Theo Chocolate

1. What practices at Theo Chocolate illustrate the concept of social responsibility?

Corporate social responsibility is the duty of an organization to act in ethical ways within the social environment it works. For Theo Chocolate, social responsibility focuses on protecting the environment and the farmers who produce cocoa beans. Socially responsible practices at Theo Chocolate include the following: locating ingredients that are grown organically, ensuring that growers earn a living wage, promoting habitat preservation in cocoa growing regions, using planet friendly energy sources to run the chocolate factory, buying maintainable packaging, and also informing the public about social and environmental liability. To use a consistent company mandate of sustainability, managers at Theo Chocolate intertwine environmental and social concerns into considered decisions and keep track of progress toward sustainability goals.

2. What does Vice President Debra Music mean when she says that Theo is a “triple bottom line” company?

In the video, Debra Music says, “We see ourselves as a triple bottom line company, which means we value people, the planet, and profit in equal measure. None of those things suffer at the expense of something else.” The triple bottom line is a good-for-the-earth company performance measure that gages a company’s success in terms of “people, planet, and profits.” Established by John Elkington, the triple bottom line thought is different from the traditional bottom line in that it tries to evaluate a company’s success by three measures, instead of just profitability. What, I think, Debra Music is saying is that Theo Chocolate is not trying to just be profitable, but also provide help along the way to everyone and everything involved.

3. What happens if Theo’s social objectives conflict with the organization’s economic objectives?

Even with the main idea in the triple bottom line philosophy, every company’s first social responsibility is to make...