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If you believe passionately in a product or service then the chances are that other people will too. This was the essential message delivered to the London Business Forum (LBF) by Craig Sams and Josephine Fairley, the co-founders of organic chocolate company Green & Black’s. The pair had come to the Lewis Media Centre on Millbank to extol the virtues of being virtuous, arguing that being good doesn’t exclude you from being rich. They’d also come to hand out armfuls of free chocolate: dark and intensely bittersweet dark slabs, and moreish bars of milk chocolate with none of the sickly processed flavour we’ve come to associate with British pocket-money fayre.

“From the beginning, our strategy has always been to give away as much chocolate as we could,” Fairley said. “I mean we do sort of privately joke when we hand somebody a bar of chocolate, the first bar is always free. And actually over the last 14 years or so, we have given away over £2m worth of chocolate. But it was the best investment in our future that we could possibly make, because we knew that each square of chocolate would – as it did to me when I found it on Craig’s desk – actually speak a thousand words.”

Fairley’s eureka moment took place in 1989. She and Sams had just moved in with each other after a whirlwind romance. He was an established entrepreneur who had launched his own macrobiotic restaurant, written several books on diet and health and manufactured his own organic peanut butter, among other exotic foods and drinks. She was a prodigious journalist who had become the UK’s youngest magazine editor aged 23, after a public-school education of little academic study and much righteous indignation over green issues.

Sams’ ‘Whole Earth’ peanut butter was a multi-million pound brand with a 20% share of its market. But, as he knew from bitter experience, it was still vulnerable to large competitors. His Harmony Foods company was the first to the UK market with many products such as brown rice, no-added-sugar jams and carbonated fruit juice drinks, but its advantage in each case had always been eroded quickly by imitators with massive marketing budgets.

“So perhaps inevitably, in 1989, Nestle launched ‘Whole Nut’,” he recalled. “The label artwork looked like ours. The name sounded like ‘Whole Earth’. And the recipe emulated ours, leaving the skins of the nuts on. Visiting a supermarket buyer at that time was like seeing your own funeral unwinding before your very eyes. They knew this would probably be your last visit to see them. They’d seen the storyboards for Nestlé’s £5m TV advertising launch that was coming soon.”

Sams retaliated by purchasing his own mainstream advertising for the first time – carriage posters on the London Underground – and somehow managed to see off the threat (Nestlé wound up the “Whole Nut” brand five years later). But then he lost his only souce of organic peanuts, as his Paraguayan producer became unreliable. It was while considering an alternative group of farmers in Togo, West Africa, that he was sent a sample of 70% cocoa solids chocolate, made from organic cocoa beans.

“When I tasted those samples, this light bulb went off in my head, and I said, ‘Oh my god, this is the best chocolate I've ever tasted.’” Fairley recalled. The pair began to fantasise about what they might call their chocolate company, if it were ever founded, and decided on Green & Black’s because this sounded like an old and venerable family business.

Immediately, they then drew up a wrapper design. It seemed a good first attempt, but a design agency called Pearl Fisher would later call Fairley and tell that although they loved G&B’s chocolate, they hated its packaging. Sams was sceptical of design agencies, but agreed to look at this company’s suggestions on a no-win, no-fee basis, and was won over. The evolution of G&B’s packaging would become critical to its success, Fairley said, especially when the text was given a “portrait” aspect on each bar (i.e. aligned with its narrow edges). This not only differentiated the brand at the point of sale but also made better use of shelf space.

The first import of 20,000 bars arrived in the middle of a heatwave, and almost melted. Then a bigger problem reared its head: “The natural food trade, interestingly, was quite resistant [to the product],” Fairley explained, “because Craig had done such a fantastic job of telling them that sugar was evil incarnate.”

However, G&B was about to see its good fortune snowball. While Sams and Fairley aimed at niche/premium sellers such as delicatessens, Lady Sainsbury tasted one of their chocolate bars at a dinner party and persuaded her husband to stock it in his eponymous supermarket chain.

“We got it into 12 stores, and then 20, and then 70,” Fairley said. “We were rolling, because at that point actually all of the supermarkets aspired to be Sainsbury’s. Pretty soon we also got it into Safeway… All without ever going to see a buyer.” Fairley’s press experience also helped considerably, as journalists flocked to tell their readers about the benefits of G&B’s products to the suppliers of its raw materials.

By this stage, Sams had moved production to Belize, where there were fewer political risks. Here, a US aid project designed to support cocoa planting “had left the farmers with huge debts that they were unable to repay because the expected income disappeared when Hershey, which was their customer, dropped the price it paid for cocoa beans from $1.75 a pound to $0.55 a pound, just as the trees were starting to really flourish and produce cacao.”

G&B offered an alternative deal to local cacao growers association: a five-year rolling contract with a fixed minimum price of $1.75 a pound, plus a raft of other benefits. “We gave them help to obtain organic certification,” Sams said. “We gave [the growers association] a $20,000 cash advance, so that when a farmer brought in cocoa beans, they didn’t get a chit or an IOU, they actually got real cash. [And] we trained key co-op members in management, accounting, correct fermentation and quality control, to ensure that our organic cocoa beans tasted better than anyone else’s, and so that [the farmers] would always be compliant with the Soil Association requirements.”

G&B began to expand fast – too fast in fact, at a rate of about 100% per year. So, by 1998, Sams and Fairley realised they needed a partner. They sold 25% of their equity to New Covent Garden Soup (NCGS), a company that shared their taste for organic food and their Fair Trade values. NCGS brought a great deal of discipline to the G&B operation, Sams said, and “traded the brand hard”. Nevertheless, he adds, “we never forgot [to support] independent health food shops.” G&B managed its pricing structure to ensure the independents wouldn’t end up at a disadvantage to big chains such as Sainsbury’s. At the same time, it splashed out on advertising for the first time, used all sorts of promotions to raise public awareness, such as organising tastings in collaboration with sommeliers, and even running an advertorial in Glamour magazine.

There has since been a cascade of benefits for the Mayan growers, as Sams and Fairley proudly revealed. For example: the local rivers are running cleaner, thanks to the introduction of organic farming techniques; the farmers are no longer dependent on government help and have actually been able to keep their reservation land intact; an increasing number of tourists are being drawn to the area, many out of curiosity to see where their G&B chocolate originated; the local education systems and facilities have improved dramatically; and many farmers have been able to improve their properties and expand their businesses.

The pair eventually sold G&B in 2005, to Cadbury’s, the chocolate behemoth. “There isn’t a single case in history where a pioneer producer has become the dominant producer in the category they created,” said Sams wistfully, quoting the late management guru Peter Drucker. “You could say that my entire business career has been about proving him right.” Nevertheless, G&B is now the world’s number-one organic chocolate brand. “In Waitrose, our sales of chocolate are now higher than Cadbury’s or Waitrose’s own label,” Sams added, “and our profits are running at a respectable close to 10% of turnover.”

Multinationals can’t recreate authenticity, he pointed out, but they can buy it in, provided they’re willing to respect the founding values of the businesses they acquire or – better still – improve their own standards as a result. “Our job now is … to keep the faith with our pioneer customers,” Sams said, “the people who proudly say, ‘I first had Green and Black’s in 1991’ with the same emotion you get from people who say, ‘Oh, I heard the Beatles at the Cavern Club.’”

The sale value of G&B was rumoured to be £20m, but Sams and Fairley haven’t put their feet up. In Easter 2005, they bought a bakery in Hastings, East Sussex, called Judges, and “turned it organic”. Then they opened a seven-days-a-week delicatessen, which has since won awards and, more gratifyingly to its owners, has persuaded customers that they “can use a local shop and still keep their bills down.” Next they are opening a “wellbeing centre” that will offer complementary therapies. And Sams is working on a charcoal manufacturing business called Carbon Gold, which will use organic farming techniques to sequester carbon dioxide.

Such is the good life for Sams and Fairley, who work like a tag-team on stage as they surely must do in business – feeding off one another’s ideas and enthusiasm. What with their macrobiotic diet, which Sams claims has enabled him to “never seek medical help for anything,” it’s difficult to imagine them ever retiring.