The Guardian,

London, May 16:

Craig Sams, has an unimpeachable organic pedigree. He opened Europe’s first macrobiotic restaurant in 1967 in London. John and Yoko, Marc Bolan, the Rolling Stones and Terence Stamp were regulars at Seed in west London, savouring the four-shilling (20p) dish of rice and vegetables.

In the same year, he and his brother Gregory set up the Whole Earth grocery range, which even now supplies arguably the best organic peanut butter around. In 1971, Sams and some friends did all the food at the first Glastonbury festival, offering muesli, brown rice, red bean stew, porridge, unleavened bread and a reportedly ripping tahini/miso spread.

Their fare was so popular that festival-goers blocked the route of local hot dog vendors’ vans to the site, shouting ‘Out! Out! Out!’ In 1972, he published About Macrobiotics, which became one of the great wholefood bibles of that decade. And in 1991, he and his wife Josephine Fairley, a former glossy magazine editor, set up Green & Black’s, an organic, low-sugar, high cocoa-solids chocolate and Britain’s first Fair Trade product. He chairs the Soil Association. He is a small-scale organic producer with a chestnut coppice and mixed fruit orchard on the south coast of England.

These are just a few of Craig Sams’s counter-cultural credentials. Last week, though, the chocolate and soft drinks conglomerate Cadbury Schweppes announced that it was buying up his Green & Black’s enterprise for an undisclosed sum.

All five executive directors are understood to have made GBP5 million between them from the deal. Sams, now a non-executive director along with his wife, says he has made a few bob from it too, though he declines to say how much.

“Let’s just say I will be able to pay off the mortgage a lot quicker.” When he has his picture taken, he says, “This is my ‘I’m laughing all the way to the bank’ pose.’’

On the face of it, this seems a distasteful move for a wholefood guru who, as we drink a very good cup of tea with soya milk in the kitchen of his vast Georgian rectory, is even wearing organic clothes.

Hasn’t he sold out to the Man, just as Ben and Jerry did when they flogged their totally radical ice-cream business to Unilever? Sams brushes back his grey quiff.

“No. Look, I don’t drive a car. If Shell and Exxon are the Man, I haven’t sold out to the Man.’’ In any case, this Nebraska farm boy doesn’t really buy the implied line that organic food retailing and capitalism are inimical.

“You’ll find the organic movement is just teeming with sharp entrepreneurs.” Sams himself holds a BSc in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and is regularly called

on to give talks about his business philosophy.

The 60-year-old American contends that the sale of his organic low-sugar chocolate to one of the world’s leading purveyors of non-organic, high-sugar chocolate, is necessary for Green & Black’s development. “It’s like in 1999, when I sold Green & Black’s for the first time. We needed investors who could sustain short-term losses so we could be profitable later.”