But the road to success had its bumps as well. For a self-professed socially responsible company, fast growth doesn't present just the typical entrepreneurial challenges -- things like maintaining product quality, keeping pace with demand, managing cash flow, and coping with sales shortfalls. It also presents special challenges, ones that come with adhering to a higher standard -- that is, doing all of the above while treating employees, suppliers, and customers well, which includes being forthright in marketing claims and vendor relationships. In other words, walking the talk is the name of the game. "All I can say is that we strive to be socially responsible," says Wild Planet's Daniel Grossman.

And that's where, for all the positive change they effected, some of the 1980s icons got into trouble in the mid 1990s. Ben & Jerry's got called on the carpet for claiming that its Rain forest Crunch ice cream was made with nuts collected by Amazon "forest peoples." In fact, to compensate for quality problems, the nut supplier, Community Products Inc. (which Cohen also owned), bought 95% of the nuts from commercial vendors. In a similar fashion, the Body Shop got skewered when a magazine article questioned its claims about animal testing, alleged that the company used petrochemicals in some of its "natural" products, and charged that its Trade Not Aid program accounted for less of its supplies than it had claimed. (The Body Shop denied all the magazine's charges.)

The people who started socially responsible companies in the '90s had the benefit of learning from their predecessors mistakes. Which made us wonder: How did those lessons influence the way the new founders shaped their companies?

The younger entrepreneurs are quick to acknowledge their '80s counterparts as their mentors, the people who laid the groundwork for a whole new way of doing business. "They are prophets," says Wild Planet CEO Daniel Grossman. "There is no doubt." But the new breed has added its own, decidedly more pragmatic ingredients to the socially responsible business mix. "Ben and Jerry basically threw everything on the wall to see if it stuck," says Sustainable Harvest founder David Griswold. "That's not the process kind of approach that today's socially responsible businesses are taking." The differences we uncovered between the '80s revolutionaries and today's company builders were as startling to our minds as a first taste of Ben & Jerry's "Orgasmic Flavors" of ice cream was to our palates more than two decades ago.

Several of the new socially responsible entrepreneurs, including Goldman and Sustainable Harvest's David Griswold, make a point of hiring business-school grads (or using interns from the schools) to beef up their ranks. "I've had business-school graduates here because I feel like the longevity of the company really depends on competing, using the rules of business," says Griswold, who'd applied to business school but kept deferring when the chance to sell the beans of Mexican coffee farmers presented itself. "Good deeds alone don't work."

That's a far cry from the likes of Ben Cohen, Anita Roddick, and Yvon Chouinard, for instance, who saw businesspeople as tools of the military-industrial complex and profits as a dirty word. In fact, in the '90s, when the young turks joined their elders in the Social Venture Network (SVN), an organization for entrepreneurs and investors interested in promoting social responsibility in business, the tension between the business-school contingent and the veterans was palpable. (See "Social Venture Network," below.) "At that time Anita and Ben ... certainly in their public statements, were very clear," says Wild Planet's Grossman, who first attended an SVN meeting as an intern while he was earning his M.B.A. from Stanford Business School. "They were saying, 'We would never hire an M.B.A. M.B.A.'s are poison. They think about only one bottom line. They're fixated on the notion of net profits at the expense of everything else.'" It was only later, out of necessity, that the stance softened. "Ben and Anita dropped their rhetoric about the M.B.A. thing because, frankly, through the Trojan Horse we entered, and we were there steadily for years," says Grossman.

Seth Goldman was very clear in explaining that the peppermint leaves he buys from I'tchik Herbal Tea are not grown on the Crow Reservation but are bought from still another source, and that he can't make claims about the labor conditions under which the company's herbs and teas are grown, because he hasn't visited the farms. Aaron Lamstein was totally up-front about the fact that he can't vouch for every condition under which workers manufacture his products, since the factories he uses are spread out across the United States, nor can he claim that all the components that accompany WorldWise's goods are recycled or organic.

"Before we go into a product agreement with anyone, we have extensive discussions -- first about environmental issues, second about social issues," says Lamstein. "Tremendous numbers of components are produced for our products: the box, the label, the product itself, the instruction sheet -- each could be made in a separate place. We don't visit the component manufacturers of every item. We don't have the answer to every question. Like all businesses trying to be on the cutting edge, we're learning as we go along. Our philosophy is that we need to do the best we can in as many places as we can. We also need to provide value to the customer."

Jeff Mendelsohn acknowledges that since New Leaf Paper is a rapidly growing company with only 10 employees, its priorities are developing its customer base, expanding its product line, and providing its customers with top-notch recycled papers and its employees with a fair and fulfilling work environment. "There are a number of social-responsibility issues that will become part of our agenda as we grow," says Mendelsohn. He notes that one of the mills that New Leaf Paper used recently closed its doors. "We were really sad for the employees, but we had no control over the situation," he says. Daniel Grossman goes one step further. He doesn't even describe Wild Planet as a socially responsible company. "I'm very careful about saying, 'This is a socially responsible company,' because it's not," he says. "There are plenty of things, if you came here, if you looked at them, you could say, 'Is that responsible?' So all I can say is that we strive to be. We're public about it, and we assess our performance."

Wild Planet manufactures its toys in China, and even though it screens the factories it works with and has an office in Hong Kong, Grossman acknowledges that the company doesn't have the level of control over the manufacturing process that it would have if the toys were made in the States. "The reality is, if we're trying to create models that are sustainable, you're not going to have the control over every piece of the business, so you have to pick your places, and you have to be really clear."

In Wild Planet's early years, Grossman says, there was discussion about producing the toys in the United States. "But that would have meant that we'd end up selling probably to the top 5% of the market. And our mission was to provide these pro-social, if you will, toys