Kees Kruythoff spent twenty seven years at Unilever and now runs Livekindly Collective, a plant-based food group assembled from a media company and four brands. The turn came on 28 November 2018, with a phone call from the chairman telling him he would not become the next chief executive. It ended an ambition he had announced to himself, and to others, on his first day in February 1993.
What he did next is the part worth copying. Rather than decide in the disappointment, he told his wife they would sit down again on the same date a year later. He took six months of sabbatical and traveled with each of his five daughters in turn, and every approach that came in was pushed out to 28 November before he chose.
Key findings
- The interviewer supplies the frame Kruythoff’s account illustrates: chance events happen to everybody, and what distinguishes the people who benefit is noticing them and then acting on them.
- Kruythoff accepts the framing and adds the obligation he draws from it: once you have recognized a chance event, accelerating it is your own responsibility.
- The letter he writes at the end of each year, setting out what he was thinking about and open to, is treated in the conversation as the mechanism rather than a reflection. It invited the approaches that followed, one of which was Roger Lienhard arriving to talk about plant-based food and the Livekindly Collective.
- His purpose is stated as a change of position rather than an achievement. He wants to stop being the youngest of the old generation and become the oldest of the next, and to give it back where he feels most connected, which is Africa.
- Its root is his mother’s instruction, which he quotes and treats as a standard rather than a sentiment: do not waste your talents, and put your talents at service to society. His coach Bill George, the former Medtronic chief executive, gave him the second half of it, the idea of acting in line with a true north whatever the journey brings.
The power of the pause
Kruythoff reads the crisis as a forced return to the base of Maslow’s pyramid, where safety, home and family come first and everything else waits. What he takes from it is the reflection that followed, which he calls the power of the pause. His image for it is domestic and uncomfortable: somebody sent everyone to their rooms like naughty children, to think about what they had done wrong.
The condition attached is that nobody comes back to the old arrangement: the instruction is not to go back into the old but to rejuvenate into the next. He pairs that with what the same period accelerated. Digitization is his example, and his counterfactual is that a three and a half percent fall in GDP would have been disastrous twenty five years ago without it.
Half a billion dollars in twelve months
Kruythoff’s evidence that capital has moved is his own fundraising. Livekindly started from absolutely nothing and raised over half a billion US dollars inside twelve months, and what interests him is that the money was mission aligned rather than merely large. His complaint about the label is that ESG investment is still treated as a separate category, when all investment should be shifting to where purpose and performance are the same thing.
What the collective is made of
The stated mission is to make plant-based living the new norm by inspiring people to live kindly for humanity, for our home and for those who share it with us. Kruythoff glosses each part: humanity is the generations to come and the health case, home is the planet given a voice, and those who share it are the animals and the most vulnerable.
It was assembled in a single move: the media property livekindly.com plus four brands, LikeMeat in Germany, Oumph in Sweden, Fry’s in South Africa and No Meat in the UK. Kruythoff calls it a collective rather than a company because he wanted the name to say movement, and because the partnerships run from upstream all the way down to the consumer.
The people are the other half of the design. Every founder of those brands stayed, and they sit beside operators out of large food businesses. The chief marketing officer spent decades at Unilever, the chief financial officer had been global CFO at Kraft Heinz, and the China lead came from McCain, Cargill and Coca-Cola. Kruythoff totals it as seventy five years of plant-based expertise against hundreds of years of global consumer goods.
The rule for buying a founder-led company
Kruythoff’s formula was a hundred percent separate and a hundred percent integrated, which colleagues told him was impossible until it proved workable in the operations. When Seventh Generation joined Unilever it stayed in Vermont and kept the community that made it what it was. What it gained was the megaphone: suddenly a much louder voice for the mission it already had.
The founders he cites had already seen the alternative. The Talenti team had built and sold Belvedere vodka before, and their experience of becoming part of a bigger group was bad enough that they joined Unilever worried. What made the difference was that they went on feeling they were the ones running the business, using the mothership only where it helped.
At Livekindly he is running the same design from the other side. Global IT infrastructure and a shared manufacturing network go in at the back end, so founders can do what they love most, which is building the brands and carrying the mission. The trade is a capability one rather than a control one: founder money and founder mentality come with a real gap on scale and infrastructure.
The internal disruptor, and the limits of size
Kruythoff maintains the work can be done inside a large company, and that the posture to take is the joy to disrupt rather than to be disrupted. His example is the Dollar Shave Club acquisition he made as president of Unilever North America. He reads its value as declarative rather than financial: it told the world Unilever was serious about direct to consumer, digital, data and new business models.
The limit he names is the one that surprises people about a company that size. Unilever was a sizable business, he says, and still not big enough to shift a total system on its own. That is why he now treats the collective rather than the company as the unit of change: put the system in the room, big companies and small ones together, and industries can be transformed.
Why he thinks the economics run the same way as the purpose
Kruythoff claims there is zero trade-off in his system, and grounds it in resource ratios rather than sentiment. He deliberately picks the least favorable comparison for his own product. Against chicken, the hardest case, he puts the carbon footprint at seven times better, water at five times better and land use at three times better.
On the demand side he points to something granular he sees from China to the US to South Africa and Germany. Daughters between twelve and seventeen come home to tell their parents they will not eat animals any more. He treats that generation as well educated and formed by transparency, and says the cost of inaction is starting to run higher than the cost of action.
On price he expects the subsidies now flowing to dairy and meat to turn into taxes, which he calls a double whammy rather than a single hit. A meat tax will follow the sugar tax that everyone thought would never come and then arrived in Mexico, and he reads the EU Green Deal the same way, as true cost entering the system.
On his own side he expects scale to remove the plant-based premium, while carbon credits open a second profit pool as the carbon price moves from forty dollars a ton today toward a hundred. The rule he offers anyone designing a next-generation model is to reason from foresight about the industry and from the consumer first, then check the economic system sitting behind it.
Where purpose either enters the economics or does not
Asked what marketing is for, Kruythoff answers by locating where value is actually created in a consumer goods business, which is brand equity and its attributes. That is his argument for calling marketing the single most important role for getting purpose into the business system: brand positioning and the mix are the place where it either lands or does not.
His test is commercial rather than declarative. Ben and Jerry’s has to be the best tasting chunky ice cream and carry attributes of shared prosperity at the same time. The claim only counts, he says, at the point where consumers want to pay a premium for it, stay loyal and hand the brand pricing power.
Two things a marketer has to be able to do
The first is spotting the wave: looking around the corner at the earliest signals rather than at today’s averages. His phrasing of what to watch is precise, and it is a bet on the fringe. The extreme consumers of today, he argues, are what the mass will become, and recognizing them is an act of intuition rather than measurement.
The second is crafting the proposition, which runs against the single-minded discipline marketers were trained on and the fear that extra messages dilute. His resolution is segmentation fine enough that the additional idea reaches only the individual consumer it makes sense for. LikeMeat, the German market leader in plant-based chicken, shows the posture: it never tells people to stop loving meat, it celebrates that and offers the plant-based version of it.
Fifty four people he has mostly never met
The extended leadership team is fifty four people, twenty seven women and twenty seven men across eighteen nationalities, and almost none of it came together in a room. Kruythoff dates the cutoff exactly: a hundred people from around the world met in New York on the ninth and tenth of March, and on the twelfth the world went into lockdown. He has never physically met his own chief financial officer.
What is being spent down in the meantime is what he calls the emotional bank account on relationships, drawn lower with every month of screens. He does not describe the period as merely difficult either. A factory that could not run stopped completely, and the whole startup came very close to stopping with it.
The vulnerability he did not expect
Asked for the hard lessons, Kruythoff starts from disposition, calling himself an absolute optimist and borrowing Desmond Tutu’s phrase for it, a prisoner of hope. The lesson attached is about the distance between conviction and outcome. What you envision does tend to become real, but the gap is wide, and the more passionate the vision the more the gap hurts.
He makes it concrete with half a billion people falling back into poverty, and with what he has seen of South Africa since he left it. For a leader whose working language is progress, the conclusion he reaches is a question rather than a claim: where is the progress?
What took the damage is the assumption that had carried him for twenty seven years, that whenever you put your talents and passion into something you can create it. He does not withdraw it so much as report the vulnerable feeling of finding it insufficient, which for a chief executive in his first startup year is an unusual admission to make on the record.
Saying it out loud to the leadership team
The most unusual thing Kruythoff reports doing is standing up at an extended leadership team meeting in New York. He told Unilever’s leaders he did not know whether he was still the right person to lead the organization, because his capabilities were a little bit in the past. His answer was to learn and unlearn: Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club, and he names its founder Michael Dubin as the person he learned most from.
Scope and limitations
This is a founder’s account of his own venture, recorded in early 2021, and the fundraising, environmental and cost figures are his statements rather than independently reported. The forecasts about a meat tax, the reversal of subsidy and a carbon price of a hundred dollars a ton are expectations he holds rather than established policy.
One passage is summarized rather than reported here. Kruythoff illustrates the cost of the pandemic through a member of his family in South Africa, and IRG has left that person’s circumstances out because they are a private individual’s details rather than his own.
Source
This page summarises HGS #26: Kees Kruythoff (CEO, Livekindly) talks about power of pause and the role of marketing, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-16.