The first speaker in this year’s Gilson Global Impact Series, co-founder and CEO of Indian food company Tasty Bites, told a University of Wisconsin crowd Thursday night how a company can be successful in a big industry while still maintaining social responsibility.
Hosted by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Ashok Vasudevan lectured on “Social Responsibility and the Corporate Ecosystem,” using his company — Tasty Bites — as an example for how to tackle an “elephant,” his metaphor for the food industry.
The elephant came into play as Vasudevan’s metaphor for Tasty Bites’ target market: the U.S. grocery industry. “The U.S. grocery industry is…” Vasudevan prefaced, before clicking his PowerPoint ahead to reveal a slide with a picture of a giant elephant, illustratively representative of just how “mammoth” the trillion-dollar market is.
Tasty Bites tackles this elephantine industry by hitting the “sweet spot” of three mammoth trends: convenience, health and specialty. However, more than being fundamentally profitable, the purpose of Vasudevan’s business is to stress his idea of a “values ecosystem.”
“We think of the values ecosystem as a tree with three branches. … There is the company, the consumer and the larger community,” Vasudevan said.
This third branch is the most prominent, encompassing Vasudevan’s bigger goals of environmental and social accountability.
These goals include water conservation, renewable energy, agriculture, literacy and education, as well as disaster relief.
For example, as a “prodigious” water consumer, Tasty Bites recycles 10 percent of what it uses. Vasudevan emphasized, however, that he is less concerned with actual numbers and statistics than the overarching trends they illustrate.
Vasudevan also described how the day after Indonesia’s recent earthquake, his factory employees offered to work an entire day without pay. This led to the managers also declining pay, a provider giving the day’s vegetables at no cost and a company offering a free private jet, all of which allowed them to deliver food to the disaster area within 48 hours.
“Sometimes, you start with something, but where it ends you never know,” Vasudevan explained.
Audience members followed Vasudevan’s presentation with a round of applause and a round of questions on everything from the flexibility of such a goal-oriented company to the sustainability of its agricultural practices.
“It’s not something I’d heard about before,” said John Flodian, a junior who attended the lecture for his Entrepreneurism and Society class. “The stuff that he’s doing environmentally is really cool.”
According to WARF spokesperson Janet Kelly, presentations like Vasudevan’s are important because they show students like Flodian a way to utilize the assets and skills taught in the classroom to face the worldwide issues.
“The knowledge and skills learned at the university are able to have a positive impact, certainly through Wisconsin and the rest of the world,” Kelly said.
Vasudevan said people are not only attracted to this idea of social responsibility but also “somehow crazily believe that [it] makes good business sense, too.”
