Courting Corporate Responsibility

Chains of all sizes profit by connecting to the communities that they serve

Walk into just about any coffee shop or quick-service restaurant, and you will likely find pamphlets on so-called good neighbor programs or a mention of their good works on the food packaging. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives date back, in their current from, to the 1960s and 1970s, and have become so much a part and parcel of business practice that they are sometimes easy to miss. For large chains, their scope can be enormous, encompassing animal treatment, energy conservation, the environment, and a host of other issues.

“I can’t imagine being a business without tapping into the larger community,” says Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president of Corporate Social Responsibility. “We’re finding issues of supply-chain management and the environment to be increasingly important to consumers. Our own people really care about them.”

Indeed, as businesses have mushroomed in size, so have consumer expectations about corporate roles outside of mere profit-turning. In the United States, traces of the notion that companies should act in socially responsible ways can be found in Andrew Carnegie’s writings about charity and stewardship in the late 19^th century. Today, CSR is as much a matter of image maintenance and ensuring future viability as it is doing the right thing. As Langert puts it: “We’re not going to do well unless we’re a responsible company.”

At times, of course, outside pressure has spurred corporations to adopt more palatable practices. Langert recalls that after McDonald’s was scrutinized for wasteful packaging in the late 1980s, the corporation worked with the Environmental Defense Fund to implement a successful waste-reduction program. Since 2002, McDonald’s has produced four CSR reports detailing its performance in areas including animal welfare, environmental protection and community initiatives. (Since 1974, McDonald’s has been the leading corporate benefactor of the Ronald McDonald House Charities, which provide housing close to medical facilities for sick children and their families.)    

Some large companies’ CSR campaigns boast ambitious goals. The stated aims of Starbucks’ Shared Planet initiative are to have all of its coffee “responsibly grown” and ethically traded, and all of its cups reusable or recyclable, by 2015. The campaign also calls on employees to contribute more than 1 million hours of community service per year.

“I can’t imagine being a business without tapping into the larger community,” Bob Langert, McDonald's

Starbucks has also invested millions in social projects in the communities where its coffee is grown, according to a company-provided fact sheet. The projects include helping fund schools and health clinics and implementing infrastructure projects to benefit coffee farmers and cooperatives. In the 2008 fiscal year, Starbucks’ funding benefited more than 186,000 people in 10 countries. 

Not all the good works done by QSRs are so large in scale. The good neighbor programs of some smaller chains more directly benefit their immediate communities. Corner Bakery Café, based in Dallas and with locations in 10 states and Washington, D.C., last year donated $25,000 in catering to more than 100 charitable groups in Corner Bakery towns and cities. Last summer, the café also donated a small portion of its proceeds, totaling $7,500, to 15 community gardens. A Corner Bakery spokesperson said the cafés will be launching similar community initiatives and will continue participating in the annual Great American Dine Out, through which the café matches customer donations to the childhood hunger organization Share Our Strength. 

Some franchises have become assets to their communities by providing meeting spaces for local schools and groups. In Wareham, Mass., Così allows nonprofit organizations to reserve evenings at the café and receive 10 percent of food and beverage proceeds. Assistant Manager Sonjon Devine says schools, parent-teacher organizations and homelessness groups are just a few of the local entities that take part. A skating club based on Cape Cod comes in each month, she says, and as the holidays approach, time slots are quickly filling up (groups are allowed to come in between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.).

“Tis the season for fundraising, so we have a lot now,” she says.

Organizations that heavily publicize their evenings and manage to bring in lots of supporters tend to do best, since more sales translate into more money for the groups. “It really is a win-win,” Devine says. “It spreads the word about Così, since [the Wareham location] is one of two suburban Cosìs in the area. A lot of people don’t know about it. But it’s also giving back to community, which is important to us. Most of our employees live in the area.”

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