As the chief executive of a company that makes toilet paper, Bergstein has been through an intense few months.

Mr. Bergstein, who runs Seventh Generation, has watched the coronavirus pandemic send demand for his company’s products — which also include household cleaners and paper towels — skyrocketing. The company has faced supply chain disruptions and limitations on how much it can produce, but is scrambling to fulfill orders, which remain higher than normal.

At the same time, with protests around the country after the killings of George Floyd and other unarmed black men and women by the police, companies large and small have been moved to address discrimination and make public commitments to diversity initiatives.

That feels natural for Seventh Generation, a progressive company owned by Unilever, the large European conglomerate that has made strong commitments to environmental and social causes. Yet Seventh Generation’s headquarters are in Vermont, and Mr. Bergstein acknowledged that his staff lacked racial diversity, and that changing that was a challenge.

This conversation, which was condensed and edited for clarity, was part of a series of live Corner Office calls discussing business during the pandemic. Visit timesevents.nytimes.com to join upcoming calls.

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At a moment like this, with a national conversation about diversity, racism and police brutality going on, what’s your message to your employees and to your customers? How are you as a C.E.O. responding to this?

It’s a devastating moment, and we’re responding on many different levels. I’m personally sad. I’m outraged by the actions of hate and violence and racism that just keep seem to coming back and back and back at us. George Floyd is the latest example, but there’s Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and sadly we can keep going on. For me, this is really personal. This son of a Holocaust survivor who lost her entire family, we know the impact of systemic institutional hate and we need to speak out, but even more we need to take action. I personally stand as an ally with the black community. It’s time for us to both speak out and to take action.

The Seventh Generation foundation committed $100,000 to the bail project to ensure that protesters and others who are incarcerated aren’t paying a bigger price for expressing the hurt that they’re clearly feeling. We’re also calling on Congress for safe, improved access to voting, which we think is a basic human right.

Can you give us a sense of how diverse Seventh Generation is as a company and what efforts, if any, you’re making to try to become more diverse as an organization?

We’re a small company based in Vermont, which is not the most racially diverse state. We started working really closely on inclusion about five years ago. We actually have a work force which is almost 70 percent female. And yet what we were finding when we took a look in the mirror some time ago was that we weren’t seeing women represented on the executive team and our board and the higher levels of management at the same rate that they were present in the country. Now we have a leadership team which is 50-50 male-female. So we we’ve made good progress in creating a space where we think that women can succeed.

Racial diversity has been a bigger challenge for us, to be really frank. When we started our efforts, less than 6 percent of our company were people of color. We’re now at about 16 percent, which is still not anywhere close to what we need to be.

You mentioned that you joined with other companies in urging Congress to secure voting rights, but are you going beyond that and actually taking a position on who people should vote for?

We’re not calling on people to vote one way or another. What we want is to get people to come out to vote, and we want to do everything we can to help ensure that there’s as big a turnout as there possibly can be.

What determines when you speak out about one cause but perhaps stay silent on another? What about gun rights, L.G.B.T. rights and other causes?

It comes back to your values. It comes back to our mission. Seven Generation has a really clear mission, which is about transforming the world into a healthy, sustainable and equitable place for the next seven generations. We use that really as a guiding star for the issues that we want to engage in. And I think it’s really important that we don’t engage in every issue that’s out there. Gun rights is an area I’ve got personal points of view on, but I’m not sure that my personal point of view is as relevant in that conversation, so I’ve withheld that.

What were the first impacts of the coronavirus on your business?

It first really became clear that there was a real crisis brewing in January. We had launched an ultra-concentrated laundry detergent last year that comes with this easy-dose cap. Those caps are made in China. In January, we had a really big challenge on our hands to be able to get these. The second piece was in January when there were three cases reported in Seattle. And at that point we decided that we would extend the coverage of our inventory on our disinfecting products, because we suspected that there was going to be an increase in demand, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the surge that we saw when March came around.