Large companies are joining the B Corp movement - both as Certified B Corporations and through other accessible options to "be like a B Corp." Learn more about the various pathways for engagement for large and public companies, then contact B Lab to discuss the right opportunities for your company.
In this increasingly complex world, big brands and companies are fundamentally challenged as to whose interests they really serve. We are convinced that answering this intent and purpose question in straight and simple terms is the best way for our brands to re-establish trust with employees, consumers, partners, civil society and governments. This is where we found B Lab accreditation a great way to express our long time commitment for dual economic and social progress, through our ambition to support people's adoption of healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices.”
- Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone, Danone North America
Certifying as a B Corporation represents the most substantial opportunity for both internal and external engagement in the B Corp movement. Examples of large companies that have achieved B Corp Certification include Laureate, KeHE, and Natura. As a large company, your path to Certification will vary based on your size and complexity.
If your company falls within this revenue range, the first step of the Certification Process will be to contact B Lab with information on your company’s size and structure, as there may be additional steps required. B Lab will review your company details with you and get you started on the right path and approach to certification. Contact us to get started!
B Lab’s Multinationals & Public Markets Advisory Council (MPMAC) is working on a path to certification for larger and more complex MPCs, including alpha testing of updated standards in 2018. Learn more about the MPMAC its membership (including representatives from Danone, Prudential, & Unilever) and provide feedback on proposed path to certification here.
In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities for engagement, including certifying subsidiaries, using B Lab’s impact management tools, adopting impact governance structures, and more.
Regardless of whether your full organization is eligible to certify today, you may want to begin engaging in the B Corp movement by certifying a subsidiary well suited for B Corp Certification. The subsidiary can then champion the value of the B Corp movement within the company, while providing a credible platform from which the parent can project leadership publicly.
There are a wealth of examples of partnerships between B Corp subsidiaries and parent companies. See ‘Examples’ section below for more detail.
Examples of large companies with Certified B Corp subsidiaries:
B Lab offers a suite of integrated tools to help large companies measure and manage their impact easily and efficiently, whether or not they are on the path to B Corp Certification.
With B Impact Management tools, your internal teams or subsidiaries can understand and celebrate impact performance and create plans to improve. The tools can also be used with suppliers and customers, providing a practical way to engage your stakeholders around your corporate values.
B Lab promotes mission-aligned legal structures like the benefit corporation that join the interests of business with those of society. B Lab collaborates with businesses, the capital markets, and policy makers to drive adoption of these structures around the world.
Adopting the benefit corporation legal form (or other similar governance structure) creates a solid foundation for long-term mission alignment and value creation. It protects mission through capital raises and leadership changes and provides legal protection to balance financial and non-financial interests when making decisions—even for publicly traded companies. There are over 5,000 benefit corporations around the world, including large and public companies like Laureate Education and Danone North America.
Bancolombia is the third largest bank in Latin America, with assets of over $55 billion. Bancolombia wanted to understand how the companies in its supply chain are creating positive impact, improve the sustainability performance of its supply chain, and strengthen the bank’s relationship with its suppliers.
After evaluating numerous impact assessment tools used by banks and corporations, Bancolombia chose the suite of B Impact Management tools - the B Impact Assessment and B Analytics - as the best solution to fulfill its objectives. This suite of tools provides Bancolombia with a self-assessment platform for suppliers that goes beyond environmental, social, and governance (ESG) evaluation, providing a holistic view of the impact of the bank and its network on the local community and stakeholders. The B Analytics platform has also allowed the bank to focus on impact improvement with the businesses in its supply chain, enhancing supplier relationships.
In 2011, an organic baby food company named Happy Family Brands achieved B Corp Certification. Two years later, Happy Family was acquired by French multinational food corporation Danone. That acquisition marked the first connection between Danone and the B Economy and began a long-term process of exploration and education.
Now, Danone has multiple subsidiaries certified as B Corps, is making use of the benefit corporation legal structure in the United States through its subsidiary DanoneWave, is assessing and educating more business units using B Lab’s impact management tools, and is working to create more pathways for multinational engagement through B Lab’s Multinational and Public Markets Advisory Council. Moreover, Danone has become the first multinational corporation to publicly commit to pursuing B Corp Certification.
Download our case study on Danone to learn more about how and why Danone has engaged deeply in the B Economy and committed to pursuing whole-company B Corp Certification.
Northwest Permanente (NWP) is proud to be the first physician organization in the world to become certified as a B Corp. Members of the NWP Board of Directors learned of the B Corp Certification in 2015. The process to become a certified B Corp took less than two years from ideation to actual certification. NWP worked not only with its operational team but also built a proposal for its over 600 physician shareholders.
Changing the medical group’s Articles of Incorporation to meet the legal requirement for Certification required a vote of 75 percent of shareholders and approval by 75 percent of those voting. Once that vote was accomplished in September 2016, NWP achieved official B Corp status. In January 2017, NWP officially filed with the State of Oregon as a Benefit Corporation. NWP’s priority is to attend and participate in B Corp events to meet other B Corps. When the physicians and staff of NWP get engaged in the community, they demonstrate core values and, in the process, enhance their brand awareness and reputation. This is important for attracting the best new physicians and staff, as well as attracting more people to consider receiving their health care from their clinically excellent, compassionate, and community-minded physicians. After all, transforming health and health care and improving the communities in which they serve is core to the NWP mission.
Laureate Education is the largest global network of degree-granting higher education institutions, with more than a million students enrolled on more than 200 campuses at 88 institutions in 28 countries. Laureate adopted the benefit corporation legal structure and in 2015 became certified as a B Corporation. In 2017, Laureate completed an initial public offering, making it the first benefit corporation to ever go public. By doing so, Laureate and its shareholders have rejected the market paradigm of shareholder primacy by going public as a new type of corporate entity designed to treat customers, employees, and communities as the shareholders’ partners, rather than as interests to be managed for maximum financial gain.
When Laureate began the B Corp Certification process in 2014, it quickly became clear that managing the process for nearly 50 subsidiaries was going to be complicated. Laureate utilized B Lab's Impact Management tools, including B Analytics, as a project management solution. B Analytics helped Laureate track the completion progress of each of its subsidiaries through the B Impact Assessment and let them quickly gauge how close they were as a whole to the performance threshold required for Certification.
Influenced by subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s, a Certified B Corp since 2012, Unilever has been active in the B Economy since 2015. That year, CEO Paul Polman announced Unilever’s participation in B Lab’s Multinational and Public Markets Advisory Council (MPMAC), stating that “the B Corp movement is a critical part of the shift to a more inclusive and purpose-driven economy, which is unquestionably needed.”
Since then, alongside its work to develop a meaningful path to B Corp Certification for multiinationals as a member of the MPMAC, Unilever has continued to acquire Certified B Corps as subsidiaries, including Seventh Generation, Pukka Herbs, and Sundial Brands, with whom they launched a $50 million fund to empower black women entrepreneurs.
When Australian-based Intrepid Group committed to becoming a Certified B Corporation, its leaders realized they would need some help getting through the certification process given the organization’s complex structure. Intrepid Group has more than 20 subsidiaries around the globe, each of which must complete the B Impact Assessment (BIA) in order to certify the parent company.
Intrepid Group’s B Corp Project team, an internal group with members from across the organization, is charged with shepherding the company through the certification process. The B Analytics platform has given the team visibility over each subsidiary’s progress toward completing the BIA and its preliminary scores. Geoff Manchester, Co-Founder and Director, says, “Thanks to B Analytics, we can easily understand where each of our subsidiaries are in the BIA, how they’re performing, and generate our aggregated BIA score to know how close we are to our goal of certification.”
B Analytics also helps Intrepid Group identify the areas for improvement that have the most positive impact on the organization’s overall score. When a subsidiary makes changes that impact its individual BIA score, the parent company can directly see the impact it has on the company-wide score, making the process easier to manage.
Contact us by filling out the form below and our team will be in touch shortly to discuss your goals and determine what engagement makes sense for your business.