing] you tend to do … you tend to fly to Portland, Oregon, nowadays. So we have Peter, a Dutch guy who had been living in the U.S. for a long time, who was our sales guy in Portland. But then we simply opened a full organization and company and office in Portland with somebody responsible for marketing, somebody responsible for sales, finance, operations. So it’s a skeleton over a company that was set up in any country that we launch.

 

Ynzo

And then indeed, you approach retailers, you approach the best stores you can find. And but since as I said in the beginning, we have a zero paid media policy, we don’t do any advertising.

 

Ynzo

So it’s finding the right people, finding it right. And newspapers, writers, journalists to get in touch with and talk to these people with about our mission.

 

Lova

So, you don’t pay at all for any ads, also not …

 

Ynzo

At all. Zero paid media,

 

Lova

But also not like Facebook ads or Google ads?

 

Ynzo

No, zero paid media. 

 

Lova

Isn’t that like starting a business with the kind of like, you know, one hand tied down or something like that? Isn’t that hard…

 

Ynzo

Uh, it might be harder, but we think our story needs more than the 20 seconds of attention that you would get in an ad or the five seconds that you would get in a newspaper or a magazine. For us, it’s going directly into this longer-term relationship with consumers, with organizations, and that takes a bit more time. We might not be the easy path, but we felt it was the path that merits that it has to do with how we work, with the making the impact.

 

Lova

Do you know a company called Charity Water because they released…

 

Ynzo

Yeah. 

 

Lova

that documentary videos as Facebook ads and went viral. Did you see that?

 

Ynzo

No, I haven’t seen that, but I do know charity,

 

Lova

so, yeah, but what they did is they also don’t advertise that much, I think, but they have this documentary video that was like 20 or 30 minutes about the founder and why he believes in clean water and everything.

 

Ynzo

But have you seen our documentary?

 

Lova

No, I haven’t. I thought,

 

Ynzo

Oh, there you go. So that’s documentary that was online.

 

Ynzo

And if you become a serious friend of Tony’s on our website, there’s a page with a whole toolbox where also you can find a documentary.

 

Lova

So it’s Tony’s…

 

Ynzo

And it’s been aired on national television in Holland.

 

Lova

What is the website then? Tonyschocolonely

 

Ynzo

 Tonyschocolonely.com

 

Lova

Ok, so the way you spell this, Tonyschocolonely

 

Ynzo

Seriously,

 

Lova

 It is more for the listeners.

 

Ynzo

So it’s Tonyschocolonely.com

 

Lova

Great, and I am on the website right now. So where do I scroll for the documentary?

 

Ynzo

 You become a serious friend. That is the most important step.

 

Lova

Where is the serious…

 

Ynzo

On our website, you become a serious friend, is that consumers that are spreading our mission amongst their friends and family, for those are in our core of brand ambassadors, I would say.

 

Lova

So you have to click on our mission and our…

 

Ynzo

Let me have a look together. So it’s our mission, no “Doe mee” in Dutch, let me switch to the English website so we can do this in English. It’s “join in” and then let’s be serious friends. You join us, become a serious friend. And once you’re logged in, you can find our documentary, which you can see.

 

Ynzo

But I would also recommend people to have a screening with their friends at this moment. I would say have it from your home with your friends at the same time while you’re munching down on a bar of chocolate.

 

Ynzo

And then so as serious friends, you can watch a documentary. But it’s you can also, I think, find it on Google Play and other pay-TV sites. If you want to watch it for free, you need to log in as a serious friend.

 

Lova

How come it’s behind “sign up” well. Why do people have to sign and why is it not like on the website?

 

Ynzo

Well, I don’t know what the reasoning behind that was.

 

Ynzo

I think in the beginning it was simply because it was a documentary. It was on pay-TV. It’s been aired on national television on Holland a couple of times. So there was visible and also after the fact and I think left and right, you might find it also directly.

 

Ynzo

But what we want to do is engage these people and ask them to join in. And that’s why we have it in our toolkit as a serious friend.

 

Lova

Clear. But you’ve never thought about running those types of things as the document, sorry, as paid ads because I can imagine those things going viral, like…

 

Ynzo

Yeah, but again, we have a zero paid media policy, so we don’t do pay that.

 

Lova

Yeah, I guess so.

 

Lova

Note interesting. But and I guess it works because you’re growing so you just have to be more strict about who you reach out to and how you portray yourself.

 

Ynzo

This is exactly my answer when people ask me, so does it work, I said, well apparently it does. Yes. We became the market leader.

 

Lova

Yeah, true. I like the focus on the mission as well. It’s on the main website right away. So you can only see that, I am interested now. So I know the mission, everything. I have not gone into the background yet, but before we do, I’m still interested in it, now it’s the 25th of March 2020. So obviously Corona has gotten pretty bad in the Netherlands.

 

Lova

How especially… like from our perspective it was like from one week to another, things were changing now on our side were mostly digital already since January, which was a policy that we’ve been adapting to for the last, I think, nine months, and officially rolled out in January, but we are a much smaller company. So how does that work with like our sales up, our sales down, how is the team performing, how what is going through your minds when this happened?

 

Ynzo

Right. Well, it’s had a huge impact overall. I got to tell you, and those people that have been stricken by much more than we have, so there’s no pity necessarily on our end at all.

 

Ynzo

I think if you look at sales, we do see a decline. There’s we don’t know yet because we’re in such early stages how long term that decline is, because what you see is that supermarkets are being replenished after they have been completely emptied in the last one and a half weeks by consumers. First being replenished with the most necessary goods.

 

Ynzo

So vegetables, toilet paper, cleaning material, etc.. We did see a complete sell-out on chocolate as well because I presume most people still will keep eating chocolate.

 

Lova

Yeah, I can imagine.

 

Ynzo

Perhaps even more …

 

Lova

I can imagine Tony’s would be sold out. So how are these sales declining?

 

Ynzo

We were sold out. If I look at supermarkets around where we saw us being completely sold out, but we don’t know whether that was because there were more sales or whether there was just no stocking from the back end. Right. There was no replenishment from the back end. So we don’t know that yet.

 

Ynzo

We, on the one hand, you could assume that there are more sales because people are more at home. So would eat more chocolate at home.

 

Ynzo

But we don’t know yet. For example, we have a big chunk in our business that has to do with travel and duty-free. There is zero there at the moment so that those sales have completely imploded. There are direct sales from our stores.

 

Ynzo

That is not existent at the moment because our stores have closed.

 

Ynzo

But the biggest sales that we have are supermarkets.

 

Ynzo

So we’re just looking at what’s happening over there. There is still the opportunity to buy online from our webshop, which is still going on.

 

Ynzo

So we think that overall it will not have a huge impact on sales in that part of the sales because the majority is done through supermarkets. But at the same time, we’re a business that is still very much in a growth base. So the new supermarkets coming on board are more hesitant. You don’t have a face to face talks with the new supermarkets. So that is on hold. So…

 

Lova

Why is it on hold? though wouldn’t you as a supermarket want more chocolate if it’s getting sold out?

 

Ynzo

No, but I mean, at new supermarkets, I’m talking about your discussions with new supermarkets now because they are focused on their logistical chain at the moment, I can imagine they have bigger things to focus on now than put in new materials on their shelves. So they are focusing on their logistics systems. They don’t know where this is leading to either. So everybody’s slightly hesitant at the moment and not knowing where this is leading.

 

Ynzo

So that normally means you’re kind of in lockdown and a standstill and we see that happening. We completely appreciate and understand why that is happening. And at the same time, though, if you look at us as a company, it’s 160 people that are all working from home.

 

Ynzo

So that does have an impact.

 

Lova

Every single one from home? nobody goes…

 

Ynzo

every single one.

 

Lova

And since when? since the announcement or before already…

 

Ynzo

Since, what are we Wednesday 25th for one and a half weeks since the Friday one and a half weeks ago, almost two weeks ago.

 

Lova

And was that like a shop or did your guys have systems in place already? Like how was the step towards that?

 

Ynzo

Well, normally nobody is prepared for a situation like this, let’s face it. But we do have a system where we all work through, for example, Microsoft Teams. So for us, the infrastructure was already there to be able to work from home. We all have laptops so we can all work from home anyhow.

 

Ynzo

But for me, in my job, for example, I tend to travel the world and be on stage at conferences and they are all canceled.

 

Ynzo

So I’m doing Tony’s talks online now in a live stream from my home, which is completely different than what I was used to. And this counts for many people. I mean, the people that are normally running our offices, the people running our stores, things are changing quickly.

 

Lova

And so …

 

Ynzo

So it has a huge impact there.

 

Ynzo

And then you don’t have face to face physical meetings and sit-downs. What we now have is in the morning we have our online meetings and Huddles to see how everybody is doing. We sent a current Tony’s survival package as a bit of Tony’s cheek last week to everybody within our team, tried to keep the spirits up. We did a pop quiz from home trying to keep the spirits up.

 

Ynzo

So it’s making sure that everybody is ok.

 

Lova

How are the Huddles calls? I’m assuming it’s not all hundred sixty people. It’s just teams. Right.

 

Ynzo

We have that.

 

Ynzo

We’ve had that twice now, a complete Tony’s Huddles. We do that once a week at least to make sure that we see the leadership team, see what the heads and chiefs are about, but also just make sure that everybody’s ok and get a rundown from everybody in the company. Every Monday morning, we always within the company have a Monday morning meeting anyhow, that is within the bigger team. So that is Holland. But we have the UK, the US calling in as well and we are.

 

Ynzo

And every morning we have it within the teams and also within the specific teams. So for example, in the marketing team, which is the overall marketing team at 9 a.m. we have an online huddle and then at 9.30, we also have a huddle in the specific team. So that’s design, that is movement, that is products, etc..

 

Lova

So how do you think it has affected productivity or did you introduce new technologies as well to maintain productivity?

 

Ynzo

Now when we have Microsoft Teams, which is the technology that we have anyhow, but for example, we quickly set up for me personally, we set up a live stream with OBS software that we sent through to our YouTube channel of Tony’s, where people can log in and see online Tony’s talks, for example. That was a new technology for us.

 

Ynzo

But having already we’re already working with Microsoft 360 and Microsoft Teams meant that we were already set up to work the way we work now.

 

Lova

So what is Tony’s talks then? Just you talking the whole day or different people talking?

 

Ynzo

[laughing] Well, my job in a sense, is yes. To present about where we come from as Tony’s, where we’re working towards, our mission, the way we work as a team, the way we do marketing, the way we do sales. So that is why I would tend to do on stage anyhow. And those talks, we have now turned on to online talks where I started first for well-graded school students because I wanted to help universities and high schools and grade schools. After all, they were switching to online and they were struggling with finding content for themselves in the beginning as well.

 

Ynzo

So I just offered them, you know, you need content, let me know and I’ll set up an online talk in Dutch, in English.

 

Ynzo

So that quickly became a huge success where yesterday we had an online talk with 250 people from several universities and universities of applied sciences logging in from Belgium and Holland. And I tried to answer all of the questions that they might have. And I’d also do conference calls.

 

Ynzo

I do a lot of these interviews and podcasts these days because of … things don’t standstill. But I think, first of all, let’s focus that we’re all ok and that the team is still healthy and ok everywhere to…

 

Lova

How did the company start treating, Yeah, the Coronavirus when it first happened? Is there a crisis team or whether significant changes in how employees were handled?

 

Ynzo

I don’t think I understand your question.

 

Lova

So a lot of companies from the Corona crisis had even before any measurements from the government started establishing crisis teams, taking specific…

 

Ynzo

Right. Well, we just decided slightly ahead of the curve to start working from home.

 

Ynzo

I don’t know when the first press conference was in Holland, but I think the day before we already decided to close our stores, for example, start working from home and …

 

Lova

How many stores you guys have in the Netherlands?

 

Ynzo

We have two stores.

 

Ynzo

We have one store in our office that the West Host area in Amsterdam, we have one store in the center of Amsterdam, the superstore in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. And so we closed those down to make sure that we weren’t part of the problem, but more part of the solution.

 

Ynzo

And then I started working for a home as just about everybody does. And we have our people and culture team is focused on how the team is doing. But we also have the IT support that’s constantly working with the Microsoft Teams, how we can work. But again, we have these systems in place. So that wasn’t so difficult for us. I mean, we all have laptops so we can work from home anyhow.

 

Lova

So and then if we would look at like the smaller companies, we have a ton of startups that apply to our events that are entering certain markets like vegan food and healthy food, gluten-free food, that type of thing. Also, startups that replace meat, obviously that’s popular nowadays. So you’re saying a lot of negotiations are stopping at supermarkets. A lot of things are closing. What would you advise those types of starting companies that need to kind of figure things out now?

 

Lova

Like a lot of people are saying, yeah, you have to innovate, innovate, but like, how would they be able to innovate?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, and I think that’s a struggle for everybody at the moment and starting startups and starting entrepreneurs, you know, on a bigger scheme of things, there’s a lot of hardship and obviously, a lot of people falling ill from Corona. At the same time, you need to have a positive view on this, too. I mean, what can we learn from this? How can we work together? I see a lot of people coming together. There’s a lot of social activities that you see happening, whether it’s online or in neighborhoods. There’re people delivering food to other people. I think this is also a moment that we can recalibrate the whole capitalist system that we’re in. And hopefully, the Post-Corona era will mean that we can use this to change for good and an entrepreneurial perspective.

 

Ynzo

And for these startups, I would say I’d rather have an optimistic view and see how businesses can adapt to this and see what they can learn from it and see what they can do to stay afloat. And I see loads of lovely entrepreneurial things going around where people that had no delivery are all of a sudden setting up delivery when it comes to food, people with food trucks that are getting in touch with people in neighborhoods where they could perhaps set up on a square in the neighborhood and deliver to the whole area, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Ynzo

So obviously, I don’t want to downplay the huge negative sides for many entrepreneurs, but there’s a lot of opportunities as well. And this is entrepreneurship and its core, I think.

 

Lova

What do you think the future like the future is going to look like after Corona? What do you think about the changes …

 

Ynzo

I wish I knew,

 

Lova

but from your experiences…

 

Ynzo

I can only hope. I mean, I think you know what there is I think 20th-century capitalism has evolved to a situation where a lot of entrepreneurs are slightly confused, I think, or get slightly confused about what their purpose in life and within society is. And this is not about creating as much wealth for themselves as they can get together.

 

Ynzo

I think within three, four, or five decades, we have gone the wrong way. I mean, it’s all been about growth, growth, growth. And I think hopefully 21st-century capitalism is much more about empathy and love and sympathy and true meaning and purpose and much more human to humankind of business.

 

Ynzo

And hopefully, this moment will open our eyes that indeed it’s not about B2B or B2C, but it’s H2H, human to human. I think what you now see is that, yes, you need a system, you need a social system. This disease is striking everybody as hard.

 

Ynzo

And there’s no discrimination within this disease. And hopefully, we can see that people get together much more.

 

Ynzo

And this hopefully means a new system that we can work in.

 

Lova

So then just out of interest from your experience, do you think the industry, was especially this industry, which is a little bit different than, let’s say, my industry of events or video or whatever, the supermarkets are being sold out, like every day things are empty? Do you think that things will change going forward for them or are they just going to be like, no, we made a lot of money so we don’t have to change anything? So being very traditional.

 

Ynzo

I know I don’t think it’s up to me to judge the supermarket at this moment in time, I think we should wait and give everybody the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know what we should judge at this moment, supermarkets profiting from them selling out. I mean, their role is to deliver food and goods to people that need it.

 

Ynzo

And they’re working very hard to replenish their shelves and their stocks to help people. And you see also supermarkets actively trying to avoid the huge hoarding that we’ve seen in the last two weeks in playful manners or restrictive manners. I mean, I love this sign by a Danish supermarket I think that said, the first product or the first two products have the regular price and the next product is a hundred and thirty-four euros.

 

Ynzo

More playfully, making sure that people don’t start hoarding and act more socially.

 

Ynzo

But even the hoarding part, you see this I think it’s only a small part of society. I think the bigger part of society is joining hands and helping each other. And that’s a more optimistic and positive view. I think

 

Ynzo

So let us not judge the supermarket at this point. Let’s wait till after the fact.

 

Ynzo

Because I think there’s a lot of them that are playing a social role in society.

 

Lova

Right. Yeah, I didn’t mean in the sense that they are profiting from it. They are working hard. What I meant with is a lot of technological innovations happen when this crisis has happened, but usually in industries that are suffering, and in this case, that industry is going to suffer that much for good reason, because obviously, we all need our groceries, and I hope they make a lot of money so that there could be even more groceries so that it doesn’t get sold out.

 

Lova

But at the same time, I’m thinking there could be so much innovation happening within those supermarkets.

 

Ynzo

yeah.

 

Lova

And somehow, like, for instance, the reason I say that is one of the things that is happening now in the Netherlands is every single supermarket cannot deliver because everything’s sold out, every single slot is sold out. So, I’m assuming the logistical value chain of getting food or groceries from a supermarket to somebody’s house can use quite a lot of innovation, just like Amazon is innovating their groceries or, you know logistical things.

 

Lova

But see right now, everybody’s super busy. So that’s not going to happen with those innovations, as you mentioned, because, well, they’re all busy. But I can imagine from the perspective of Tony’s then, you guys have a little bit more time on your hands because one of your stores, you closed it and, the negotiations are mellowing down. Are there specific innovations you’re looking at to become more of an Amazon for chocolates or something like that?

 

Ynzo

[Laughing] we don’t have the aspiration at all to become Amazon of chocolate honestly. I wish perhaps Amazon would become Tony’s of the online ordering platforms.

 

Ynzo

But I think we are at the moment, business as usual. In a sense, we are not looking at technological innovation as much as other companies tend to do. I think we are much more looking at social and societal innovation and how you can innovate in the field of making a physical impact in value chains. That is what we look at. So I would call that social innovation, which is the angle that we choose. What you do see, for example, now we call them Tony’s Unlimited, which is a machine that we have in one of our stores that produces your bar of Tony’s. So you can make more than twenty-two thousand different combinations of chocolate, but also of packaging and you can put your name on that. And for example, I think the team behind that is now working hard on how can we make sure that those home deliveries get brought to people.

 

Ynzo

But again, we are in such an early phase of this Corona crisis at the moment, we are more looking at how we can support local initiatives with our chocolate. How can we put a bit of a smile on the faces of people that are finding hardship at the moment? And then after this, let’s see how we need to have more business innovation.

 

Lova

Well, so quick question. Do you guys have a machine that can make any chocolates ever?

 

Ynzo

Yes.

 

Lova

 So, ok.

 

Ynzo

Ever we have three types of chocolate. So you have white chocolate, you have milk chocolate, you have dark chocolate. You can then choose… But have a look at it on the website as well. You can then choose what layer of chocolate you want beneath and how you can choose three ingredients and create your bar.

 

Lova

And so a consumer can just buy this machine or not

 

Ynzo

No, the machine is a big investment, you know, by the machine you buy the bar that the machine makes. So have a look at our website in the chocolate shop. You have designed it yourself and then you have the Tony’s Unlimited on the right side and the unlimited bars, you can design your own bar of chocolate, your own ingredients, your own wrapper, and then it’s sent to your home.

 

Lova

So why have you never thought about making it available, like making a consumer version of that? I can imagine that would create a new revenue …

 

Ynzo

Because I don’t think…

 

Ynzo

What do you mean with the consumer version? of the machine?

 

Lova

Yeah of the machine, something like for like 50 …

 

Ynzo

Because of where do you source your…  People at home can’t make their own chocolate, right. They can’t buy their cocoa beans and turn that into chocolate. It’s a process to make your own chocolate. We’d rather make the box for them because we’re sure we can make the best chocolate for them.

 

Lova

But don’t you have those? I know that in big warehouses, you can buy, like bags of chocolate and then you put them into a machine that melts it. And then you have like your…

 

Ynzo

But have a look. I don’t think you understand what I mean. Have a look at our Choco shop and how Tony’s unlimited works.

 

Lova

No worries. I’ll check it out.

 

Ynzo

This is not about just making a mold and putting your chocolate in there, making your own bar. It’s really what kind of ingredients you want in there. What kind of wrapper do you want around it, print your own wrapper, etc.?

 

Lova

Make sense. So I have two more questions that I wanted to ask now I did have you on the call. So, when you got into the company, I can imagine you either saw somebody who went to Ghana or went there yourself or something that made it all real for you? Do you have a story like this you can share?

 

Ynzo

I think this is also essential. I think once you’ve been there on the farms and spoken to the farmers that that grow the cocoa beans, that is life-changing, I think because that makes that relationship with those farmers so real. So I indeed, I was in Ivory Coast, I haven’t been to our corporations in Ghana yet, but I’ve been to cooperatives in Ivory Coast. And that is good to see what is happening on the ground.

 

Ynzo

And it’s also put things in perspective. And we have people on the ground there constantly. We have an impact team at Tony’s that is constantly in these building these relationships with these cooperatives. But many and I would say almost every Tony’s has always been to our cooperatives in Ghana and Ivory Coast.

 

Lova

Can you share a story that changed that for your immediate real?

 

Ynzo

Well, I was in Ivory Coast, it’s good to see even just the distances that you travel in a country like Ivory Coast, the condition of the roads you see, that it’s not as easy as things sound, just get cocoa beans from one place to the other. And then you see the cooperatives that you see the farms and you see the situation that these people live in.

 

Ynzo

And you should expect lovely white cottages with flowers around it from the farmers that we work with. It is a lengthy process to change that system and to make sure that the poverty diminishes for everybody over there. So it is a different level of poverty that you see there. And whatever I’ve seen in the rest of the world.

 

Lova

Can give an example? What did you see? And like…

 

Ynzo

Well, I mean, I think if you take what I had seen up till then in my life anywhere, whether it’s in Asia or South America, what I had seen, where I traveled, you always still have stores selling, for example, Oreos and Pringles chips. Right. And what you see in Ivory Coast, once you leave Abidjan, there are no brick and mortar buildings that you see anymore, almost. These are huts by the road, motorcycle repair stores, roads that are torn apart until the next election moment again, dirt roads that when it has rained, it takes you a full day to travel 50 kilometers.

 

Ynzo

And these are farmers that grow cocoa beans on tiny plots of land that have very little means for themselves.

 

Ynzo

So just increasing their revenue and helping them increase their own productivity is essential to get them to where we want them to get. It’s a different level of poverty that you see over there.

 

Lova

But so what? What does Tony’s do exactly? They just give them more money or do you build roads or do you go…

 

Ynzo

So we pay… the first and most important thing is to build this long term and direct relationship with these farmers. So we buy these cocoa beans from them where you pay a higher price for the cocoa beans. On top of the fair trade premium that I mean, all our beans are fair trade certified. So you pay about at the moment about a 20 percent fair trade premium to those farmers. But on top of that, we pay an additional Tony’s premium.

 

Ynzo

That is bridging the gap between the fair trade price and the market price and the living income reference price that we set up with the Fair Trade Organization that we think every chocolate producer should be paying. We pay on average, I would say about a 50 percent premium on top of that market price that the farmer would normally get.

 

Ynzo

We also help them increase their profit, their productivity by giving them schooling, education programs, awards for the best farmers to inspire them to increase their productivity, showing them different farming techniques that they could use, helping them use inputs for their farms. But also, for example, a bit of the premium goes to empowering the female farmers there and the wives of the male farmers to start up their businesses.

 

Ynzo

Part of it goes to improving their health insurance. How do you call that the health situation?

 

Ynzo

When we tell a farmer, listen, you need to send your kids to school and they tell us, you know, but the nearest school is 30 kilometers down the road. We help them build schools locally, we help them build canteens in their schools, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s up to the cooperatives and the farmers what to do with the premium that we pay to them. So they get to decide, I mean, this is an entrepreneurial relationship.

 

Ynzo

They can decide what they want to do with that money. Part goes to the farmer in cash, part goes to the farmer in goods.

 

Ynzo

So materials that they can work with, inputs, fertilizer, machetes, wellies, whatever they need.

 

Lova

And so what have you guys done so far then? Practical examples of how many schools have you built? and do you have those numbers?

 

Ynzo

Top of my head, I don’t know that. You need to look at our annual report that’s on our website. That states all of these things. What we do mostly, for example, is installing a system that we call our child labor monitoring and remediation system that is now all the cooperatives and all the farmers they work with have those systems in place where you can see whether you run into incidents.

 

Ynzo

There’s in our annual report, you can read exactly the amount of remediation that we’ve done up to also on our website by the way.

 

Lova

Yeah.

 

Ynzo

You can see what we’ve done very specifically on each on each situation that we run into. You can see exactly the amount of euros that we paid in premiums to our farmers at the beginning of the revelation. Let me see what I can have a quick look at what I would just recommend you read up on our website when you want to dive into these exact figures.

 

Lova

I have it in front of me right now.

 

Ynzo

Go for it.

 

Lova

It’s very nice. I see here, so Tony’s has 18.8 Percent achieved market share. And you bought fifteen hundred tons of cocoa. The one that interests me here.

 

Ynzo

No, we bought a lot more tons. We’ve bought fifteen hundred tons of open-chain cocoa. That’s the platform that we’ve launched with Albert Hejin, for example, and where we invite other companies to also join. I think last year we bought five and a half thousand metric tons of beans.

 

Ynzo

 I would just recommend reading up on our website.

 

Lova

Great. And then, small question, because we actually get a lot of these companies that… What do you think of companies that they start as a startup and they sell shoes or something? A lot of these shoe companies do that as well. And then what they do is they donate for every pair you buy, you get, you know, a pair get sent to Africa or something that.

 

Lova

What do you think of those companies? Or that business model specifically because a lot of startups are jumping on that wagon and I’m never sure if it’s good or bad.

 

Ynzo

Me neither, and I don’t think it’s up to me to have an opinion about this, I think you need to always see and keep reevaluating that business model specifically because indeed there are good sides and bad sides to that business model. I think you’re referring to a company that indeed donates a pair of shoes for every pair of shoes that’s sold in Western society.

 

Ynzo

You need to make sure that you don’t take away business locally from the person that would be making shoes there, for example. I think that is what you’re referring to. And I think you need to constantly …I don’t think it’s up to me to have an opinion whether that’s good or bad. I think every business needs to constantly recalibrate that business model and make sure they don’t have negative impacts there because we might judge this company.

 

Ynzo

But at the same time, there’s also a Dutch lottery that spreads bicycles to villages. And then that bicycle guy in that village doesn’t sell any bicycle for that year. So this is we shouldn’t judge these startups. I think we need to look at the positive impact that they’re making as well at the same time.

 

Ynzo

But let’s make sure that any business model needs to be constantly, I think, reevaluated, then it needs to be able to have the guts to pivot when they realize that there’s a negative impact or undo the negative impact.

 

Lova

So you suggest that if that business model is in place, that they need to look at the metrics of everything that is happening on the ground and whether it’s good or bad and then…

 

Ynzo

Exactly. And then be able to pivot. I mean, let’s face it, 10 years ago, we thought biofuels were the solution to fossil fuels. And what you saw happening is that the first generation biofuels were made from corn and that directly beat into the food chain in South America, for example. And then you need to recalibrate and see what is the best solution. And for example, we can now make biofuels out of algae. We can make biofuels out of the grass.

 

Ynzo

So it also leads to innovations. And we should embrace those innovations, but realize that we need to and we can only embrace those innovations if we start realizing and are open that we need to be able to pivot and steer and change our business models.

 

Lova

Yeah, I agree. So again, almost five questions. So what interests me a lot is which you mentioned in the earlier conversation about serious friends. Now we have also something called ambassadors. These are the people that without them we wouldn’t have grown that much. But how do you get those ambassadors, serious friends? How do you keep them engaged and how do you make sure that they are as effective as possible towards your goals?

 

Ynzo

Well, first and foremost, this is still a work in progress for us, what we saw is that we want to …

 

Lova

 I thought you have fifty-five thousand serious friends in your mission report?

 

Ynzo

No, I think we’re at 35000 at the moment, and I think we’re at 35000 at the top of my head.

 

Lova

It says here, fifty-five thousand serious friends, that’s thirty-five thousand more than we currently have. Oh, that’s our goal.

 

Ynzo

So you’re looking at other goals for this year?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, exactly. And I think we started with 15000 this year or something or 20, and we are now at thirty-five thousand. Anyway, long story short, we’re still really working on what works best. What works best for them, what works best for us. But for example, two years ago we launched a petition in the Netherlands and called “wet Zorgplicht Kinderarbeid”.

 

Ynzo

So this has to do with due diligence within your company to make sure that there’s no child labor in your area of the value chain. And this was a law that was passed in Holland. And we needed our serious friends to sign a petition to up the pressure on the government to make sure that they realize that there are consumers that want this.

 

Ynzo

So that was what we did two years ago that inspired us to set up this serious friend program. And what we do, for example, you have this login that you have, you can then join up, but we’re still seeing what works best for them.

 

Ynzo

Now, for example, we launched a petition at Tonyschocolonely.com/petition where we want to get a million signatures in total to really up the pressure on governments of the U.S. and also the European Union states to make sure that there are laws in place all around the world.

 

Ynzo

Right, where we make sure that there’s enough pressure on organizations all around the world to make sure there’s no human rights violation in their value chain. But it’s still a work in progress. How we’re actually doing this, these serious friends of what we can give back to them. Up to now, what we do is we keep them informed on these things that we’re doing, but we also inform them on the fun stuff.

 

Ynzo

So there’s a bit of a new newsletter involved. There’s also allowing them to come to our annual party before other people, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s a constant and dynamic playing field.

 

Lova

And how do you …

 

Ynzo

First and foremost, it’s people signing up.

 

Lova

So, Yeah. How do you get them to sign up? Because there’s a lot of donations out there.

 

Ynzo

Yeah. So it’s we speak about this on our wrappers. I have a QR code in my presentation where people sign up.

 

Ynzo

It’s when we do talk all around the world where we ask people to sign up.

 

Ynzo

It’s we have a truck gone around through the U.S. where people can sign up.

 

Ynzo

If we have any events, we ask people to sign up. It’s any trade shows that we are, we ask people to sign up. So it’s everywhere we have… in our stores, both our stores, we have this wall for serious friends where they can sign up as a serious friend, etc..

 

Lova

Ok, so pretty much wherever possible QR codes and ask people?

 

Ynzo

Yeah, and I used to be adamantly against QR codes a couple of years ago. I thought they were outdated and now I think they were useful again for this forum, for this part…

 

Lova

Why did you change your mind?

 

Ynzo

I thought QR codes at a certain point were everywhere useless, and now I can put them in a presentation and because smartphones now don’t need an app anymore to directly from the QR code get to where you want them to, that you can just point your camera and you have a direct link to the QR code that helps.

 

Lova

So you pretty much have thirty-five thousand serious friends just from word of mouth technically from speeches and a wrapper?

 

Ynzo

We have 70 million euros in sales just from word of mouth.

 

Lova

So what would you recommend? Like a business that wants to grow and use word of mouth? Would you say do more speeches, apply for more awards?

 

Ynzo

I would say. I would, first of all, have a story that’s authentic and real. So it’s not about just telling the story. I mean, obviously, for us, telling the story is essential and we hope to do it nicely. But if your story isn’t right, then it’s useless to tell that story anyhow.

 

Lova

How do you know the story is right?

 

Ynzo

So if… Well, we have to go back to the very first moment we started speaking, I mean, we’re a business that’s there to change things in the world, right? So if you have a very clear purpose and you have a very authentic purpose, that means something for the society and a planet around you. I think that is the story that’s great to spread. Right. If you’re just making hand grenades and cluster bombs, I don’t think your story is very fitting in society.

 

Lova

Yeah. Get that. So pretty much something that contributes to the world that we can all agree on that is beneficial to the world.

 

Ynzo

 And I think as an entrepreneurial activist, I would say any business from now on or maybe already and definitely in the future needs to have a purpose that has to do with creating a better world.

 

Lova

Yeah, ok, so then you have your story. What do you think would be the next steps that you would recommend?

 

Ynzo

 Tell it …

 

Lova

So speeches at conferences or …

 

Ynzo

anywhere, tell it.

 

Ynzo

I mean, we started on any stage. People would give us we would tell our story and anybody would tell our story, everybody in Tony’s and I would say never in a company that wants to tell a story needs to be able to tell that story. And that is by being fully transparent, by having a story that has no hidden features behind it.

 

Ynzo

And then perhaps at a certain point, you could decide to have a guy like me, an evangelist, running around the world telling that story as a full-time job to be able to spread those values. But I would say grab any opportunity you have, whether it’s business or private, to tell that story. I think some Tony’s might not be as fun to stand by at the bar because they would just constantly tell you about how the world of chocolate looks like.

 

Lova

And, ok, what would you say about in the early stages, do you think especially young CEOs are just starting, is it worth it to tell the story at the beginning or should they focus on actually building the business? Or how do you have the balance? because I can imagine …

 

Ynzo

I would focus on building a business that has a benefit to the society around them. That would be my focus. Once you have that business that adds something to the world and society around them, telling that story will become an automatic part of your being. And whether that’s through paid media. Right. I mean, we do it without paid media, but you could still put in ads for the good of the world, right?

 

Ynzo

I mean, there’s no shame in using ads. We don’t do it because we think our story needs a longer time frame because we have a very complex story. But if you have a very simple story that adds anything to the world, feel free to use a paid media if that’s your way. For us, it’s telling the story and as an independent adviser, ages ago when I was an independent entrepreneur, I would also and afterward as a professor to students of new companies and of entrepreneurship, I always tell them, go to any Chamber of Commerce meeting, go to any entrepreneurial platform, go to any conferences or whatever you can find.

 

Ynzo

Just go there and soak up information but also spread your story to the people around you. If you have the time, go to anyone you can walk up to.

 

Lova

 Ok. And then maybe a tip that you have, especially from your position, get to speak a lot at conferences. How do these young entrepreneurs then get all these opportunities?

 

Lova

Do you just email …

 

Ynzo

No, by going everywhere and starting to tell your story to two persons, then you get an audience of five, then you get a living room audience of ten, then you get a classroom of twenty. And in the end, perhaps you might be on stage with a thousand people around you. It’s something you build up gradually. People need to see you and people need to run into you. People need to be inspired by your story.

 

Ynzo

And when your story is inspirational, people will be inspired. They will ask you to tell that story at the next stage and the next stage.

 

Lova

So how long in years did it take you to go from two people to like a lot of people?

 

Ynzo

We went from two people to 160 people now in 15…

 

Lova

 No, I mean, in stages as in you started.

 

Ynzo

Uh… Stages, that differs.

 

Ynzo

It’s not about just the amount of people that are in your audience. Right. I mean, it’s also talking to the right people in an audience and that’s something you gradually build up. And some big stages come by on day one and some take ages. But you can’t put a very specific timeline on.

 

Lova

So, your advice is not …

 

Ynzo

grabbing every opportunity you have.

 

Lova

Your advice is then not to focus specifically on big stages but on industry-specific stages.

 

Ynzo

Look at quantity and quality at the same time.

 

Ynzo

I mean, you need to it’s no use talking to a thousand people that that have no that don’t care and that you are not interested in and they are not interested in you. At the same time, you could find 10 people that might become your biggest brand ambassadors and that might be the best audience you will have in your lifetime.

 

Lova

Ok, so yeah. So pretty much quality and quantity need to be balanced and then tell you to make sure that your story actually helps people and then you tell your story everywhere. And in the meantime, just make sure that the foundation of your business is actually running and showing examples of that story.

 

Ynzo

Exactly.

 

Lova

Cool, now, I think that is actually really interesting, Do you have anything that you would like to add specifically for social entrepreneurs or activist entrepreneurs like you called them?

 

Ynzo

 With the danger that I might open up a new one hour of conversation, I honestly in the last couple well, last year or two years have started to steer away from being called or at least calling myself and also being called a social entrepreneur, because that has the risk of ending up in or being seen as part of a niche.

 

Ynzo

And I honestly think that entrepreneurship as a whole needs to be recalibrated and is or will be social in its core anyhow. So this is what I mean with new 21st-century capitalism, where entrepreneurship will be or already is much more social in its core. And it’s not something you add on to entrepreneurship.

 

Ynzo

So by realizing that, then that puts you out of that thing that we talk about earlier in this podcast was where entrepreneurship and doing good for the world would be two extremes of one spectrum. Right. People often ask how can you combine being sustainable with making money? I think the moment you let go of that being a paradox, then you realize it can be one and the same thing, we’re the living example that it can be. Right, being financially successful.

 

Ynzo

So doing good financially can go hand in hand completely with doing good for the society around you. And once you start realizing that, I think I think it’s good to let go of the division between entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, but realizing that entrepreneurship is or will be social in its core. And then I think that is the entrepreneurs of the future that will be successful. And you can see it around you with companies like Patagonia, Tony’s Chocolonely, Saiper, Dopra, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Lova

But don’t you think …

 

Ynzo

So, my tip would be to let go out of that paradox. And my second tip to starting entrepreneurs in your case would be to never think you’re too small to make a difference.

 

Lova

What do you mean with that?

 

Ynzo

Well, I think anybody can make a difference, whether it’s consumer-level or it’s an entrepreneur, if you think that you’re never big enough … in my slides, I use one slide, one saying by Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, the lady who died very too young, unfortunately.

 

Ynzo

She once said, if you think something small can make a difference, try sharing your room with a mosquito. Right. And that shows how a very small thing can make a very big difference. And I think anybody, whether it’s a consumer or an entrepreneur, can make a difference on any level, any decision you stand in front of. You can always decide will I make a more sustainable and more social decision or will I have a different driver behind it than being social and sustainable.

 

Lova

And why do you think, um, the shift is happening towards more social? Um…

 

Ynzo

Because we landed in a complete overshoot of capitalism.

 

Lova

What do you mean?

 

Ynzo

Because I think 21st.

 

Ynzo

Because I think there’s more wealth in the world, but it’s not distributed as socially as it can be. And I’m not I am not a social I’m an entrepreneur in heart and soul.

 

Ynzo

And I think anybody deserves the opportunity of thriving as an entrepreneur. But if you look at the division of wealth in the world, sometimes it makes me nauseous and very sad. Right. If you look at the wealth in certain parts of the world and the other poverty of other sides of the world where people don’t have clean drinking water, don’t have normal toilet facilities, can’t go to school. And at the same time, there are people living in ridiculous wealth.

 

Ynzo

I think that is just the wrong signal. I think people are starting to appreciate that. I think the human side of the economy has reached an overshoot in a couple of generations that we’re now seeing an underflow of new true leadership that has to do with empathy, sympathy, and hopefully, I would consider working it much more, working towards a love economy where much more have a human side to it.

 

Lova

Do you think it’s also regional specific? Because I luckily have been seeing the same thing, that it’s going more towards an economy and capitalism where you really help each other, which now the Coronavirus and everything is really starting to show. But do you think that some parts in the world just don’t like they pretend to care but don’t care or the circumstances don’t allow them to care? And so they just accumulate wealth without thinking.

 

Ynzo

Uh, yes and no, I think yes, I mean, if you really zoom out and look at the planet, you obviously see a higher level of wealth in Western Europe and North America and certain parts of Asia and a lesser amount of wealth in Africa, Asia or South America.

 

Ynzo

But at the same time, you also see the same kind of divisions if you zoom in again. Right. You also see that in levels in Brazil or in Africa or in Western Europe, there’s also poverty in Western Europe, which is unacceptable. I mean, just kids going to school in the U.K. without breakfast. The only hot meal they have once a day is in school. I think that’s ridiculous as well. So there’s a lot of stuff to fix it.

 

Ynzo

I don’t think you could really mark it down on certain regions that easily.

 

Lova

That actually brings me to a really interesting question that I always have when I’m dealing with especially. So when we started, there wasn’t a lot of social impact and entrepreneurship. So we decided to create this event where we would allow especially if an entrepreneur had an impact, a positive impact on someone, we would stimulate them and we’d give them pretty much everything they needed to become viable.

 

Lova

But what I also had I had weird conversations with people who said why do you focus on helping specific startups who don’t help, you know, here locally, but they help like people in Africa or Asia or Latin America? And my answer was always, well, the whole mission for us was so that we can facilitate and help somebody who can at least help one human life. But you have these diverse reactions.

 

Lova

Obviously we help startups that help locally, but also we want to help startups that, you know, are international or in Africa or in Latin America. So how do you answer people when you’re in that discussion, how do you answer people that say, oh, no, we have enough problems here? I guess the discussions everywhere. For instance, Elon Musk, who’s doing with SpaceX going to Mars and then everybody answering, we have enough problems here on Earth.

 

Lova

Why are we going to Mars? how…

 

Ynzo

Yeah, but at the same time, you know, we can always criticize everybody down to the ground. But I much more take a positive view there. Yes. You could criticize Elon Musk for wanted to go to Mars. At the same time, this guy is putting his balls on the block constantly as an entrepreneur to make sure that within five years time we started driving electric cars that were comfortable and had a long-range, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Ynzo

Right. So, yes, you could criticize social entrepreneurs that are doing something for people on the other side of the world.

 

Ynzo

At the same time, they are doing something for people, period. And yes, we need people to do more for people locally as well. But we need both. We shouldn’t be criticizing everybody constantly that they’re not doing what you want them to do if they are doing something right for the world as a whole. I mean, we need to take a bigger perspective. We are no longer, I mean, we are no longer separate ships on the ocean.

 

Ynzo

I mean, this whole world is intertwined and interconnected. Right. And you see that with the sustainability discussion. Uh, CO2 emissions don’t stick to your country. I mean, they go all over the world. And this is a global issue we need to face. And that has the same thing with global poverty. It’s a global issue. We need to fix, a yes at the local level as well.

 

Lova

So what have you been in those discussions, what do you tell people, do you just say we’re all interconnected?

 

Ynzo

Yes, that’s what I told you. I tell those people as well and I salute these initiatives. And, yes, we need to do it locally and we need to do it globally at the same time. It’s all intertwined.

 

Ynzo

It’s all one big system.

 

Lova

 Sure, now, I like that. I think that’s actually a really good closing. A very positive note as well on making sure, especially during this crisis, to understand that things are local but also international. And we wherever needed, need to help people. I’m extremely excited that you guys are offering your chocolates also online. You’re not promoting or anything, but I love your chocolates, obviously.

 

Lova

So I’ll be ordering some stuff online because everything’s sold out to … [Laughing]

 

Ynzo

[Laughing] Cool, go for it.

 

Lova

Cool,  anything else you have to add? If not, then we’re going to close here.

 

Ynzo

 Let’s close off, I think we covered everything this long…

 

Lova

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming by. If anybody’s interested in becoming a serious friend of Tony’s, I’ll make sure that the links are below. 

 

Ynzo

Perfect

 

Lova

and, yeah, I’m going to sign up as a serious friend for sure. And I’m super excited …

 

Ynzo

sign up petition becomes a serious friend

 

Lova

 I will, I’m super excited that you are here with us. Yeah. Thank you so much.

 

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