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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Today I am going to tell you a very personal story. A number of years ago, we were invited to visit with one of the world's foremost actors, humanitarians, an individual with the most twinkling, piercing blue eyes. It was Paul Newman. He had just founded the committee to encourage corporate philanthropy, and his company, Newman's Own was looking for a partner that might help to advance the awareness and sales of his Newman's Own food company.
Well, today we're going to take that story further. My conversation is with Alex Amouyel. She's the president and CEO of the Newman's Own Foundation. And interestingly, the Newman's Own Foundation actually owns Newman's Own, because when Paul sadly died in 2008, he donated the company to the foundation. Well, over the years, since 1982, the company, through giving its profit from its sales, has raised over $600 million, $600 million that has been given to grantees of all different types through the foundation. My conversation with Alex is going to talk about how the foundation is advancing today, the type of work that it is doing, its principles to, "Give it all away." So join me for this amazing conversation. It's delicious, it's inspiring, and as Paul always said, "Join in to help raise some hell." So let's get started. So welcome to the show, Alex, and we are going to find out all about you.
Alex Amouyel:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Carol. Delighted to be here.
Carol Cone:
So I just want to start out, so I went into my refrigerator and look what I found. And she's going, yes, I love. It's Newman's Own balsamic vinegar. Love it, love it. I'm not going to have it quite now. I'll have it on my salad at lunch. And I have been a fan of Newman's Own basically ever since it was formed because I've been involved in social impact for so many decades. And so when one of my colleagues, Talia Bosch said, "Hey, you should have Alex on the show, they're doing amazing things." We reached out and she was absolutely wonderful. I think you responded the same day. So this is great to have you. So let's just get into your background, Alex. Why is your work for CGI and MIT Solve and now you're at Newman's Own, why is your background... It's almost the perfect job.
Alex Amouyel:
Thank you. Thank you for saying that. And yes, I do think it's the perfect job for me. I think throughout career, which started many years ago, first at BCG and then at Save the Children, then the Clinton Global Initiative and MIT Solve, I've been really interested in how do people and organizations, how can they have the most impact using the resources that they have? And through notably MIT Solve, that really led me to think about innovation, social entrepreneurship, for-profit social entrepreneurs all around the world, non-profit social entrepreneurs all around the world. How do you get financing to them? How do you support them as they grow? But obviously, a major model, when you think of social entrepreneurship that has been in existence for over 40 years is Newman's Own Foundation.
And I wrote about it. I wrote a book called The Answer Is You: A Guidebook to Creating a Life Full of Impact. And there's a chapter in that about how to think about your giving, your investing, your purchasing. So how everyday people can think about how they're using their money as opposed to volunteering, their skills, their career. Those are other chapters. But how can you use your money to have an impact? And I wrote a few sentences about greenwashing and some of the issues with sustainable brands. They're not that sustainable. But then I commended Newman's Own Foundation as saying this one is one of the examples of the few examples of companies doing this really right. Because in fact, the food company is owned by the foundation, and thus, 100% of the profits and royalties from the sale of a product go to the foundation and service of its mission. So when I see that you have some Newman's Own salad dressing in your refrigerator, I say thank you for your donation, because as a consumer of our products, you're in fact one of our donors.
Carol Cone:
No, we love that. And I think, gosh, for 20, 30 years. So that's even better. Can you talk about just the founding of Newman's Own and where the idea came from? I mean, it's so lovely. And we will put in the show notes links to the website. There's a beautiful video about Paul and Hotch, his partner, and how it came about.
Alex Amouyel:
Absolutely. So Paul Newman with his friend Hotch, A.E. Hotchner, founded Newman's Own back in 1982. Paul was the young age of 57, so a relatively late bloomer into entrepreneurship, but as we all know, he was a award-winning actor and race car driver by that time. So he'd been busy already. And he was famously pretty obsessed with salad dressing. There are stories of him coming to the restaurant requesting olive oil and vinegar and making his own dressing at the table. And the story goes that he and Hotch started making salad dressing and decanting it into old wine bottles that they gave away one Christmas to their friends in the Westport. He was a long time resident of Westport, Connecticut. And so they gave these wine bottles away to their friends. And by February their friends were knocking on the door for more. And so they decided they should go into the business that they knew nothing about, which was selling salad dressing. They put in $40,000 of their own money at the time and then found a bottler, started getting it into stores. For anybody who's in Connecticut, they would probably know Stew Leonard's was the first store to-
Carol Cone:
Oh, love Stew Leonard's.
Alex Amouyel:
... carry them. And it snowballed from there. The first year they made $300,000 in profit. That's pretty great. And then it just continued growing and growing and they added different products based on... Paul also hated that pasta sauce had a lot of sugar in and wanted to come back to really tomatoes and olive oil as a base and things like that. So it went from there. And it's pretty amazing that from the very beginning, Paul wanted to give all the money away. And so any profit they made at the end of the year, Paul would go and write checks to different organizations as he went. So from the very beginning, it was a company that didn't keep any of the profits. It was all to do good in the world.
Carol Cone:
We did go visit the foundation some years ago, and there were thousands of little tiny grants. And I know over the years that you've gotten more focused helping kids who face adversity. And you've given away over $600 million, is my understanding, since 1982, which is extraordinary. So can you talk a little bit about... First I want to ask you, do you have a favorite story that you can recount about Paul that's been handed down from individuals who know him? I'm just curious about that.
Alex Amouyel:
I obviously didn't meet him. I joined the foundation two years ago, almost to this day. End of the month is my two-year anniversary.
Carol Cone:
Congratulations.
Alex Amouyel:
We have an archive of some Paul Newman videos talking about the foundation, also talking about the SeriousFun Children's Network, camps and a few other things. And there's a lot of things he said that were really ahead of their time and still are so relevant today, I would say. But the two that come to mind is, there's a segment where he talks about the importance of luck. And I think he came back to that question quite a bit as far as I know. And I will misquote it, but essentially about the extraordinary luck that one can have and that he had. And the opposite, the extraordinary unlock or dis-luck, and this is where I'm misquoting it, when it's taken away. And in one of these things, it's also very much related to children and why he thought giving money towards children's causes, children's hospitals, the summer camps that we fund as part of SeriousFun and other things was so important, because children don't get the right to vote and they could be born with different types of luck, basically. So that's very memorable to me so far.
And the other piece relates to the first motto of the foundation, which is shameless exploitation of the common good. And that is a really smart analysis on also his attitude to celebrity and talking about how he's going on these shows to promote films and that he doesn't always feel comfortable in that. And somebody suggested he should put his face on the bottle, which we still have today. He was like, "I thought I should have them committed when they suggested I put my face on the bottle."
Carol Cone:
So you know what? I actually can tell the story that I know about Paul. In the early days, they had the hole-in-the-wall game camps and Paul used to love to go to the camps because he was incognito. He was just a person. And then you had the kids, and these are kids that are seriously ill. So this is the one in Connecticut, and they had this really very large mess hall where the kids eat meals. And so on the center of the tables, there's a carton of milk, a carton of lemonade, et cetera, et cetera. So Paul was sitting there... And I'll never forget this story, it's so cool. He's sitting around these kids and they don't know who he is. So a very young child, seven years old or so, Paul goes, "I'm Paul Newman," and the child doesn't know what. So he points to the lemonade package and his picture's on it, and he goes, "I'm Paul Newman, I'm that." And the child starts trembling and a tear comes out of his eye and he says, "Were you kidnapped?"
Alex Amouyel:
I had not heard that one before.
Carol Cone:
I just love that story because it just talks about the humility of Paul and the children and how he interacted. Maybe we'll go around the corner here. The SeriousFun Network are all of these camps now. Can you talk a little bit about that before we get back into the business?
Alex Amouyel:
Yeah, they've just celebrated their 2 million camp experiences and their founding, which I believe was the first camp, was Hole In the Wall Gang Camp in 1988 in Asheville, Connecticut. So quite some years ago. And they're hosting their Year of SeriousFun in honor of-
Carol Cone:
His hundredth birthday.
Alex Amouyel:
I guess he would've been 100 in January 2025. [inaudible 00:18:28] whole year to celebrate. So just The Year of SeriousFun. And now SeriousFun is 30 camps and programs in the US and around the world. The famous one is the original one, Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. But there's also Ireland. There's programs for kids with HIV in Africa. There's different camps all around the world. What's pretty amazing is it's free for parents to send their kids who may have cancer, rare blood diseases, HIV AIDS, different types of medical conditions. And their motto, if you will, is that kids get to be kids and they get to raise a little hell. But underneath all of that, I think is what they're now being able to show, something that Paul knew intuitively, that positive childhood experiences build a child's resilience and mental health and sense of self in the face of adversity.
And I think what's also pretty amazing for the camps is the... Again, just starting to be studied, but there's a lot of medical volunteers, doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and many other volunteers as well. And by the way, that's one of their big calls for this year is if anybody wants to volunteer, they're looking for 10,000 new volunteers.
Carol Cone:
Across [inaudible 00:20:35]?
Alex Amouyel:
Yeah, across the US and across the world. So if people want to come and volunteer, you can do that for a week or the whole summer. Please go to their website and get in touch. But the impact on the mental health and the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose for medical volunteers who, after the pandemic and a lot of other things, may be feeling burnt out, may be feeling this is a way for them to really also reconnect with their work basically.
Carol Cone:
Thank you. What was your first response when you heard they were interested in talking with you to come over to be CEO and president?
Alex Amouyel:
I did indeed say, "This is a dream." I had been at MIT Solve for six years and I was just starting to think, "Oh, this is time to think about next steps and what I might do for the rest of my life."
Carol Cone:
So you arrive, you start your work. What did you do within the first six months to year? How did you approach this?
Alex Amouyel:
I think it's taking stock of what was there. I would say if I had to give two things that I told the boss in my first three months was that really the north star question I was going to ask was how can we have the most impact using the resources that we had in service of our mission? That was the north star question. And then there's a lot of sub questions from that. How do we know if we're having an impact? So one of the first hires I then recruited for is, now Dr. Christina Chauvenet, who's our monitoring evaluation and learning officer, we hadn't had somebody devoted to really looking at do we have an impact? How do we measure that impact? Can we have more impact? So that's one of the sub questions which come out of that.
And then indeed, of our portfolio of guaranteed partners, as you mentioned, at some point there was lots of small grants, [inaudible 00:25:33] different topics. Already, my predecessor, Dr. Miriam Nelson, had really focused the mission of the foundation on nourishing and transforming the lives of children who faced adversity. So that was already more focused, but still there were questions of why does this grantee partner get this amount of money versus this grantee partner get that amount of money? And in all honesty, the answer was, "Oh, because that's what they got last year," as opposed because of the size of this organization and the need of this and their growth trajectory, and are they at the tipping point? What could they use? So all of that was important considerations.
And this is quite fashionable right now in the foundation world. But can we use our influence to partner with like-minded foundations and funders to co-fund either particular grantee partners or different pools of funding so that every dollar we bring out can be multiplied in different ways, and thus, our resources are going further and our grantee partners are getting more money, more than just our checks basically. And that's also why then I recruited Emily Yu, our chief partnerships and program officer to really both oversee the grants but really set up this partnership strategy.
Carol Cone:
I know that so many of our listeners want to know what's the secret to measurement, and how much do I need to do, and how much is qual and quant? Love your opinion on that.
Alex Amouyel:
I think it's definitely always very valuable to try and know whether or not the work that you are doing is having an impact in different ways. I think the core headlines for me are, are grantees having an impact based on what they think they should be doing? Which is what people call theory of change. But are they having an impact based on how they thought they were going to have an impact? Are they growing in either depth or breadth or scale or however you want to call it? Are sometimes [inaudible 00:29:12] static, and that's fine, that's still really great, but is the trajectory moving and this is expanding in some way? And sometimes expansion is going deeper in a particular community.
And then I think what people often miss in these is are we, Newman's Own Foundation in this case, or somebody else [inaudible 00:29:37], is our impact being helpful, catalytic, transformational, or not helpful? And obviously, a main resource that we are going to give out is going to be the dollars. And it could be $50,000, it could be $200,000, whatever it is. But is that money helpful? Hopefully, at the very least. Even more interesting if it's catalytic or transformational.
Carol Cone:
Do you have a grantee?
Alex Amouyel:
I don't want to have favorite grantee partners either. I have spoken a lot about SeriousFun Children's Network already, as you can see, but that's where we started. But I think probably the story of Food Corps is quite relevant because it also ties into Paul. So Kurt Ellis back in the day was a documentarian and was looking for some funding to finish this documentary, which was about food and our food system and how messed up it was perhaps. And he ended up being connected with Paul Newman in his later years who gave him some finishing funds, along with some other people. And this movie was called King Corn and came out to pretty good success, and was recently even featured last year on John Oliver [inaudible 00:33:10] so still relevant. And then he went to different universities and schools presenting the film. And through that had this idea of it would be really great to see how we could transform kids' relationships to food and what was happening in school cafeterias across the country.
And that coincided... I don't want to get things wrong, but roughly coincided with the start of AmeriCorps which was a Peace Corps in the US. And so he ended up starting Food Corps, which was a taking AmeriCorps service volunteers into schools to support the teachers when it comes to nutrition education, to start school gardens, to support the food service directors in terms of the cafeteria. And all of that's very exciting because kids get two meals a day.
Carol Cone:
And they need them. They need them to grow, they need them to learn.
Alex Amouyel:
But also, I don't know if you've seen some of these, I would say scandals of school lunch debt because in some cases when you don't charge... Kurt likes to say... In the public school they don't have to pay for the bus to go to school, they don't have to pay for the math textbook, they don't have to pay for the English lessons. So why are we asking them to pay for the food? And then some kids are going hungry because they can't afford it. There's a lot of stigma. Or indeed they end up with launch debt, which is incredible.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Thank you for that. And that was a grantee that you really liked and it's beautifully done. I want to flip to Paul's hundredth birthday. Were you part of that? Did you get in on any of the planning?
Alex Amouyel:
Yes, we were very happy to celebrate what would've been Paul's hundredth year this year as 2025. SeriousFun has done a number of activities around that and we're doing a number of things. We launched two main things in January, which was his birthday, and one of them was the TED Talk, which came out just before his birthday, [inaudible 00:37:13] Transform Capitalism.
Carol Cone:
Which is great. And I love the timing. It's like 11 minutes, so it's long enough but not too long. And you were fabulous in it. And then also, can you talk about the Food Justice for Kids Prize? Because I think that that is lovely.
Alex Amouyel:
Yes. So we did that last year, so that was fantastic. But that was last year. But as part of the TED Talk, we've launched this 100% for Purpose Club, which is all about inviting companies who are already giving 100% of their profits away to come join us. And we launched that along with Humanitix, which is an event ticketing company in Australia. Now we have four, five members who are already doing this. But also, it's about inviting the next generation of companies-
Carol Cone:
I love that.
Alex Amouyel:
... either to start or to convert themselves to giving 100% of their profits away. And that's been going well. We've been hosting some sessions. We are planning to write more content and things like that. And then the other thing, which was maybe also what you were referring to that we launched is, going back a little bit to film, is to have young people under 18 have at least 100 films for Paul's one-hundredth [inaudible 00:38:43] films through a youth film competition called Nourishing Narratives.
Carol Cone:
I love the name. It's beautiful.
Alex Amouyel:
[inaudible 00:38:54]. It's a grantee partner Mosaic Film experience, which that's what they do. And they're based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They came up with that and with all the adorable videos. But they just closed the competition yesterday, I believe. And I haven't yet got any of the results of how many applications we got, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm very excited to see what the results are. And the top 10 winners will get $1000.
Carol Cone:
$1000 each? That's great.
Alex Amouyel:
And then they'll be going to LA early August to live their dreams as future potential film professionals, but also meet each other. And through that we were asking them the prompt or question was what does food justice mean to you? And so getting their perspectives on that topic, compared to... We wanted to ask young people themselves to be agents of change and to share with us what they thought was important.
Carol Cone:
Great, great. I always love to feed back a quote to our guests and to have you talk a little bit more about it. So this is about your personal purpose, and you said, "When you get the intersection right of aligning to your mission and to your superpowers, you are living your purpose."
Alex Amouyel:
Yes. That sounds right to me. Thank you for quoting me. Yes. I think it's partly a bit of a joke on the BCG matrix where everything that consultants do is in a two by two matrix with X [inaudible 00:41:13].
Carol Cone:
That's funny.
Alex Amouyel:
But in truth, yes, as I was writing the book, the question that people would always ask me going, "Wow, you've got a great job," et cetera, et cetera, is like, "I want to have more a purposeful life. I want to have more impact in my life. Where do I start?" And I say, "Start with your superpowers rather than what the topic is because that's what you've got to contribute to the world." And your superpowers is your skills, your experience, the good and the bad, the positive experiences and the adversity that you've faced, which every superhero faces adversity before discovering their powers.
Carol Cone:
They do. Yep. Thank you. Where do you think Newman's Own is going to be in three years?
Alex Amouyel:
I hope continuing to live out the legacy of impact and innovation of Paul Newman and all the people who've helped build Newman's Own Foundation, and still really fighting to support our grantee partners and to nourish and transform the lives of children who face adversity.
Carol Cone:
Love it, love it. And I always give the last additional comment to my guest. So Alex, you have been so eloquent, you're so passionate. What would you like to leave our listeners with?
Alex Amouyel:
In the spirit of Paul Newman and also it being the year of SeriousFun, go raise a little hell.
Carol Cone:
Go raise a little hell. We love that. So to our listeners, Alex Amouyel, you have been extraordinary. This is the job... I think you believe too... Of your lifetime. You're having such a wonderful, thoughtful impact on going to raise a little hell for kids who face adversity. So I want to thank you for being on the show. And keep doing the great work.
Alex Amouyel:
Oh, thank-
Carol Cone:
So, thank you so much.
Alex Amouyel:
... you so much for having me.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark Mark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone On Purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
This transcript was exported on Apr 15, 2025 - view latest version here.
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