It’s Time for a “TOMS Shoes Model” for Peanut Butter:

Buy One Jar of _________’s Peanut Butter.

Give One Package of NepalNUTrition’s ready to-use therapeutic food (RUTF).

Save a malnourished child’s life in Nepal.

Buy one. Give one. Save one.

A simple concept that others tried before TOMS Shoes, but no one has perfected the One for One model like TOMS Founder Blake Mycoskie has, and they deserve an enormous amount of credit for showing the business world a better way and making more than 100,000 consumer-philanthropists out of TOMS Shoes buyers (along with, of course, delivering 140,000 thousand pairs of shoes SO FAR to children in need).

We are out to do the same, and here’s why:

The major cost of implementing this life-saving peanut butter program in Nepal is the cost of the product itself (b/c the program is implemented through the gov’t staff that already exist). Imagine bypassing the long, tedious, and uncertain process of getting a major donor to commit to buying large amounts of RUTF and instead acquiring hundreds of thousands of consumer-philanthropists. This way the program becomes more sustainable, it gives everyone involved more motivation to expand our market, and adds value to the consumer’s purchase.

It seems the model only makes sense if you can do at least a few things:

1. Make an incredible product so your buyers are not only “sympathy buyers,” and you can charge slightly higher than competitors without losing the market
2. Don’t pay anything for marketing. Instead create “evangelists” for your product.
3. Use your hybrid status as a “not just for profit” to get all sorts of free inputs (marketing, great press and partners, interns, volunteers, etc…)

TOMS has been able to do all this and more, which is why I am trying to learn more about their business model, best practices, successes, and failures. At the same time, I want to make a proposal to TOMS: Lets build an umbrella One for One marketing machine. If high-performing One for One’s create this collective credibility, this will become a major movement (Why? Because my friend Will who pays $44 dollars for a good pair of TOMS knowing a child in Argentina will also get a pair of shoes will also buy a high-quality, healthy organic peanut butter for 10 cents more than the nearest competitor because he knows it will save the life of a malnourished child in Nepal. And he will tell his friends about it.)

So where is NepalNUTrition headed? We have our eyes on one producer already, Justin’s Nut Butter (http://justinsnutbutter.com) for a few reasons:

1. They are based out of Boulder (so am I…at the University of Colorado)
2. They are fairly new and fairly small (so this could still become part of their identity
3. They have some great TOMS Shoes-type clients (including Starbucks, Boulder moms, and college kids.)
4. They produce higher-end, organic varieties of nut butter so a small price difference at this price level means less than the same price difference for Peter Pan peanut butter level.

I’m pitching this to a group of MBA students in a Social Entrepreneurship class at CU-Boulder to see if they will consult us to plan and scale this with a partner. With this and a little guidance from TOMS, I think you could soon be buying Justin’s Nut Butter that saves a life. (better than peanut butter with salmonella, eh?)

As always, your thoughts are appreciated in the comments section below : )

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