It is 7 a.m. when Wladek’s truck enters the huge parking lot of LSDH, a European leader in packed milk and juices. After 10 hours of night driving to this Loire Valley warehouse, he is tired, hoping to load his shipment quickly and leave.
At most warehouses around the world, what Wladek would do next is entirely predictable: Wait for your turn, adapt to the supply chain constraints, and hope to be able to maintain your human dignity — not an abstraction in this case. For truckers, that means to take a shower, eat a snack, and, possibly, to rest. Usually, they are deprived of these opportunities, but not at LSDH.
After signing in, Wladek can settle down in a lodge on the property called the Trucker’s House. There he can wash himself, have food, watch TV in a lounge, and even take a nap in one of the bedrooms — all at no cost. This facility is certainly nice, but is investing in such creature comforts for your drivers economically rational? LSDH is a 2,250-strong business with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. If caring for hundreds of anonymous truckers for free had proven profitable, it would have been copied by all of LSDH’s competitors. At first glance, it seems more like a folly than sound business.
But LSDH’s case, along with the many others you will discover in this book, is significant, and it speaks to the heart of the predicament currently facing our economic system. Once, the free-market economy was widely praised. Today, it is under scrutiny, even attack. And one of the most frequent angles of attack concerns the treatment of workers under capitalism.
Modern capitalism, to be sure, has worked economic wonders. From 1820 to 2001, per capita income increased 20-fold in the free-market West, while it rose only sixfold in the rest of the world. Historically, the free-markets in Europe, by allowing masses to engage in direct trade relationships, have been a major catalyst for the emancipation of the lower classes from the dominance of nobility and clergy, as well as for wives from their husbands’ economic control. More recently, through initiatives like microcredit, this economic system has proven to be a powerful tool in the fight against extreme poverty.
At the same time, critics are right that this unparalleled growth of prosperity and many social conquests have come at a significant cost and has not benefited everyone equally, either within a given country or across the globe. From the deplorable working conditions of the Industrial Revolution to the plundering of resources from countries in the Global South and to the present environmental damages, corporations are accused. They are viewed as making profits thanks to the collective efforts of communities while shifting social and environmental costs onto society at large.
Once their transformed business processes allow companies to care unconditionally about the members of their business ecosystem, these companies enjoy a continuous and amazing prosperity.
Today, younger generations are the most disillusioned with business-as-usual. According to a Deloitte survey, 87 percent of millennials believe that “the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance.” And according to the most recent Deloitte study, younger generations go beyond simple beliefs, with many translating them into professional decisions: “44 percent of Gen Zs and 45 percent of millennials have left a role they felt lacked purpose, and around 40 percent of both groups have declined an assignment, project, or even a potential employer based on their personal ethics or beliefs.” With millennials and Gen Z making up between 65 percent and 80 percent of the workforce in 2025, their expectations cannot be ignored by business.
No matter your age, you may also believe that something must be done to address the contradiction between the interests of the corporations and those of society at large. You may even question whether it is possible to reform capitalism as we know it. However, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don’t want to abandon the free-market economy or the idea that business can be part of the solution — not only a source of problems.
Companies have long been trying to be part of the solution to social problems. For centuries, this took the form of corporate philanthropy, mostly conducted outside their core business processes, and in the last decades, through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), marginally integrated within them. Recently, in response to criticism about the social and environmental ineffectiveness of philanthropy and CSR, companies have started to balance their focus on profit with two additional priorities: people and planet. By the early 21st century, thousands of companies were seeking external validation for their efforts, earning the status of “B-Corps,” or incorporating these three priorities into their corporate charters to become “Benefit Corporations.”
However, the balancing efforts haven’t stopped there. In December 2022, a Wall Street Journal Intelligence Survey found that 59 percent of 350 CEO respondents confirmed that their organizations had a well-established purpose — typically involving social and environmental goals. The survey concluded that companies had learned that “they must collaborate for the greater good.”
Yet, a cynic might dismiss these “wider social impact” initiatives as merely the latest effort by unrepentant capitalists to maintain the status quo — and there is evidence to support this view. A Deloitte 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey reveals that only 26 percent of Gen Z and 30 percent of millennials are content with the social impact of their company. Despite the recent surge of attention paid to corporate purpose, with thousands of business leaders trying to balance social and environmental values and profits, the jury is still out.
Another LSDH “folly”
Regarding LSDH, you might wonder whether the Trucker’s House is something more than a well-orchestrated PR campaign for the sake of the CSR report. For sure, LSDH would not be the first company accused of social- or green-washing. So, let’s look at another story from LSDH.
At the beginning of 2016, Nicolas Chabanne, a French social entrepreneur promoting sustainable consumption, comes to the Loire Valley to meet LSDH’s CEO, Emmanuel Vasseneix. Chabanne has the idea of creating a milk product that will simultaneously offer a fair return to farmers, nutritional value for consumers, and environmental sustainability. Moreover, it will be consumers themselves who will devise this product and decide how much they are willing to pay for it.
Concretely, for a 1-quart carton of milk, they will be invited to a website where they can indicate their preferences along the following dimensions: How many hours a day do they want the animals to graze outside? Should the farmer enjoy two weeks of annual vacation? What food quality do they want for the cows? They will be able to directly observe on the website the impact of each choice on the retail price of the milk. To finish, Chabanne explains to Vasseneix that to implement his idea he needs a milk producing and packaging partner and that LSDH is a perfect fit for it. Though Vasseneix finds Chabanne a bit over the top, the project resonates with him, and he accepts the deal.
In July 2016, 6,823 people take part in the web-based simulation, with the characteristics most favored by these consumers becoming the specifications for this new milk product. They also indicate the retail price they are ready to pay for it. Now it’s Vasseneix’s turn to find the farmers willing to supply such milk. He happened to be in contact with a cooperative of 81 milk farmers who are on the verge of bankruptcy because the price they are getting for their milk is so low. So Vasseneix offers them almost double the price they are receiving, provided they respect the conditions laid out for what will become the Consumer’s Milk brand. This turns out even better than they imagined. The first year, Consumer’s Milk sells 5.8 million gallons, instead of the 2.6 million gallons projected. As of today, the brand has sold more than 114 million gallons — the biggest commercial success in the French food industry in the past 30 years.
But that came later. In 2016, when LSDH’s Vasseneix agreed to lead this project, he had neither a business plan nor certainty of profits. Moreover, Chabanne’s visit was the last-ditch effort — all of France’s biggest industrial dairy producers had already rejected his idea. Is this another LSDH folly?
Once, the free-market economy was widely praised. Today, it is under scrutiny, even attack. And one of the most frequent angles of attack concerns the treatment of workers under capitalism.
They care
In fact, we have seen other LSDH follies, and many more in dozens of other companies we have studied and will describe in this book. And though we have not uncovered a clear-cut “method in their madness,” we have discovered a deep reason why they engage in seemingly unprofitable activities that their competitors avoid.
The reason is simple: They care. And not in the abstract, remote sense of the word we are all used to, as in “customer care” or “health care.” Put differently, they care not for all humankind or for nature in general. Nor is it for global causes like fighting epidemics or promoting the arts. Importantly, they eschew these types of care not because they are indifferent. Rather these companies believe that the most authentic and effective way to care is to care about the people right on their doorsteps, those with whom the company is continuously interacting — its customers, suppliers, and the local community.
Such caring focus has for these companies one logical and one surprising consequence. The logical consequence is that since the company aims to care about those with whom it interacts, it has to make sure that its processes allow and reinforce these caring interactions. This often means radically transforming these processes, since they were devised in the first place not to maximize care but to maximize profit. Specifically, this means transforming them from being designed for transactions based on self-interest and mistrust to being designed for relationships based on serving others’ needs and trust.
And now, the surprising result: Once their transformed business processes allow companies to care unconditionally about the members of their business ecosystem, these companies enjoy a continuous and amazing prosperity.
This book does not prescribe a new ideology. Nor does it pretend to get us out from all the shortcomings of modern capitalism. Rather, it tells the story of outstanding, yet often discreet companies— small and large, public and private, in diverse industries and geographies— that are quietly reinventing what it means to operate a business successfully while meeting our world’s biggest challenges. Their stories are so counterintuitive to traditional business thinking that you will probably hear your inner voice telling you that they are too good to be true.
The authors will be hosting a private book launch, hosted by former Vertex CEO Jeff Westphal, at The Fitler Club on December 2.
Excerpted with permission from The Caring Company: How to Shift Business and the Economy for Good by Isaac Getz and Laurent Marbacher. Copyright ©2025 by the authors, and reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons.
MORE LITERATURE FROM THE CITIZEN