Saving The World, One Chocolate Bar At A Time

With a recession in full swing, the CEO of Divine Chocolate has her work cut out for her.

Erin Gorman always wanted to help save the world, but she never imagined she would do it with chocolate.

While at Ursinus College, a small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, Gorman majored in philosophy and English, but her goal was to help bridge the divide between the rich and the disadvantaged. "I was always interested in dealing with poverty issues," she says. "But at that age, I didn't have a clearer thought than that."

In 1997, her ambitious plans led her to American University in Washington, D.C., for a master's degree in public policy, with a special interest in prison reform. But after several personal talks with inmates, she kept coming back to one idea: Poverty was the main reason people ended up in prison. "I realized if you didn't address the root cause, you would never solve problem," she says.

After graduation, a version of Gorman's dreams came to pass when she took a job as program director with Washington, D.C.-based Green America (formerly Co-Op America), an organization that lobbies companies to become more socially responsible and environmentally friendly. Her particular interest was in addressing poverty through economic reforms, such as finding ways for Third-World farmers to get fair prices for their crops.

That made her a perfect fit for London-based Divine Chocolate, a fair trade company with $25 million in sales partly owned by the very farmers in Ghana who harvest the cocoa. In 2005, Divine UK had been in business for seven years and wanted to expand into the U.S. Gorman, now 35 and married, was tapped to secure investors, which she did while keeping her day job at Green America. "There were about two years when I didn't sleep," she jokes.

In 2007, after securing financing for the Washington, D.C.-based Divine US from fair trade advocate Lutheran World Relief and micro-lender Oiko Credit, Gorman told Divine UK's managing director Sophi Tranchell that it was time to hire a CEO for the new company. Tranchell replied, "We thought you could do it."

Gorman's lack of retail experience didn't bother Tranchell, who had run Divine UK since 1999. What she wanted was someone who was passionate about the cause. "If you really believe that the chocolate is good and that what the farmers get is good, then you can be really persuasive when you need to be," says Tranchell, who even saw Gorman's business naïveté as an advantage: "She's able to ask any question and not be embarrassed about not knowing the answer."
With no experience running a company, Gorman was hesitant at first. "If you had told me one day I'd be running a company, I would have said you were joking. I thought businesspeople were old men."


Source : Forbes