Beech-Nut Journal

This is a story about how Beech-Nut and its top executives-Anderson and Storer, were driven by the ambitions of making profits and covering negative publicity that overshadow their sense of business ethics and social responsibilities.

Beech-Nut, which had maintained its image that its products were 100%pure, nutritious and of high quality, still kept selling apple juice after top executives acknowledged the fact that the concentrate was adulterated. Even worse, they didn’t stop illegally selling the apple juice, even after third party inspections by the FDA and PAI. What they chose to do was to take advantages of loopholes in the law. In order to avoid seizure by FDA, phony juice were transferred from one warehouse to another, to foreign countries and overseas markets so that Beech-Nut was able to minimize its financial losses and get rid of legal sanctions. It’s not like flipping coins where you always have equal chances of getting caught or not caught by doing bad things. Meeting financial targets for a company is surely important to top executives, but more important is to make right decisions and judgments that align with their moral duty and obligation.

Social responsibilities are sometimes confronted with a company’s benefits. It has an obligation to act to benefit society at large. For Anderson, he should behave as a responsible individual first rather than a CEO who only focuses on financial goals. It is also a duty for every individual or company to perform so as to maintain a balance between each other. Beech-nut is selling baby food to newly born babies. Parents instill great trust and expectations into Beech-nut’s products. Same cases also happened such as Sanlu Milk Company in China. Many babies died from Melamine contained in the milk powders. Business moral standards are facing crucial challenges in China nowadays. Ethical missteps can often lead to detriments of careers, company reputation, or even legal sentences. Corporate culture with right ethical values must be implemented for the sake of a company’s long lasting healthy development. Some would argue that the guy who wrote the letter to FDA is from R&D department in Beech-nut. If he hadn’t reported to FDA, the ending of the story would be different. I don’t agree with this. It may possibly take a longer time to discover, but once you continue to do illegal things or cover illegal behaviors with frauds---lies are always covered by lies, the law of justice will come to you sooner or later. But if Anderson and Storer listened to their employees’ different opinions, and changed to a right attitude and recognition for their mistakes, the story would definitely change. I wouldn’t deny that Anderson was smart in his dealings with the FDA such as delaying as long as possible to minimize financial loss and deciding to do a so-called nationwide warehouse recall to make it seem like they cooperated with FDA. But he just dedicated his business talents in a wrong way. Choosing to admit the problems and making corrections when facing mistakes is the prerequisite that a successful leader should have.