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“What happened between us in our personal relationship in the past is history,” he said in a statement. “The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.”

Under AEA’s watch, Burt’s Bees products expanded into stores like CVS, Walgreens and Target. AEA hired Mr. Replogle from Unilever, where he was general manager for the company’s North American skin care business, to be chief executive. This fall, AEA accepted Clorox’s bid. Ms. Quimby sold her remaining 20 percent share in Burt’s Bees to Clorox for about $183 million.
Ms. Quimby, 57, now runs Happy Green Bee, a company that makes organic clothing for children. She says she spent more than $50 million to buy 100,000 acres where she tries to restore the land to its natural state by blocking hunting, closing roads and dismantling bridges.

In the meantime, the task of defending Clorox’s purchase of Burt’s Bees has fallen on Mr. Replogle’s shoulders. He says that in six months, he will post a blog on the Burt’s Bees site about whether he thinks Clorox is making enough progress on its green initiatives. He says Burt’s Bees’ 380 employees have an opportunity to influence the direction of Clorox, a company that generated $4.8 billion in sales last year and employs 7,800 people.

Burt’s Bees maintains its founders’ green philosophies. Employees’ bonuses are based in part on how well the company meets energy conservation goals, and there are prime parking spaces for staff members who drive hybrid cars or carpool. It buys offsets for 100 percent of its carbon emissions and is working toward a goal of sending no trash to landfills by 2020.

Mr. Replogle calls his current job a “mission” and says he is trying to reinvent business with an idea he calls “the Greater Good,” based on the founders’ ideals. The premise is that if companies are socially responsible, profit will follow. Burt’s Bees not only prioritizes the natural origin of its ingredients but also emphasizes animal rights, responsible trade, employee benefits and the environment.

Like most natural-products companies, Burt’s Bees has the luxury of charging enough for its goods to pay for such causes. A 0.15-ounce tube of Burt’s Bees basic lip balm, for example, costs $3. The same-size tube of ChapStick, which uses synthetic ingredients, costs $1.69.

Burt’s Bees is not perfect, Mr. Replogle acknowledges. The company obtains all of its beeswax from hives in Ethiopia, so shipping the ingredient across the Atlantic adds to carbon emissions.

LATELY, Burt’s Bees has started to police its industry. The company’s research lab is full of competitors’ products labeled “natural,” and employees of Burt’s Bees test those assertions.

Burt’s Bees has also led a group of companies that have teamed up with the Natural Products Association to create a standard for natural personal care products, complete with stickers to label items that make the cut. To qualify, brands must create products that are at least 95 percent natural and contain no ingredients known to be harmful. The stickers will make their debut in April.

Consumers “walk down the aisle in the grocery stores’ health and beauty area, and they’re confronted with ‘natural’ at every turn,” says Daniel Fabricant, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the association. “We just don’t want to see the term misused any longer.”

To prove his own bona fides, Mr. Replogle grabs a bottle of Burt’s Bees avocado butter hair treatment, squeezes some onto his finger and dramatically licks it off. He then passes the tube to two Clorox executives so they can have a taste.

“If you can’t put it into your mouth, you shouldn’t put it on your skin,” he says. “I’d like to see other companies do that.”

Clorox says it is reshaping its product mix so that more of its products will be eco-friendly by its 100th anniversary in 2013. Two weeks ago, the company introduced Green Works, household cleaning solutions labeled as 99 percent natural. The last 1 percent consists of preservatives and fragrances.

Clorox says Green Works is more natural than all other cleaning products.
“It is the standard-setter,” says Beth Springer, vice president for strategy and growth at Clorox.

Green Works products are so new that outside groups have had little time to evaluate the company’s assertions. But Clorox says it believes that consumers will pay more for natural products. So, while they may be more expensive to produce, they will also be more profitable. Clorox research recently found that 53 percent of consumers planned to buy more eco-friendly products this year and that 47 percent were willing to pay 20 percent to 25 percent premiums for them.

While Clorox has decided to keep its brand off of Burt’s Bees products, its name is on the Green Works cleaning line.

“We spent a lot of time talking with consumers who wanted to keep their homes clean and healthy but wanted more natural alternatives,” Ms. Springer says. “And they confessed in most cases they were disappointed with having to pay more for products that didn’t work. So we concluded that we would initially bring it out with the Clorox brand name endorsing it because it gave people a belief in its efficacy.”

Then she lapses into Burt’s Bees speak as she continues.

“If we think about the Greater Good,” Ms. Springer says, “one lesson we’ve learned is, if you set your mind to the goal of more natural and sustainable practices, you might actually surprise yourself with what you can accomplish.”

It’s Mead making time…

This year at our annual meeting in Marshalltown on November 7th & 8th ; I’d like to have a mead judging contest. So if you are a mead maker or would like to try to make mead to bring to the meeting, it’s time to get started. If you never made mead, where do you start? I get all of my supplies for wine and mead at www.midwestsupplies.com , or you can do a Google search for mead recipes; or if your not into using the computer just call me and I’ll bee happy to send you some things to help you get started.

We are planning to do things a little different this year, and not have the Marshalltown Convention and Visitors Bureau help us with wine, cheese and crackers. We will bee using the mead for our social hr. and still have the cheese and crackers, and we will have enough to go around for everyone. (If we don’t receive enough mead, we will use other home made wines)

The three categories for the mead judging (at this time) are: dry mead, sweet mead, cyser, and few others I haven’t thought of yet. Any suggestions let me know.

So, if you would like to have your mead judged, bring it to the annual meeting for the mead judging contest. Or you may just bring your mead for the social hour. Please call or email me and let me know what you can bring, and remember, this is all just for fun! BEE HAPPY! PAT ENNIS

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