Nell on Earth

We have Thanksgiving to thank for the beloved Fig Newman. It was Nell Newman, daughter of actor Paul Newman, who actually created the eponymous product, but she had the opportunity only after convincing her father to take his food company, Newman's Own, in an organic direction with a triumphant organic meal she whipped up for her family on Thanksgiving 1992.

The following year, Nell started an organic division of Newman's Own more than a decade after the parent company was established, and has since become one of the most recognized names and faces in the health food industry. That's her on the Fig Newmans wrapper, standing next to "Pa" wearing calico and braids and wielding a pitchfork – bearing as much likeness to her movie star mom, Joanne Woodward, as to her blue-eyed dad.

In person, however, Nell is nothing like the country bumpkin she appears to be on the packaging. Now 45, she's a tough-talkin', race-car-drivin' surfer babe, and proud of it. Oh, and she's a tree-hugger alright – she grows her own produce, catches her own fish, and lives in a solar-powered cabin. But she doesn't carry any purer-than-thou pretenses.

From her home in Santa Cruz, Calif., Nell talked about the philosophy of her company, the troubles with big-business health food, and her life as a "flexitarian."

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First, I've got to clear one thing up: According to the back of the Newman's Own Organics pretzels package, you bet your dad his house that you could come up with a better organic pretzel than the traditional ones he munched all the time. You won the bet, and he lost his house. Is that true?

That's made up.

I'm crushed. You made it up?

Do you honestly think I live in Dad's big house in Westport [Conn.]? God no! I live in a cabin in Santa Cruz. That story is just us trying to be funny. There are different stories for different products.

Have you ever read the back of the Newman's Diavolo pasta sauce? Dad on the front is dressed like the devil with a little beard and horns. He says that he sells his soul to the devil for the recipe. It was banned in the South. They thought it was an abomination. Then an anti-violence organization gave him hell for a popcorn story that they said was overly violent because he says he goes to movies with his bag of homemade popcorn in one hand and machete in the other to cut off the hand of anybody who might try to take it away from him. Some anti-violence folks were just horrified.

I can't help but laugh. So tell us the real story about how Newman's Own Organics began.

It was Thanksgiving 1992. My dad was pretty skeptical about organics back then – he thought it was all heavy, dense, unappetizing stuff like nut loafs and yeast gravy and atomic muffins. So without telling him, I had an organic farm in California FedEx me a three-pound box of organic salad greens and peas and potatoes and I got ahold of an organic turkey, which was hard to find back then. I made my usual Thanksgiving dinner, exactly the way that Dad loves it, but with all organic ingredients. And when he started wiping his plate clean, I said, "So, how did you like your organic meal, Pa?" And he got the picture; that convinced him that organics could really take off.

So I started my own organics line under his name, and he agreed to cover expenses for the first year as long as I paid it all back, because it came out of money that normally goes to charity. We started the line in 1993 with the slogan "Great-tasting products that just happen to be organic," and within one year I'd paid it all back.

Had you had much experience in business or environmentalism before that?

My background is in biology. Before getting into the family business, I worked at the Predatory Bird Research Group at the University of California at Santa Cruz, fundraising for them. They were involved in a captive breeding program for the peregrine falcon to reintroduce it to the wild, but as soon as the peregrine was down-listed from endangered to threatened, a whole bunch of our funding dried up. It went out the window – as though we'd done our job. It was very shortsighted for funders to just drop the cause like that. So I thought, well, why not do fundraising a little differently? Why not support a cause by investing in it, participating in it, sustaining it with profits?