A disillusioned Catalan psychologist named Cristóbal Colón – shattered by his experiences in Spain’s mental asylums – decided that the patients of all local asylums around the La Garrotxa region needed a job in order to fit into a society which thought that giving them bed and board was the limit of its responsibility. He believed these patients could be an effective part of the local economy and this would allow them to be valued as contributing members of society. That is how in 1984, Colón became a businessman by starting a little co-operative farm named “La Fageda” with a compelling goal in mind: creating shared value.

Thirty-five years later, Colón runs a business with 256 employees and annual sales of 16M euros. La Fageda, which makes high-quality yogurts, jams and ice cream, has been studied at business schools as far away as Harvard and has reached the second position after Danone in the Catalonian yogurt market. More importantly, it has fulfilled its aim of giving employment, homecare and social inclusion to almost the entire population of work-capable mentally ill people in La Garrotxa. There have been many ups and downs, but La Fageda ran on enthusiasm for many years: its staff and workers giving up weekends to tour towns with cuddly calves and samples of their yogurts. Those in charge sometimes found themselves working late into the night to fulfill orders on time. Finally, the creamy, ecological, full-fat yogurts made from La Fageda’s own milk became a runaway success and a real example of how profitable companies can also be sustainable.

However, I believe that the most astonishing part is that after being consuming their dairy products all my life, it was only recently when I took a social business course in my university that I got to know all this shared value background they hold. Shaded Green Marketing Strategy is La Fageda’s approach to their branding: they have never sold itself as a social cause. Once Colón said: “We want to compete like any other brand. Our message had to be that, even though we had people with disabilities, we were perfectly capable of doing things well”. Instead, they build their reputation around a visitors’ center – attended by 55,000 people each year.  Colón once stated: “That is the best marketing we have: People go away not just liking the yogurt but also – after seeing the forest, the cows listening to their music and the workers doing their jobs – as apostles.”

In fact, La Fageda bases its marketing in engaging people’s emotions and had genuinely succeeded in local terms:

“We have helped put Garrotxa on the map, and the people here now proudly claim La Fageda as part of their world.”