Stonyfield Farms and ClimateCounts.org

Of all companies whose organic-ness you may be tempted to dismiss as marketing ploy or otherwise appeasement of a growing demand for environmental and health concern, Stonyfield Farm, purveyors of tasty and organic yogurt, is beyond such skepticism for two reasons. Their marketing, from cool branding to the wide-open story-telling of their organic practices (check out the Bovine Blog) is too good by traditional measures to need a folksy ploy for organic attention.

And they're thorough. "For a Healthy Planet" isn't just a lone link of the homepage and a banner tag on each yogurt container. Stonyfield goes much deeper, getting involved in student lunch reform, openly opposing artificial bovine, supporting Recycline and more.

Stonyfield is a compelling entrepreneurial tale even strictly in a business sense, but they've been a sustainable success for a long time (see this 1998 Inc. story on the company and founder/CEO Gary Hirshberg's mission.) And I haven't mentioned their greatest Optimist success.

ClimateCounts.org is a Stonyfield- (and Hirshberg-) lead collaboration aiming to build consumer awareness and corporate cooperation on the impact of business on climate change. Among other activities, ClimateCounts scores (based on self-reporting) a bunch of companies in 8 industries on their climate change impact and awareness. In Food Products, Sara Lee is "Stuck" with a score of 2 (!) while Stonyfield ranks itself as the second-highest "Strider" (63) behind Unilever (71). In four categories of grading (Review, Reduce, Policy Stance and Report), Stonyfield docked itself most in Reduce. (After all, even the most conscientious food packager is still a mass packager.)

Canon is the high ranker so far at 77.