OUR B CORP JOURNEY
Why we became a B Corp.
Here at Veneziano Coffee Roasters, we believe in coffee with significance and our mission is to drive and inspire significant evolutions in coffee and create meaningful positive impact on our communities. It is this mission that drove us to achieve our B Corp certification.
Why should B Corp matter to you?
Our B Corp certification is our commitment to using our business as a force for good. It means we will make business decisions that positively impact the environment – purpose, accountability and transparency are core to our DNA. When you support Veneziano, you are supporting a business that fundamentally believes in doing better and putting social and environmental impact before profit.
What is a certified B Corporation?
In our current global economic system, business is failing its enormous promise to create positive impact while driving large-scale negative impact. In short, it’s putting profit over people and planet. B Lab believes that a different kind of economy is not only possible, but necessary — and that business can lead the way.
Since 2006, B Lab has been advancing this work around the world by certifying B Corporations: companies that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. B Corps are also legally committed to bringing benefit not just to shareholders, but all business stakeholders — workers, customers, communities, and the environment.
As of 24th April 2023, there are currently over 6000 Certified B Corporations in more than 80 countries and over 150 industries. Head to B Corphomepage to see the latest statistics about the B Corp Movement.
Our certification journey.
3 years ago, we identified B Corp as an aspiration in our sustainability journey.The pathway to certification lies within the B Impact Assessment, a free tool to self-assess where a business lies in relations to B Lab’s five key pillars – this is the first step we recommend to any company that wants to start their B Corp journey. The assessment’s benchmarking tool helps a business recognise what they're doing well and can help pinpoint areas of improvement and highlight areas not previously considered.This tool is broken into five key categories, (workers, environment, customers, community and governance) and with over 200 questions, this dynamic assessment helped us understand where we sat against similar companies in our sector. It showed us our focus areas of development to help close the gap and prepare us for our official assessment submission.
We found that although we were above the average for our sector, size and country, we were still short of the 80 points required to become certified. Parallel to our efforts of becoming Carbon Neutral and reducing our carbon footprint, we also worked hard on some new initiatives to improve our score.
We implemented several new initiatives such as a Volunteer Time Off Policy, Parental Leave Policy as well as improving our waste management programs. We also focused on building up our existing social impact program whereby we pay a premium for coffee that goes back into supporting local communities and improving livelihood at origin.
We achieved official certification in April 2023, with a final score of 90.3. The average for our sector and business size is 76, so we are really proud of our score.
Our score
It doesn’t end here...
Becoming B Corp Certified is only the beginning for us, and we know we can’t get complacent if we want to retain our certification. Our goal is to reach a score of 100 in time for our recertification. To do this we will keep a strong and consistent focus on the 5 key areas, especially in areas that really touch the heart of our business, in the communities and environment in our home countries, and along our supply chain.
As leaders within the coffee industry, and we endorse and promote the B Corp framework, and recommend our peers complete the free impact assessment.
