Recently divorced Mike Hannigan was in a grocery store looking for spaghetti sauce when he came across Newman's Own for the first time. Discovering that all the profits of the competitively priced brand were donated to charity made something to click for the office products company manager.
"As a consumer I wasn't making any sacrifice," he says. "Use business as a tool to accomplish a community goal — it made perfect sense."
In 1991 Hannigan started the...