Brushing up on business.

In the 50s, kids could brush their teeth with Crest or ... Crest. Or maybe Colgate. The ads for these products extolled their cavity-fighting abilities -- and skipped over the fact that they were full of saccharine and artificial coloring. By 1975, the toothpaste market was ripe for change. Enter Tom Chappell -- Tom of Maine himself -- and his wife Kate, pioneers of natural toothpaste. Brushing hasn't been the same since.

The Chappells' simple ads, questioning the use of saccharine, preservatives and dyes in most commercial toothpastes, have obviously struck a nerve. Market share has climbed to four percent in some regions, and annual sales to $16 million -- enough to outgrow the old headquarters more than a year ago. Tom's moved to the third floor of a renovated shoe plant, near their factory and warehouse. Tom's own factory outlet, The Natural Living Store, featuring discounted seconds and other earthy products, is on the first floor.

The offices are spacious and naturally lit, and the predominant feeling is one of small-town friendliness. We are, after all, in Kennebunk, Maine, and Tom's offices reflect that. Perhaps it's the colorful paper mache totem poles, or the bowls filled with fresh fruit gracing the reception area.

Tom Chappell is tall and lanky, with properly distinguished grey hair. Though he looks the part, Chappell is no ordinary CEO. He's a recently published author (The Soul of a Business: Managing for Profit and the Common Good, Bantam Books) who went back to school parttime in the 80s -- Harvard Divinity School -- and earned a master's degree in theology. Neither is his an ordinary company. In 1992, Tom's received a Corporate Conscience Award from the Council on Economic Priorities, and an honor roll listing in its guide, Shopping for a Better World.

Despite its expansion, Tom's is still very much a family business. Kate, manager of the R&D department, brings into Tom's corner office a package of small figurines made from re-melted and re-formed crayons collected by school children. "People just sent us this stuff," she tells me. "They know we're interested." Their son Matt, 25, one of five children and 67 employees, has been working here for nine months. With a professional familiarity apparently born of toothpaste in the blood, he conducts our factory tour.

"Our moss-filtration system removes 80 percent of the bio-burden from our waste water," says Matt. By this he means the water is filtered through a tank filled with layers of peat moss, stone, sand and gravel, then emptied into a leaching bed. Tom's aluminum toothpaste tubes are recyclable, and outgoing product is packed into 95 percent post-consumer-waste cardboard boxes.

Bags of calcium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate (i.e., chalk and baking soda) await their turn to be mixed up in huge vats with natural oils like spearmint, peppermint, fennel and cinnamon for the toothpaste that remains the company's clear breadwinner, among other products like floss, mouthwash, shampoo, shaving cream and deodorant. Today's flavor is peppermint, and the place smells great.

E: Where did your environmental sensitivity come from? TOM CHAPPELL: Growing up in rural Western Massachussetts, surrounded by farmers, and vacationing in Maine every summer -- that kind of impact just graduates on your being a little bit every year. So to be anything other than environmentally sensitive becomes a violation of your own principles.

How did you get the idea for natural toothpaste? Kate and I started our business on the premise that you could make products that were good for the environment and also make a living at it. Back in the 60s, that seemed like an either/or proposition. Our first product was a non-polluting laundry detergent called Clearlake, packaged in a container that could be mailed back to us at our expense for refilling. It sold well in natural food stores. Actually it was Paul Hawken (formerly of Smith and Hawken) who said that, although Clearlake was a wonderful product, he saw more of a niche in natural body care products. He gave us the opportunity to start formulating them under the name of Tom's Natural Soap. Our first products back in 1973 were liquid soap, shampoo and skin lotion; then in 1975 we came out with toothpaste.

Do you have a chemistry background? How do you come up with the different product formulations? I was an English major in college. But it was our inherent love for the land that got us to re-think: What do you do about toothpaste or shampoo or deodorant to make it safer for your customers, safer for the environment, better for society as a whole? Our new director of research and development, Maurice Iwu, a Nigerian, is an ethnopharmacologist -- a pharmacist, but also an environmentalist who researches and knows the uses of plants. He's been instrumental in developing our new deodorant line.

Can your customers just throw their used Tom's toothpaste tubes in with other aluminum recyclables? Or would these impede recycling efforts because you can't really wash them out? You can wash them out by uncrimping the bottom, then rinsing them out. But no one is giving us a hard time about contaminating other recyclables, even if some toothpaste is still in there.

Are your tubes recycled as well as being recyclable? The aluminum is not recycled aluminum. There are reasons for that having to do with its purity; I wish I knew more about that. But we use aluminum for its recyclability -- it's actually more expensive than the non-recyclable plastic laminates other toothpaste companies use.

Are any efforts being made to purchase ingredients from indigenous tribes, or to insure that your ingredients are sustainably harvested? The idea is a good one, but the reality is not yet happening. There's a long trial period to go through; many times you have to put money up for the farmers to risk growing enough acres of a particular species to get enough raw material just to try it. Then you go through the long, involved process of finding out if it has the properties you want. Only then are you ready to make a committment to the farmers. All that can take years. We buy our spearmint and peppermint leaves from farmers here in the U.S. and our cinnamon from Asia. But we have contacts in Brazil who know the farmers; we are making a commitment to getting some trial crops grown -- plants with anti-microbial properties indigenous to a particular region of Brazil -- but first we have to narrow down the species we want to try. Then we may be able to purchase our ingredients from them.

[In a follow-up, Matt Chapell told E that the company "looked into organic growers, and found that they can't meet our demand and are often inconsistent with flavor."]

Your company has taken the Humane Society of the United States' pledge never to test on animals. How do you safety-test your products? People! [laughs] We also do lab tests that give us an indication of potential irritancy. But ultimately you have to test on human skin. I think we're paying some group to do that for us.

I've read about sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) being a potential carcinogen and skin irritant. Yet it's used as an ingredient in your products. What's your take on that? SLS has been hanging around on someone's undesirable list, and we just don't subscribe to that point of view. There are different sources of SLS and it behaves differently in different formulations. We're using SLS drawn from coconut oil as a dispersant in our toothpaste.

Are you saying the evidence is not conclusive enough to warrant a change? The evidence is conclusive enough for us that it's a safe ingredient. But when there are concerns about an ingredient, you do your best to provide customers with whatever facts you can. SLS performs a very important function in our toothpaste. Your other choice is soap, and most people don't want to brush their teeth with soap. There are other ingredients that don't give you the foaming action. Basically, you need something that's going to rinse out the plaque in your mouth without tasting offensive or harming you. And if there were a substitute, we would have found it by now. This is one of those things taken up by people who are out to find fault somewhere. And that's one of the great mysteries -- maybe not mysteries, but disappointments -- of in business.

[According to Spectrum: The News Magazine, "SLS is known as a skin irritant... [that] can react with other chemicals to form carcinogenic nitrosamines ... [It] is known to cause serious eye damage to young animals."]

Another example: There's been another rumor circulating that Tom's of Maine is a supporter of [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue. Nothing is further from the truth. It just takes that kind of a tidbit to fuel speculation, and sometimes it can be disheartening. Someone called us just yesterday to ask if it were true. No, it's not true!

You donate 10 percent of your profits to various causes. What are they and how do you choose? We begin with our mission statement: We are concerned about communities, the environment, the arts, human needs. Kate screens our grant proposals and brings a list of recommendations to the leadership circle, which consists of a manager from each division. The circle, plus Kate and I, decide where that money goes. It's important that that be a shared process, because it takes the political overtones out of the choices. I don't believe that Kate and I should be using our donations for political advocacy. I disagree strongly with Anita [Roddick, president of The Body Shop] and Ben [Cohen of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream] on this point. I know that in the realm of social responsibility, there's a tendency to turn your customers into political advocates, but I believe customers are the reason you have a business. And it's in their product preferences that we should be giving everything we've got.

[Tom's has made donations to The Rainforest Alliance, Maine Women's Fund, Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility, The Urban Services Program and the National Parks and Conservation Association, among others.]

Tell us about your employee policies. They're very, very sensitive. Employees may donate five percent of their paid working time to volunteer work of their choice, and they get a month off for either maternity or paternity leave. We also have flex time -- rather than being chained to a word processor, if someone needs to get off for a few hours, they can be covered by other people. [Tom's does not have on-site day-care, but it does provide $1 per hour in child care benefits to employees who make less than $20,000 a year. There's 50 cents an hour for a second child. ]

Do you work with other environmental groups and other progressive businesses? We're part of Businesses for Social Responsibility (BSR) [a Washington, DC-based umbrella group]. I believe that's where you should drive your advocacy -- through groups that are in a position to impact Washington.

What advice would you be able to offer small businesses that want to be green? Well, the intuitive sense that they have of solving problems while respecting human beings and nature -- things that you would normally do in a family or other group that has some kind of bond. It's OK to do it in business too! You don't have to give that up. Business is not some other kind of value system.

You've been active in your Episcopal church on connecting religion and the environment. What's been the response in your church? I'm delighted with it. This is not a new topic for Christians. But now, because my church is saying it's our responsibility to care for God's creation, I don't have to go to the Sierra Club to be a supporter of the environment. There are some differences: The church is concerned about all of creation, not just the environment.

I know as a private company you don't divulge profit and loss figures, but what can you say about how Tom's is doing financially? Regionally, we're at four percent of the New England and Northern California toothpaste markets; in bigger and tougher markets like New York and Los Angeles, we're under two percent; and in the Northwest and the Rockies, we're about three percent. Our average national share is about one and a half percent. These are very good figures for an alternative product.

Any plans to break into the international market? We just received word that Sony will be our retail partner in Japan, so we'll be in Sony stores there. We're also in the UK and Canada.

Are you surprised at your success? When you've come this far, you realize that you're in a daily enterprise of bringing about change. And if it's something you know how to do and you're given the gifts and tools to do it, then that seems to be what your work is -- and that's how you measure your success.