Mission and values are important in the business world, and they’re central to everything Seth Goldman has done during the last three decades. In 1998, Goldman left investing to start the beverage company Honest Tea with a former business school professor Barry Nalebuff. In 2011, Coca-Cola bought the less sweet, organic and Fair Trade certified beverage company. Coca-Cola then discontinued the tea line in 2022 (it still produces Honest Kids organic juices), so Goldman started a new value-centered CPG tea brand, Just Ice Tea, later that year. In 2024, Just Ice Tea surpassed $20 million in sales.

I talked to Goldman about creating a successful business based on both customer needs and personal values, and how leaders can ensure their mission is at the core of what their business does. This interview has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CEO newsletter.

I had no previous experience, but I jumped in. I was working at a mutual fund company called Calvert that did socially responsible investing, and I always had that entrepreneurial itch, so I was trying to think about what would be an idea I could get excited about and build an enterprise around.

After giving a presentation in New York City on behalf of Calvert, I went for a run in Central Park. After the run, I was thirsty and went to a beverage cooler. I said, ‘There’s nothing here.’ I was with a friend who I used to run track with. He said there’s lots of drinks. I said, ‘I know, but they’re all the same.’

That idea of making a less sweet drink resonated with me. When I had been in business school, my professor had brought up a case study of Coke versus Pepsi, how they compete and what could be the strategies. We both, at that time, had agreed that there should be a less sweet drink. After that run sparked my memory, I reached out to that professor, Barry Nalebuff, and I said I’m interested in doing something about this idea. He was as well. He had just come back from India where he'd been studying the tea industry, and he’d come up with the name Honest Tea.

It kind of all came together. I left my work at Calvert. I started Honest Tea out of my house. I got an appointment with a Whole Foods buyer. I went in there with five thermoses of tea I made in my kitchen and an empty Snapple bottle I had pasted the label on. And that was my start.

The beverage is the medium for the message. Starting with a less sweet drink is, on its own, an intrinsically better option for people. Especially going back to 1998 when we started, where soft drinks were the largest source of added calories in the American diet, being able to bring a product with dramatically less calories in it was a great starting point.

We had some organic ingredients in the beginning. [In] 1999, we brought the first organic drink. We converted everything over to organic around 2007. That’s all about helping to reduce the amount of persistent chemicals that end up in our ecosystem and our bodies—organic means no chemical pesticides, no chemicals, synthetic chemical fertilizers or herbicides. Then, on top of that, fair trade.

Because we’re sourcing ingredients like tea and sugar, we have the opportunity to choose suppliers that are protecting the rights of the workers, both in terms of the wages they’re paid, but also to uplift those communities by investing back into them. Over the years, we’ve invested in everything from education to healthcare to infrastructure to help these communities become more economically self-sufficient.

The nice thing about all of those three approaches is it’s great if the consumer embraces it and supports it, but they don’t have to. They may just be thirsty and want a great tasting tea. The impact still happens as long as the consumer says, I want the tea, but I’m not going to invest in these things, or I want to invest in these things but I don’t want the tea at all. It’s all part of the same package.

These enterprises are also about employee empowerment. As part of the business model always is employee stock ownership, stock options, that means that all of our employees have the upside of the success in the business. That’s one step towards making employees feel like an owner. The other step is you have to give them empowerment. In order to be empowered, you have to have the information—so transparency in how the business is run, meaning you understand the financial condition of the company. Also, the autonomy, the ability to take action. It’s not just to feel like an owner. You have to be able to control your destiny. If everyone’s just telling you what to do, you don’t own it.

And then accountability, meaning if you succeed, then there's great benefits, whether it's a bonus or promotion. And if you don’t succeed, there’s no bonus, or there may be termination, but whatever it is, there’s transparency around it. I don’t ever want somebody to be fired and not understand why, and I certainly don’t want somebody to get a bonus and not understand why.

First of all, I definitely had to let the news sink in about Honest Tea being discontinued. Honest Kids is still out there thriving, so it wasn’t a total loss. But it wasn’t like as soon as I heard the news, I’m like: I’m getting back in. I had to think about it. It’s real work. Even now that we know what we know, it’s still real work and a real effort. I really had to think about, was it still an opportunity? And was it something I could be excited about?

I was leaning toward that, and the thing that tipped me over was I started to get reached out to by old partners—whether it was retailers or distributors who saw the opportunity, and consumers who wanted to get the tea back. So we’re hearing a lot of that, but the one that really got me was one of our tea gardens reached out and said, we really chose this path with you to invest in organic and fair trade supply chains, and it would be a shame if this decision we made was a failed experiment. For me, that was like, I can’t let that happen. Not to mention the economic impact on those communities.

So we decided. All this, by the way, was just in a matter of two weeks. We got the news in May 2022, and we knew if we were going to do it, we had to be in the market by no later than October. Once we made the decision after that two weeks, we took 90 days to get to market. It was a very fast movement.

We’ve been on the market for two years. We’re now larger than Honest Tea was when Coca-Cola first invested. It’s happened very quickly.

A lot of the fundamentals are there. The values we talked about: less sweet, organic, Fair Trade, those are embedded. What I didn’t mention with Honest Tea is it took time. We didn’t get to be Fair Trade certified at Honest Tea until 2011, so 13 years in. Just Ice Tea, day one, everything was organic and Fair Trade certified. We started from a much stronger mission commitment.

I would say the business and the leadership is more mature—no surprise. More than a third of our team are former Honest Tea employees. I think that’s a good reflection of the values around leading a team. These are not indentured servants. Nobody was obligated to come back, but a lot of our team really wanted to come back and build again.

We moved much more quickly to growth. We skipped a lot of those painful growth years going from zero to $10 million, which during the Honest Tea days was about six years for us to get through that. We basically got there in year one. We are better financed, for sure, but we’re also better informed.

I was a founding board member of [organic baby food brand] Happy Baby, and they sold to Danone around 2012. I had not a lot of free time, but I had new headspace that I could think about doing something new. In 2012, my wife read this article about this company getting started out on the West Coast, Beyond Meat, that was selling plant-based protein. My family has been vegetarian for 18 years. In 2012, when she read this article, she said, Boy, if this company succeeded, that would be a great thing because it sounds like it’s so promising. I just reached out, literally with a blind email saying: I love the sound of what you’re trying to do. If there’s any way I can help, I’d love to.

They needed help. They had heard about and seen my success with other businesses. I got involved as an advisor, and then board member, and then chair of the board. In 2011, [Honest Tea] had sold to Coca-Cola, so I started shifting some of my responsibilities to Coke corporate. Starting in 2015, I got to have a very unusual division of labor. Half of my time was with Honest Tea—Coca-Cola—and half of my time was executive chair of Beyond Meat. That allowed me to be there during some critical growth years, to bring in some new sales leadership, to help take the brand international, to help take the business public.

At the end of 2019, I transitioned to chair of the board, no longer executive chair, and that freed me up to go back and create this new venture.

When we were launching Honest Tea in Europe, I got to know the gentleman who is now the CEO of Tony’s Chocolonely. His name is Douglas Lamont, but at the time I was there, he was running Innocent, a juice brand that Coca-Cola now owns. We got to know each other and both [ran] mission-driven brands operating within a larger system. When Douglas was hired to run Tony’s, he reached out to me and said: This is a business that’s growing quickly. We have a great board, but the board’s job is to represent shareholders. This business, which is so mission-driven, needs somebody to protect the mission. There’s an understanding [the board] should be respecting the mission, but we wanted to create a role where somebody could speak out only for the mission—meaning not accountable to shareholders.

This was a new role, a new model that Tony’s created. And I am happy to continue to take on that role. It’s really been enlightening for me to see different supply chains. A Dutch-based company, how they approach things. I got a chance to travel to Côte d’Ivoire last year, where Tony sources its cocoa, and really understand how it operates on the ground. It is quite different. With tea leaves, I would say we have a high level of confidence about there not being child labor involved because of the way tea leaves are picked and processed. The people picking the tea leaves literally have to come to the weigh station to get paid. It’s not like you could have a child laboring in the field, and then someone else brings the tea leaves to the station. With cocoa, it’s much more dispersed. There’s cooperatives that are spread out over miles. So somebody comes in on a motorcycle with a bag of cocoa, you don’t know who’s been picking those beans.

Tony’s has had to invest in a much more comprehensive system to monitor what’s going on. And even though they do, there’s still the prevalence of child labor. It’s much lower in the Tony’s supply chain, but they don’t claim there’s zero child labor. They seek to lower it, and it’s dramatically lower at their cooperative partners than in the rest of the country. But it still exists. It’s not about whether it exists, it’s how you address it.

For me, that’s the motivation for all this. I enjoy what I’m doing and I like the work, but for me, there’s not a motivation just to make money. It’s really thinking about: How do we deploy the markets to make a difference in the world and to make people’s lives better, whether it’s making them healthier, or make the planet better. I believe in doing it through market-based mechanisms. I’m not asking for any subsidies or charity. I’m just taking the challenge of finding ways to create value for consumers, and for these enterprises and for shareholders by trying to infuse values into the way we operate these businesses. And, I should say, also create value for our employees as well.

We used to have the [first] Honest Tea business plan online. We put in a statement around aspirations for social responsibility. At that time, we had no idea what we were going to be building, but we did put this statement in that we were always going to try to do things right by the environment, right by the stakeholders—whether they’re the employees or the people in the supply chain. That statement really reads through even today, and certainly captured what Honest Tea was about, and it still captures what we’re about at Just Ice Tea.

Starting with intention is really important, because it’s very hard to retrofit. Seeing people create businesses and say: How do I make this socially responsible? The right time to ask that is not 10 years in. It’s in the beginning. We make it clear whenever we’re raising capital what we’re doing. You don’t want to have somebody invest thinking we’re going to be out there selling volume at the lowest price, and then they say: You’re buying Fair Trade, which costs more. It’s a different strategy.

We have to be transparent with our shareholders and our employees about what we stand for. By the way, that’s served us well. It’s not like we’re trying to hide anything. [We’re transparent] when we meet with buyers as well. I had a great meeting with a national restaurant chain, and the first thing I showed in my presentation was a sourcing video from Mozambique, where we’ve been investing in that community. The woman I was meeting with was almost in tears, like: This is beautiful. We want to be part of this.

That’s how we operate. I firmly believe in being transparent with that. Not exploiting it like it’s a fashion thing. It’s core to what we’re doing, and we declare this is who we are and what we stand for.

This underlines the importance of believing in what you’re doing. I believed that plant-based meat is important for human health and for planetary health, back when I reached out to [Beyond Meat founder and CEO] Ethan Brown in 2012. I don’t believe any less in it. I believe even more in it. It’s challenging to go through that kind of high hype moment and moments of challenge, but what fuels you is the belief. It’s great when you can have the belief and hypergrowth come together. That’s exhilarating and energizing. It’s challenging when they separate, and you learn who really believes in it or who’s just there for the [ride].

The other thing is, as much as we’ve had these moments of challenge, it hasn’t made me any less confident about the long-term opportunity. If something changed, let’s say some competition emerged and I said, ‘Wow, that’s a better option,’ I’ll just tip my hat to those folks. That’s not what happened. We needed to go back and strengthen our proposition and our messaging.

It’s obviously hard to anticipate. I don’t think about the exit outcome. I think about how to create value with what we’re building right now. I’m not even going to consider different ownership options with Just Ice Tea until we’re well over $100 million in sales. I feel like I see that path for us happening pretty immediately, and we need to grow it with all the force that we’ve brought to it.

I do believe in scale as a key vehicle for change, meaning I’m not trying to create a nice model to show others how it can be done. I want something that drives change itself. But I also don’t feel like I need to own these things forever.

An interesting postscript on Honest Tea: It’s disappointing that it got discontinued, but the one consolation was that it wasn’t a compromisable brand. Honest Tea stood for organic, Fair Trade, less sweet, and there was never an attempt by Coca-Cola to try to dilute that. To me, that’s a better way for a brand to disappear than to start whittling away at it: make it sweeter, less organic, less Fair Trade.

When I look at Honest Kids, I still have a great deal of pride in seeing that brand grow. Honest Kids now is in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Subway, Chick-fil-A, Cava and Sweetgreen. Its integrity is fully intact. It’s still organic, low calorie, and for millions of Americans, it is democratizing organic. It’s the first organic product for millions of Americans because when they go to McDonald’s, they’re not saying: Let’s go find an organic drink. And all of a sudden, here it is. When I was part of it, we were selling over 200 million units of Honest Kids at McDonald’s a year. It’s a 35-calorie drink that replaced an 80-calorie drink. That’s a 45-calorie differential, times 200 million units. You’re removing just under a billion calories in the American diet every year, just through having Honest Kids there. Getting to scale is important to really drive change.

The first thing is you’ve got to do some of your own personal reflection about what are the values that really drive you? Just like I was talking about with Beyond Meat, if I was only marginally caring about this stuff, it would’ve been very easy to just say, all right, I’ve had a good ride. I’m going to step away. What are the values and causes that are going to motivate you, even in a challenging moment, for business? Or if you say there's no financial payoff, if you were launching a nonprofit, what would be the causes that you would want your nonprofit to address?

Obviously that’s important for a founder, but it’s also important for an employee, too. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve interviewed over the years who’ll say: I’m really excited about these causes you have. I care so much about them. And then I’d say: Did you work in any capacity to address them? It doesn’t have to be in your for-profit work. In some cases, they say: I worked in a food bank and was trying to make healthier options available, or I work in a community garden.

The work that people do, how they earn their living, is usually where most of their time is spent. And so it’s wonderful when what you care about aligns with how you’re spending most of your time.

Is there anything else you wanted to add?

Building brands, interacting with consumers and creating that brand love is a fun thing to do. Brands are so personal. Whether it’s Tony’s or Just Ice Tea or Beyond Meat or PLNT Burger, people do get very attached to these brands. Sometimes, they put tattoos on their butt, literally, but other times they make it part of their own lifestyle and they use it as it’s a reflection of their values.

When I was building [Honest Tea], one of my board members was Jeff Swartz, who was the CEO of Timberland. I remember walking with him one day, and we walked by somebody who had a Timberland hat on. He didn’t say anything [at first], but then he says: I can never get over that. This person feels so attached to my brand that they wear it on their body. What could be more intimate than that?

Then I realized, and I thought about it, I said: People take my brand and they put it in their body. That’s what’s more intimate.

Building that connection with consumers can be so powerful. But it’s also a serious task. There’s a trust your consumer has when they put something in their body. You have to live up to that. That’s a very serious obligation we take on. It doesn’t mean our messaging has to be serious. We have to make it fun and inviting and colorful and all those things. But for me, that’s a really wonderfully challenging creative process.