By Ryan Honeyman
A few weeks ago, I shared a LinkedIn post about my interview with Douglas Lamont, CEO of Tony’s Chocolonely.
I opened with a deliberately bold claim: In my opinion, Tony’s Chocolonely belongs in the same conversation about corporate credibility as Patagonia.
I still stand by that. I pointed, among other things, to Tony’s legal Mission Lock, which is designed to protect the company’s purpose; Tony’s Open Chain, which other chocolate companies can join; and the company’s work to drive policy change through the UK’s Better Business Act.
It didn’t seem like a particularly controversial claim to me. I was wrong.
The post generated nearly 104,000 impressions and reached more than 77,000 people. It quickly came to account for the vast majority of all my LinkedIn impressions over the previous 12 months.
By contrast, I didn’t see any comparable increase in listeners to the podcast interview with Tony’s CEO. That suggested that many people were reacting to the comparison between Tony’s and Patagonia without necessarily engaging with the arguments behind it.
First came Tony’s supporters:
“I love Tony’s.”
“Aren’t they amazing?”
Then came the critics, with much sharper questions. They asked about Tony’s relationships with conventional cocoa producers, the company’s pricing and traceability claims, how much real power cocoa farmers actually have, and whether Tony’s high visibility risks overshadowing smaller companies working on more fundamental forms of change.
I invited Seth Goldman, one of Tony’s three so-called Mission Guardians, to respond to the criticism. He didn’t join the thread, which by that point had become pretty chaotic. One person even wrote that my post looked like a paid advertisement.
I responded to almost every comment. That probably helped keep the post alive. The more intense the discussion became, the further LinkedIn’s algorithm carried it.
But the interesting part wasn’t that the post went viral. Beneath the debate about chocolate was a much bigger disagreement about how we actually create systems change.
The disagreement beneath the disagreement
On the surface, the discussion was about cocoa and chocolate.
Underneath it was a disagreement I encounter again and again in the B Corp movement and among people working for social and economic change:
Should we change the economy by getting large companies to improve their practices and influence markets and value chains at scale?
Or does real systems change require us to build smaller, locally rooted, regenerative and structurally different businesses outside the dominant system?
The problem arises when we see these two strategies as opposites. Because we need both.
The most useful model I have found for understanding this tension is the Two Loops model, based on the work of Deborah Frieze and Margaret Wheatley at the Berkana Institute. At LIFT Economy, we use the model to describe the transition to what we call the Next Economy.
Imagine two curves.
The first represents the dominant economy, which grows, peaks and eventually begins to decline.
The second represents something new emerging underneath it: worker-owned businesses, regenerative agriculture, steward ownership, locally controlled capital and non-extractive forms of finance. Models that don’t simply seek to reduce harm, but also change who owns, governs and benefits from the value created by the economy.
The Two Loops model describes two different roles in this transition.
One is the hospice worker.
Hospice workers seek to reduce harm within the systems we already have. They help extractive institutions change – or wind down – in more responsible ways.
One example might be a company like Walmart, using its enormous purchasing power to promote renewable energy and reduce emissions across a global value chain.
The other role is the midwife.
Midwives help new economic models come into the world. This could be an Indigenous-owned regenerative business such as Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm, or other businesses that build ownership, governance and value distribution in fundamentally different ways.
Neither role can create the transition alone.
Hospice work can make an unjust system less harmful without changing its underlying structures.
Midwife work can create beautiful and visionary alternatives, but those alternatives can remain small while millions of people continue to be exposed to the harms of the economy we actually live in.
Once you see the two curves, the fight over Tony’s – and many similar debates among people who ultimately want the same things – becomes easier to understand.
Tony’s works within the existing system
Tony’s Chocolonely did not leave the global commodity economy to create a small, vertically integrated and entirely alternative cocoa model.
It stayed inside the machine.
Tony’s works with large cooperatives, processors, manufacturers and retailers. The company therefore uses much of the same infrastructure as the rest of the chocolate industry.
What Tony’s is trying to change, however, is what happens within that infrastructure.
Its five sourcing principles include traceable cocoa, prices set against a living-income benchmark, stronger cooperatives, long-term purchasing commitments, and investment in quality and productivity.
Through Tony’s Open Chain, competing brands can adopt the entire model. Tony’s is therefore not trying to protect its sourcing model as a competitive advantage. As Douglas Lamont put it in our conversation, the idea is to collaborate in the supply chain and compete on the shelf.
This does not give cocoa farmers ownership of the chocolate industry. It does not eliminate their dependence on the commodity market. And it does not, by itself, undo the colonial history and underlying power structures of the global cocoa sector.
But it does change the contractual terms and prices for cocoa purchased through Tony’s Open Chain.
When large companies enter into longer-term agreements and pay higher prices, producers can feel the difference. It does not transform the cocoa sector on its own. But it is not nothing, either.
The critics were asking the midwife’s questions
The critics of my original comparison raised a different set of questions – and equally necessary ones:
Do cocoa farmers have real influence – or simply better terms within a system that is still owned and controlled by others?
Where does the economic value accumulate?
Is the industry moving towards local ownership and control – or simply towards a slightly less exploitative commodity economy?
And does Tony’s visibility risk drawing attention away from smaller, farmer-led businesses working on more fundamental changes to ownership and power?
One side of the debate was asking how we can improve the enormous global cocoa market that exists today.
The other was asking why we should celebrate an intervention that leaves so much of the underlying structure unchanged.
Both sides of the debate are necessary.
Yet the two positions often end up in a trench war. Those working with large companies and scale can dismiss more transformative projects as too small to matter. And those building alternatives can dismiss any compromised improvement as greenwashing.
Both sides then mistake their part of the map for the whole landscape.
Tony’s sits between the curves
The hospice-and-midwife metaphor has its limitations, too. It would nevertheless be too simplistic to place Tony’s squarely in the hospice role.
Tony’s is not simply helping the existing cocoa economy die in a less harmful way. The company is both trying to improve the existing industry and developing structures that could point towards a different kind of economy.
Tony’s Mission Lock places a special share in an independent trust overseen by three Mission Guardians. Their role is to protect the company’s purpose, even if ownership or leadership changes.
As Douglas Lamont said in our interview: “This mission isn’t going to be solved in a year or two. We’re talking about 20 or 30 years of work.”
At the same time, Tony’s supports the UK’s Better Business Act, which seeks to change the legal responsibilities of companies, and makes its sourcing model available as shared infrastructure for the industry.
Tony’s therefore sits between the two curves. The company is improving practices within the existing industry while also experimenting with new forms of governance, collaboration and policy.
That is probably true of many purpose-driven companies. They occupy the difficult space between the economy we have and the economy they want to help create.
The B Corp movement faces the same dilemma
The same tension runs through the entire B Corp movement.
Should B Corp certification be reserved for a relatively small group of companies with fundamentally transformative ownership and business models?
Or should it create an ambitious but realistic pathway that larger and more conventional businesses can also follow?
Douglas Lamont argues strongly for the big tent.
Large companies control value chains, jobs, capital, emissions and political influence. A movement that cannot influence them will struggle to change the economy at scale.
But the midwife’s warning is equally important.
A large, conventionally owned company that makes credible improvements is not the same as a worker-owned cooperative, a steward-owned company or a regenerative business built around local wealth and control – even if they carry the same B Corp certification.
At its best, the B Corp movement is one of the few places where companies from both curves can belong to the same community, measure themselves against a shared level of ambition and sit at the same tables.
Certification cannot tell us exactly where a company sits on the two curves. But part of its value may be keeping these two forms of change work in relationship with one another – rather than leaving them in separate rooms, criticising each other from a distance.
That requires both a high bar and a big tent.
Lower the bar, and B Corp risks becoming a marketing community.
Make the tent too small, and the movement risks becoming a narrow identity for companies that are already convinced, with limited influence on the wider economy.
What I learned from the LinkedIn fight
My original comparison between Tony’s and Patagonia compressed several different questions about scale, evidence, ownership, governance and systems change into a single categorical judgement.
I still believe Tony’s belongs in a serious conversation about corporate credibility, purpose protection, collective action and the transformation of global value chains.
But my conclusion is now more precise:
Tony’s is doing serious work to reduce harm and improve conditions at scale. At the same time, the company is experimenting with new forms of governance, collaboration and policy influence that reach beyond hospice work.
That does not change the fact that we still need more farmer-led and structurally transformative businesses that can show what a fundamentally different cocoa economy could look like.
One side of the LinkedIn fight was asking how we improve a huge industry that exists today.
The other was asking what an entirely different cocoa economy could become.
The path to the Next Economy embraces both questions.
Ryan Honeyman is a partner and worker-owner at the consulting firm LIFT Economy and co-author of The B Corp Handbook and The Next Economy MBA. This article is an adapted version of his original piece.
