#43 Going from A to B Corp With Tesh Randall From Raglan Food Co.

So good morning everyone. My name is Cheryl Adamson, I'm the GM of the Pioneel Business association and gives me great pleasure to welcome you all here this morning. This morning's talk was entitled to B Corp or not to Be Corp. That's the question. So obviously this morning our speakers are going to give us an understanding of what is B Corp business. We're going to hear about a good example of one and hopefully you will gain how your business can get involved if that's something you'd love to do. So the format of our webinars are usually that the two speakers.

Good morning.

Morning. Somebody needs to switch off their audio.

This morning we'll introduce both speakers and if you could please save questions until the end. And please can I ask you to keep your microphones on mute as you can hear this is being recorded. It will be on our website after the event so you can unshare that. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce our first speaker, Tim Jones, the Grow Good Guy. So Tim is called the Grow Good Guy. He delivers inspirational, motivational, memorable and impactful consulting, training and coaching to individuals and organizations. He helps them achieve meaningful goals in life by tapping into the potential of their purpose fueled performance. Tim is New Zealand's first qualified B consultant having successfully completed the training program run by B Lab ANZ. He's helped more than 50 companies from around the world navigate the B Corp impact assessment. He also holds a certificate in Impact Measurement and management for the SDGs from Duke University and is an industry expert and co teacher of the University of Canterbury MBA program. Originally from the uk, he was born in Oxford but is half Welsh through his father. He's been in Aotearoa since 2004 and now is based in Otatahi in Christchurch. Outside of his work, he's married to Lee and has a 10 year old daughter and a dog child, Dougal, who is a West Highland Terrier. Two random facts about Tim. He holds a degree in Medieval history and spent 10 years selling medical devices in the UK and New Zealand. And when he's not growing, he's most likely to be found skiing or riding his bike. And he commented this morning, nice cold Christchurch and lots of snow. Over to you Tim, we look forward to hearing from you.

Hello Kia Ora. Well, what an intro. I've got a lot to live up to I feel here. Right, we will share the screen. Is that working? Can you see some PowerPoint stuff? Excellent. Cool. So I guess the case for the prosecution or the defense? I don't know which one you want to take. You know, I kind of think B Corp just is better business and this is why. So we'll cover off pretty quickly what B Corp is a little bit about how to get certified. But then we'll also look into some of the trends that are driving the rise of B Corp right now. And I'll finish off by talking about what I call the ROI times two. So there's the return on impact of you potentially being a B Corp, but there is also potentially a financial upside to you being a Bight. But we'll crack into it because we haven't got a huge amount of time to explain all this. Goody cool. Anyone on the call, are you interested in basketball or have you got friends or family members who are big basketball fans? Not many. There's normally one. If you were or if you had been interested in basketball, you would know this brand called and one and back in the day, late 90s, early 2000s and and one was one of the premier basketball apparel brands globally, second only to Nike in shoe sales. And they had a really successful business until September 11, 2001 where J. Cohen Gilbert, who was co founder of and one his sister, was trapped in the Twin Towers in New York. Now luckily she was one of the survivors. She got out and then about two weeks later one of his close friends and One passed away. And so he had what I call the existential wet fish to the face moment where it's this shocking realization that life is short, life is fragile, agile, what am I doing? Like I could be next. And going through that, he just realized, I'm running a really financially successful business, but so what, like what damage am I doing whilst earning that money? So they went and reviewed the business and found lots of areas where they could be better. So they started looking at their supply chain and making sure that they were paying good wages throughout their supply chain. They looked at how they were treating their staff and gave their staff like way more workers rights than you typically get in the US even today. They created a charity. So they're based in Philadelphia. They created a charity to help create leadership opportunities for the youth in Philadelphia to kind of get out of poor or lower socioeconomic areas and try and you know, really have a good shot at doing something great in life. And what they found was the business went from strength to strength. What a crazy idea. Like the employees loved it, their suppliers love them. They have all this kudos from doing all this cool stuff in the community. Anyway, Fast forward to 2005 and Jay decided, look, you know, I've kind of done what I can do with the business. I'm going to sell. I want to move on to something else. They've all got great names. So he got together with his chief operating officer, Bart Houlihan, and said, right, we're going to sell the business, and we're going to try and do something else. Excuse me. So they take the business to Wall street, and the first thing all the Wall street bankers say is, look, we know your brand, we know your business. It's amazing. But looking at the numbers, it's awful. You're really unprofitable because you're giving away all this money to your suppliers and your and your staff. So we're going to strip all that out before we sell you. So they did that, and they sold the business. And Jay and Bart walked away feeling pretty disheartened as to what had just happened. And so they actually got together with one of the guys from Wall street, one of the Wall street bankers, Andrew Cassoi. And the three guys, like, drinking a bit of whiskey. And over a few glasses of whiskey, they thought, well, why don't the three of us get together and we'll start a new business? And this time they will bake in all the good stuff that we had at ANN1. And we'll keep to that. We'll stick true to that. And I guess a few glasses of whiskey eventually turned into a few bottles of whiskey, and they thought, hang on a minute. Instead of creating one business, what if we created a movement of businesses that aim to be the best for the world, not the best in the world? And so that's the creation myth story of B Corp. And so they launched this idea of B Corp certification in around about 2006. So B Corps are this new form of business that are seeking to balance purpose and profit. So rather than solely focusing on profit maximization, they consider the impact of their operations on their workers, their customers, their suppliers, the community, and the planet. And to do that, you go through this, I like to call it, rigorous but achievable certification process, where you will eventually be independently verified to be operating at the highest levels of transparency and accountability around your social and environmental impact. Now, beyond it being a beautiful little red certificate that you can get on your wall like I've got behind me, and I'm sure Tasha's got hers flying proudly somewhere in the Rugland Coconut Company office. So, yes, it's a verification and a certification tool. And that's really important because increasingly, people are Wanting to know that the claims you're making about the good that you're doing are actually true. It's definitely a movement and a community. The community in Aotearoa is amazing. The global community is amazing. It's just easy to connect with other B corps and get stuff done. It's a commitment. It's you stepping up as a business and proving that you're going to try and do as much good as you can with what you can do. And lastly, it's an impact guide. So it lets you understand where you're doing good, but it also lets you understand where you can be doing better and globally. B Lab. So we've got QLA on the call here. So QLA actually works for B Lab. Now, I wasn't going to get too into the details of B Lab versus B Corp, but B Lab is the organization that runs the certification system. Essentially, businesses like mine or yours, if you want to certify, you become a certified B Corp. And B Lab has this vision that all people will benefit from an economy that builds community and regenerates the environment. So stepping up to become a B Corp, you're trying to work out, well, how does your business play some role on each either side of that ledger?

All right.

Who can Certify? Come on, Mr. PowerPoint, you can do it. I know you can. Cool. So who can certify as a B Corp essentially?

Kind of almost anyone can, but not quite is the best way to think about it. So you have to be generally a for profit business. If you are a not for profit, there are some nuances around that which are best discussed one on one rather than in this brief presentation. You have to have been in operation for more than 12 months because we need to know, we need to look at your operational data to be able to see what you've been doing. You can pretty much be in any industry. There are some industries that are on the controversial industries list, which would mean it would be either impossible for you to certify or there would be some massive work you'd have to do to be able to sort of demonstrate your intent to become better. So the classic one would be an arms dealer. You know, you currently, you cannot be a B Corp arms dealer. It's just like that's just not going to work. And you can be, yeah, generally any legal structure, like I say charities, not for profits. If you want to have a chat about that separately, we can, we can talk to you about that. But yes, sole traders, limited companies, pretty much any organization structure can Be a B Corp. And so these are some of the amazing B corps locally and from around the world. So locally we've got, obviously we've got Tesh at Raglan, Coconut Company, Kiwibank as a B Corp. Kathmandu as a B Corp. Ethique, B Corp number two. One of my favorite B corps because they've just been nailing it for so long. The Chia sisters. They're the highest scoring B corp currently. Unless QLA can advise me that someone certified in the last two days that I haven't heard, that's beating them. Sawmill Brewery, one of my favorites. Based in Maticana. The more you drink, the better the world gets. And then at the big end of town you've got, you know, Ben and Jerry's All Birds. I guess we try and claim them as a Kiwi Bee Corp, but really they're based in San Francisco, aren't they? We'll give it a go. So yeah, it's, it's a wide range of businesses that have certified. And for me I say it's about mindset and intent, not size or scale. Like Danone is one of the world's biggest companies. I'm a B corp. It's me and two part time contractors. And there's plenty of B corps that have just one person.

Cool. So how do you certify? Well, this is a snapshot of what's called the BIA or the B Corp Impact assessment. And so your business is assessed across these five, typically these five areas, if you don't have any employees, you don't get questions, questions on the workers. But again, we can talk about that separately also one on one. But essentially almost all businesses are assessed against these main areas of your governance, your workers, your community impact, your environmental impact and your customer model. So governance is basically transparency and ethics around how you operate your business. How easy is it to know who owns the business, what reporting are you doing around your social and environmental workers is generally how you treat the staff. So beyond what is legally mandated for, you know, entitlements around leave and holiday and personal development and stuff like that, community is a bit of a mixed bag. It covers diversity and inclusivity, it covers supply chain and it covers community giving. So any volunteering that you're doing or charitable donations that you're doing, Environment for businesses is typically inputs and outputs. So it's energy use, water usage, waste production, it's where you're getting your power from. And it's carbon emissions if you're making something, if you're a manufacturer Then there's obviously a little bit more depth on your supply chain and the community, and there's a little bit more depth under your environmental impact. But for most of, of service or retail businesses, your environmental impact isn't too, it's not too onerous. And then the customer model looks at what you do and how you do it. So do you have warranties and guarantees in place? So on and so forth.

Next slide. Come on, Mr. PowerPoint, you can do it. So how do you go through the certification journey? Well, typically you literally, you go online, so you can go to www.bimpactassessment. we'll make sure that Cheryl and Carolyn get all these links. You go to bimpactassessment.net, you create an account, and it's completely free for you to go and have a go at taking the assessment. What you need to try and do is score a minimum threshold of 80 out of 200 points on this assessment before you can then click Submit, where you would then go in the queue for verification. So if you want to, you want to just have a look at the assessment and see how your business is doing against this global framework, it's completely free for you to do that and you can play around with it and you answer and unanswer all the different questions. You only pay money to get certified if you want to go through the verification process.

All right, hopefully that's all making sense. So why is B Corp becoming more and more of a thing? Well, there's quite a lot of environmental stuff that people seem to be more and more concerned about, whether it's plastic pollution, whether it's biodiversity loss, whether it's climate change. There's just stuff going wrong or there's stuff that could be better on an environmental side. In the middle, we demand justice and change. Well, insert the social topic that you're personally passionate about. Well, now there's probably a million other people that you can connect with in a Facebook group who have the same thoughts around a social challenge. So it's easy for people to connect and understand how they can have an impact on doing more good in the world. And I think the big thing has been Covid, collectively, we've all walked our dogs to within an inch of their lives during various lockdowns. And during that, people have had a bit of an opportunity to go, well, do I even like my job? Do I even like what I'm doing? They've all had the kind of J moment where they've had that existential wet fish to the face and gone. Hang on a minute. Maybe my business can play a role in solving some of these challenges. And then if you layer on top of that, these numbers are like, impossible to keep up with because they just keep going up. But, you know, this has all led to more consumers, more employees wanting businesses to genuinely show that they are playing some part in making some difference. So consumers want to support the brands. I've got heaps of data if people are interested or want to have a look at this. There's like, there was a McKinsey report, I think it was 2020, that showed that the lockdowns had increased conscious consumerism because people were sat at home looking at all the cleaning stuff in their cupboards going, oh, my word. Like, do I really use this? This is awful. So there's lots of evidence that's showing that even the lockdowns and Covid have accelerated this change or this interest in supporting brands that are proving that they can do good. The other big human. Well, the two other big human drivers are investment and supply chain. So supply chain, we're definitely getting companies coming to us who've been asked by one of their customers, hey, what are you doing about your social and environmental impact? Because we're measuring ours. So there's definitely increasing supply chain pressure. As you kind of have a hub company in the middle that gets certified, they then start asking their supply chain what they're doing. But for me, one of the really big ones is when the investment people get it or when the money people get on it. So this was May 2021. ANZ issued a $100 million sustainably backed loan to Kathmandu that was based on Kathmandu maintaining and increasing their B Corp score. And the team Anz basically said they looked at all the different ESG frameworks out there, and B Corp was the only one that they felt was rigorous enough. It was the only one that's independently verified, and it was the only one that they could compare kind of peer to peer on a global level. So for me, when the money people see that B Corp's the thing, then you kind of know that you've made it.

Cool. So do B Corps do any good? Well, yes, we do. So on average, B Corps are twice as likely to be offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions compared to their non B Corp peers. 63% of B Corps hire workers that have historically been from underemployed populations. And 7 to 1 is the average pay rate, highest to lowest pay ratio for a B Corp compared to 144 to 1 average globally. So that's just three brief snapshots. B Lab does write an annual impact report if we want to. Again, we can add all these links to. It's showing all the impact that B Corps are making globally. But for those of you that are kind of like not maybe not convinced on the do good argument, if you just want to make more money, then maybe you should look at being a B Corp. So this was from 2018 from a UK journal called the Grocer, which looks primarily FMCG brands in the UK. But they surveyed the 150B Corps that was certified at the time in 2018 and the average growth rate for the b corps was 14% over that 12 months, compared with 0.5% growth in GDP. A third of the B Corp certified said that they'd attracted new customers since certifying, whilst almost half said that prospective staff had been attracted specifically because they were a B Corp. What's interesting is that the UK QLE might actually have the updated number, but they are close to 1000b corps now in the UK. If you're a company exporting into the UK, you should definitely be looking at B Corp. And then this one from the University of Ghent where they reviewed all the B Corps across Europe between 2012 and 2018, they basically summarized here. This paper empirically shows that B Corp certification positively impacts the turnover growth rates one year pre versus one year post certification. Now, this is not saying, you know, certify as a B Corp, you get more money. The reason why I believe this happens is if you successfully tell the story of the journey to certification and your certification to the right stakeholders. So bring your staff on the journey, bring your supply chain on the journey. Tell your customers the authentic story of why you've done this and what it means to you. Tell your investment partners why you're doing this and why it's important for you. That's how you really make use of the certification. And then to finish off, this is like really, really cool. B Corps are super resilient. So this is from 2020, the 2020 B Lab Impact Report. 52% of B Corps hired more employees in 2020. So in the middle of a global pandemic, over half of B Corps hired more employees. 47% of B Corps had employee growth of more than 15% in the middle of a global pandemic. And two thirds of all B Corps increased revenue in the middle of a global pandemic. Now, a lot of people go, yeah, but obviously they were all selling PPE or something. Related to the pandemic. That's not the case. And what was really interesting is it was there were similar data points seen from 2008, 2009 post GFC B Corps were more resilient when it comes to global economic kind of shock factors. And so to finish off, We've got over 5,000 B Corps now globally. It's really, really hard to keep up with the number. It's like just, it's just growing and growing and growing. 20 to 2021 average was about 25% growth in the movement. I think Qlay correct me if I'm wrong, It was about 38% in this region. But globally still all the B Corps aiming to be the best for the world, not the best in the world. And it's best to sum it up with the words of Rose Macario, former CEO of Patagonia. The B Corp Movement is one of the most important of our lifetime. Built on the simple fact that business impacts and serves more than just shareholders. It has an equal responsibility to the community and to the planet. That's me. Hopefully that wasn't too far over time.

Thank you so much Tim. You did really well in terms of your timing and thanks for being such an enthusiastic and as I said earlier, high energy individual. I'm sure you must be great as a consultant. In terms of our next speaker, many of you would be very familiar with her product. We were just talking as we were waiting for everyone to join about the yummy yummy yogurt from Ragland Food Company. So to formally introduce Tish, co founder of Ragland Food Company. Tish said she didn't plan to start a business. She actually just stumbled onto it. She was making coconut yogurt at home to help her business partner Seb who has dairy allergies. They wanted to eat a dairy free diet but didn't want to give up yogurt as they both loved it so found an alternative option. She offered a couple of jars to the Ragland locals to buy and had a huge demand and it grew organically from there with more and more people asking for it. Tess says that we have a brand that people love because we're authentically passionate about making a great product, taking care of our staff and looking after the environment. We're a fair wage employer, we make everything ourselves instead of contract manufacturing. So we really understand the product and how to make the best possible coconut yogurt and plant based products. Ragland Food Co. Are a B certified corporation and have been carbon zero certified for three years which means they track and offset their emissions, packaging, glass, etc. As well as doing things like sponsoring beach cleanups around the country and donating to charities. They're now in over 650 stores and I cannot wait to hear from Tess how their journey began and how they evolved. Over to you.

Thanks, Cheryl. I'll just bring up my presentation here.

Well, kia ora koutou k Mangaraho te manga ko Northern Wairoa te awa ko HMS Mataroa te waka ko Ross Randall Tokutipuna Nodagaval Aho ko tish tokawingawa Namihi nui kyakoto. It is really lovely to be here with you all. I am excited to share some of our journey with you. And if I wasn't already a B Corp, I think I would be signing up after Tim's presentation. That was awesome.

Tim.

You gave so many good reasons for becoming a B Corp. So I'm going to go through some of the journey with you and some of the things that we were already doing as a business that helped us get the B Corp certification and then some things that we put in place because of going through the B Corp journey. And I guess just starting with how it all began, of course, Cheryl sort of dived into that already, so we won't spend too much time on that. But total fluke business. No plans to start one. Just making yogurt at home and then offered a few jars to locals. Everyone tried it, loved it, picked it up from the garage, wanted more, and the whole thing just kind of snowballed. So if you had said to me 10 years ago that I'd be running a yogurt company, I would have been very surprised. That was not on, not on the radar at all, but we put a lot of effort in in the early days, you know, making yogurt till midnight by hand, hand stirring pots, hand filling jars, hand sticking on labels, roping in all the family members, roping in all the hippie friends we had in Raglan who didn't currently have jobs. So very, very organic beginnings. Using the surf band to sort of transport yogurt around.

Yeah, you name it. We kind of went through it all in the beginning.

And.

Moving on, we sort of had to figure out how to grow. There was all this demand, a lot of interest in the product. People wanted it, but it was just, how do we get it into people's hands? As we didn't have any real previous experience in running a food company. So we learned everything from scratch. Equipment, hygiene, logistics, food technology, all of this was new to us. So yeah, a lot of kind of work and learning in the early days. We ended up building our own little mini factory. We outgrew the community kitchen that we were in pretty fast. And then we got a shipping container, refurbished shipping container, and turned it into kind of a mini yogurt plant. And at that point we just had 1000 liter brewing tank, one filling line, and we were kind of all jammed in there like sardines trying to make yogurt. We had, yeah, a very small space to work with and a lot of demand for product. So it was quite a, quite a full on time. And we went from that to expanding to sort of take over the rest of the building that we were leasing. And we very quickly outgrew that as well. We added more tanks, we built storage facilities, we built our own chillers. We were just doing everything, everything from scratch. And we realized that this wasn't going to last us very long either. So a site came up for sale at a new industrial pack that's been formed just outside of Raglan. And we thought, okay, this is our opportunity. If we want to keep the business in Raglan, keep employing locals, we're going to have to take a really big risk and build a whole proper factory. So we bought the land and started building and then Covid happened and we had to send everyone home. We had a whole pile of contractors there doing things. But then we had lockdown, so it was a bit delayed. But we ended up getting there in the end and moving in nearly two years ago now. So it's a 800 square meter custom built facility. It's so nice to have everything just how we like it, all clean, shiny, you know, fit for purpose. Before that we had a real sort of make do attitude. And now it feels like we're properly established and this is where we're wanting to be for the long term. We've actually bought the land beside the building and currently as I speak, the builders, they're now in extending the building. So after sort of two years it's already become too small. So we're going to double it and it's going to be end up being around one and a half thousand square meters.

So we started out with just one product. Like I said, I was just making the natural one at home. And then we added more products over time. Ended up with a sort of classic range of really popular stirred through flavors. And then a more gourmet, decadent kind of treaty range and a smaller size. And then we added our kefir which are a sort of yogurt smoothie, like a probiotic smoothie drink. And then most recently we've added the vegan mayo and vegan aioli. So that was our first sort of foray into something non coconut based because we have this vision for creating food products across all categories. So we started as Raglan Coconut Yogurt. We rebranded a few years ago to Reglan Food Co to give us the ability to over time, you know, make all kinds of different plant based food products. And the whole vision is that the products will be delicious, they'll be made with natural ingredients, really high quality, they'll be completely plant based and sustainably packaged. So that's our sort of overall ethos around the things that we're making. And we've gotten more distribution now than the early days of me kind of going around to stores with a little chili bin and asking if they wanted to stock a few jars of yogurt. I covered nearly all New Zealand supermarkets. I think when people say that they're from a particular town, I'm like, oh yes, I know the new world there. I made the fresh choice there. And so now we're in all the supermarket chains. We're also doing a bit of export. We're in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, the Pacific Islands, United Arab Emirates and we're just working on setting up in the US at the moment, which is a massive, massive undertaking for every us. So I've just got a few little learnings to share with you all and how the sort of B Corp certifications tied in with those. The first one is around working with purpose. So we're trying to accelerate the shift to a plant based diet for humankind. And that is mainly around climate change, which is something that's sort of weighing on my mind regularly with all the news that's coming in all the time. Every time you open up Facebook, it seems there's some other weather event happening that's affecting people. And from all the research out there, it's shown that one of the best things that we can do as individuals is just to reduce our meat and dairy intake and correspondingly decrease water use, decreased land use. Everything just gets a bit more efficient with eating plants. And Albert Einstein was saying this sort of 100 years ago. He was saying that we didn't stand much of a chance of surviving if we didn't gradually evolve to a vegetarian diet. So we're not saying everyone has to be vegetarian or vegan, but we're trying to make it possible for people to Cut down, you know, maybe have a few days of the week where they're switching out products for dairy free, animal free options and making it delicious at the same time. So it's not a huge sacrifice. I think this was already mentioned by Cheryl, but we have been Carbon Zero certified our fourth year now. So just taking responsibility for our emissions, tracking those every year, having a plan to reduce them and putting targets in place and paying to offset all the emissions we do create as a business in native forestry projects in New Zealand. And this is something that B Corp definitely looks for. It's pretty high on their radar. And yeah, I would say that if you weren't already doing this now, it's something that you'd probably want to put in place place going into the B Corp process, it's sort of an expectation now. We also have some quite creative initiatives around sort of going a bit more circular and trying to reduce our impact. So that's our factory there and you can see behind it all these trees. And so there's actually an avocado grower up there behind us growing Raglan's first avocados. Very delicious. And so we had been. We've built our own wastewater treatment mini plant sort of on. On the same side as our factory. So all the water that we use when we wash down our tanks at the end of the day after making yogurt is going through that treatment and then we're pumping it up the hill and using it to aerate the avocado trees. So just kind of trying to create a bit of a closed loop for water use on the site. We're also looking at other ways we can recycle products that might be sort of deemed as waste. So obviously we bring in a lot of coconut cream to make our yoghurt and it comes in from Indonesia and It's in big 240 liter steel drums. And we were looking at the drums and we're thinking, what can we do with these? You know, we've got so many of them and we're just sending them off for sort of scrap metal recycling. And then we thought, you know, maybe we can make products out of them. So our engineer Dave came up with this beautiful design for a Puhutakawa brazier. So we've got a big one and a small ring one. And we've created a whole brand for those called Reforged. And we've just been selling them online and shipping them to people around the country and just, yeah, trying to give waste a new life, I guess, is something Sort of useful and beautiful.

And so, yeah, the B Corp certification process, Tim spoken to it already, but it is very rigorous, which is great. You know, it needs to be. And it does take quite a long time. So I'd just say that I probably underestimated how long it was going to take us to meet the criteria. So I was working towards it for probably a year and a half going through the whole process before we had our audit. And I found it a really useful process to go through because it almost acted as a checklist. So I was going through all the different areas and it would say, are you doing this? Do you have this in place? And in some things it would be yes, and in some things it would be no. And if it was no, then it was like, well, okay, I'm going to need to create that system or we're going to need to create this policy.

So we put all of these things in place along that year and a half that then allowed us to meet and exceed the audit criteria. So, yeah, just a sort of tip there would be. Give yourself enough time. If you are thinking about doing it, just start now because it probably is going to take a little while to get there with it.

We have a bunch of different initiatives as well, and these were things that we sort of reported on as part of the audit process. It's really important to the B Corp team to know that you're sort of making an impact in your local community and doing things to give back. So some of the initiatives that we're doing is around planting trees, especially along polluted waterways. We've sponsored beehives for families and schools. We use recycled materials in our factory and also in things like there's aprons that we use for expos and demos, and that's all sort of scrap material in our office. If you come visit our office sometime, you'll see that we have these squares of mismatching carpet for the office, which we're all going to go to landfill. But, you know, we just put them all together and they're like, fine. And then we're trying to clean up a million pieces of plastic from beaches all around New Zealand. So people go out and do cleanups. They report to us on what they found, and then we send them free yogurt to say thank you. So we've been working towards this million pieces target for coming up three years now, it must be. And I think we're going to hit it finally by the end of this year, we're at about 860,000 pieces of plastic now. And it is. Yeah, it's crazy what's out there in terms of plastic. There's just all kinds of things on beaches that shouldn't be there. Yeah. So this, this is one area that they want to know about. What, what do you kind of have in place that you're doing that is having an impact and giving back? And this is. One of our customers made this for us, actually. This was. She was doing all these beach cleanups and she kept all the white and green pieces and then made us this cool little smiley logo. And we have it in the back of our office on the wall. The next one is around others. And this is another major focus for E Corp certification is what are you doing for the people in your team and the people in your wider community? And we have a philosophy around elevating others. So a rising tide lifts all boats. This is our crew here. They're a really lovely bunch of people. I've got 30, 30 team members now. So we're one of the kind of larger employers in Raglan. It's a very small town. I'm sure many of you have been here. And they're all sort of between 20 to 40 would be our main sort of age range. They like surfing and yoga and all the things you'd expect from people who live in Raglan. And we've tried to put a lot of things in place to support these guys. A lot of them have been with us sort of the majority of the journey, like five, six years of our nearly eight year business journey. So things like having a really transparent system around pay. We have a whole pay level framework so everyone in the company knows what kind of range they're sitting in and where they can aim for in future. We have a fair wage policy, so we pay 10% above minimum wage to anyone just starting out, entry level on the line. And that's currently slightly higher than living wage. Actually it's about 2332. We have a team health and wellbeing fund where people can apply to use that for things that would sort of benefit the health and wellbeing, things that fall outside acc, like having a massage or seeing a nutritionist or maybe getting a counseling session. So these are just some examples of the ways that we try and look after our team. And we just last week actually won the Supreme Employer award at the Good Employer Awards, which was pretty cool because we were one of the. Definitely one of the smaller companies at the awards. And yeah, we're sort of recognizing all these different things that were put in place to look after the people.

This is another photo of our lovely team. And then giving them opportunities, training, development, we try and take them out and show them things, you know, other local food factories. And so we can sort of learn from each other. We do volunteering together, paid volunteering, beach cleanups, June plantings. We've got a tree planting day coming up next Wednesday with the crew. And this is planting trees around our factory. We've planted about 900 native trees just around the factory.

Yeah. So I think all these things are very important and I could go on for ages about initiatives around people and then in terms of the wider community. So outside our immediate team, we've been trying to find ways to elevate what other people are doing. So partnering up with other foodie brands and collaborating with them, partnering up with local artists on gifts. And here we've got pottery, bowls and Raglan. There's so many potters. We've done, done collaborations with about five different potters now. If we're going to do Christmas gifts or supplier gifts or sort of special limited edition products, we always try and do it with someone local and support what they're doing. T shirt artists have done tie dye T shirts for us for staff presents and just trying to sort of, you know, think out the box, get a bit more creative with gifts and use it as an opportunity to show what other people are doing and making.

And then the final learning is just around values and trying to stay true to your values, which is pretty hard in business, I think at times. You know, it's set up as a very capitalist model and it is traditionally about just making profit. And that's why I really like the B Corp philosophy around businesses more than just profit. There's so many other things to think about and, and values have always been very important to me personally. I wrote a blog about being rather than doing and all these different sort of character qualities to develop in your life. And the blog got discovered by a US publisher and turned into a book. So it's in wit calls and distributed around the US And I guess I say that to just, you know, it's very hard going into a, a business with this sort of values philosophy and then trying to marry the two together. And I think that's what we've tried to do with this company is put our values into practice.

And also working through with the team what they value and how they see the company. And these are some of the things that we came up with together in a brainstorming sort of session. And they do get tested. Like I'm not saying that it's easy at all. And an example of that is here with these products that we developed and launched quite a few years ago. Now, this is going back about four years, but we were getting asked for a pouch product. Mums wanted a dairy free pouch that they could put in their kids lunch boxes because you can't take a glass jar to school.

And so we thought, oh yeah, that's a great idea, we'll launch one. And we tried to find a compostable pouch. We thought it would be easy. Turned out it was not easy to find a compostable pouch that can contain yogurt. We tried looking all around the world, kind of gave up because they all said they were going to be a year and a half, two years away. So we thought, okay, that's all right, we'll go ahead with it anyway and put a recycling program in place. So we had this nationwide recycling program where people could clean the pouch and then return it to be recycled. So we launched and we just found that over time people weren't using the recycling program. It was quite disappointing. We were hoping that it would be used and it and it wasn't. And it just showed us that, you know, people look for convenience. It's a hassle to collect all your pouches, rinse them out and return them. And so people just weren't doing it. And so as this went on, we kind of felt worse and worse about the fact that we were putting this plastic pouch out into the world, you know, to just end up in landfill. And it was a real values conflict because on one hand, you know, it's sales and people are buying it and on the other hand it's plastic and it's just something that we just didn't believe in. So we ended up having to make the tough call and delete the whole product range, which was hard at the time, but ultimately definitely more aligned with our values. And so now all our products are in glass. Yeah. And that's just one example. And there's so many different things that come up in business which you have to sort of think about your values and decide if it's the right thing or not.

Yeah. So lovely to share with you some of the journey. There's so much more, but I'm sure we want to save some time for Q and A. We are all very enthusiastic about the B Corp certification. I think there's really good buy in from the team and it's something that we really want to continue with and improve and increase our score over time.

So, yeah, happy to take any questions. Thanks for listening.

Thanks so much, Tess. It was absolutely inspirational and good on you for starting from such an organic start and developing such a great business. Any questions from anyone, you can either type it into the chat or it's a fairly small group, so I'm quite happy if you just want to ask it.

Catherine. Yep.

Yeah, I've got, I've got two for Tish and one for Tim Tesh.

I'll give you both of them. That's cool. First.

Yep.

So can you please talk to us about reinvesting in the growers? I've just been doing some homework on the coconut growers and your visits to them, so it'd be really interesting to learn a bit more about that and, and what they might want to help them grow that you could help them with grow or improve wellbeing rather than straight economic growth, firstly. And then secondly, with respect to the pouches.

Appreciate. It's a deleted line, but I wondered if you'd come across Paul Charteris at Save Board, who is now able to take tetra packs and multi laminate foils and whether that has helped you consider perhaps restarting the line. And then the question for Tim. Tim, is B corp consistent with ICL credibility principles, the ICL Eco Labeling alliance that includes Fair Trade, msc, FSC organics, et cetera. Thanks, Cheryl.

Cool. Okay, well, I'll start.

So the coconut growers, so they're in Indonesia and we've previously gone over there every year to visit them and see how they're getting on and so on. But now there's been a bit of a gap these last couple of years. So we're looking at planning a trip later this year because we kind of missed that contact.

And it's very cool how they're set up. So it's, it's, it's kind of like a. It's kind of like a co op where they don't actually have a plantation as such, but people can just sell their coconuts to them. So they have these trucks that go around and pick up the coconuts because people have coconuts everywhere. Like they're just in your backyard. Everyone has coconut trees. So anyone sort of big or small can sell coconuts to them. And then they take them back to the processing plant and turn it into the coconut cream and also desiccated coconut and things. So it's a cool model. And then they also have a, like a school that they've built in the community for their Workers, kids, and they provide hospital care as well for their workers. Yeah. So they have some really good things in place. And I would say that there's a lot more we could be doing there because we haven't directly. Like, we don't have any programs set up with them directly. You know, we've just focused on things we're doing in New Zealand as opposed to giving them funds to do stuff with over there. So, yeah, there's some room to do more with them in future. And hopefully we can get over there this year and actually catch up about some of this stuff because it's all just been on Zoom lately. And then. I've actually forgotten your second question. Sorry, Catherine, what was your second question?

Safe Board and the patches.

Oh, saveboard. Yeah. I just came across them last week, the Tetrafax safeboard thing. And I thought, oh, that's cool. It was. Yeah. Building materials, like jibboard stuff they were making out of it. Right. So they could be options. But then it's still just the same thing because I know other companies like allgood who do the Oat milks. They have a partnership with Save Board. That was how I came across it. And I think just getting people to do the work of. Because they have to, they only accept them back in a certain format. So you have to rinse them, cut them open, flatten them, and then return them. And just from my experience with the pouch thing, the second you put any sort of work into it, like people. People don't really want to do it or just getting people to do these things is really hard. So I think there's like a big education piece there around any type of program. We have to. I know here in Raglan we have amazing recycling, local recycling center. And it's still that they remind people all the time, like, please take the plastic caps off your bottles or we can't recycle them. Please flatten your cans now. Like that whole just educating people on how to use a program is hard. Yep.

Tim, would you like to answer your question?

I'll give it a go.

Yeah. I still. I don't have a deep knowledge of. Of. But in general, you know, the way I consider B Corp is it's almost like a Google of certification.

Systems because it is. It is holistic and looks at all parts of the business. It kind of plays well with other certification systems. So if you have done one. So if you've done Living Wage, typically that will be captured under B Corp as like, well, we've done that. Great. It'll fit under the workers section. Section. So yeah, without, without a depth of knowledge. Qla, I don't know if you've got any experience, deeper experience with ISIL than me, but yeah, in general what I like about B Corp, like I say is it, it kind of leans on other and builds off other certification tools to create some, you know, the sum of which is greater than the individual parts. So yeah, Kulo, I don't know if you've got anything extra to add. If it's okay for me to bring you bit a little it just randomly. Who is the B Lab? Aotearoa, New Zealand manager for B Lab.

Yeah, thanks Tim. Yeah, I don't have deep, deep knowledge but I do know that all of the. So in the B Corp framework we recognise other third party certifications and those have to be.

Either a member of icl, so the likes of Fair Trade in order for us to recognize those and give the company points.

But I don't think Balance Lab itself is a member of icl and I'm wondering if perhaps it's because it's not a product certification, it's a business certification. But yeah, happy to chat a bit more. I can email you about that.

Catherine.

Question from anyone else.

Chris, it looks like you're trying to talk. You need to switch your mic off. Switch your mic on.

Chris.

Chris.

There we go.

You hear me now?

Yep.

Okay. Tim, the name B Corp intrigues me. Why? Why B? Ah, the million dollar question. This is a great one because a lot of people go oh, but we want to be an A Corp. And when were we ever a C Corp? So there's kind of two, two reasons for it. So in the US quite often a limited company off the shelf is actually called a C Corp. So a B corporation is actually better than a C Corporation, but the main reason is that the B stands for benefit. So rather than you solely focusing on profit maximization, what benefit does your business have to society, community, your employees, your supply chain, the planet? So the B stands for benefit. Thank you.

Elizabeth.

Who's talking?

Sorry, I was just seeing that there's questions coming through in the chat, so I could probably respond to some of those if you want to let Elizabeth.

Go and then we'll go to one.

In the chat, just a quick one possibly for Tim or Kyle.

So if you did, if you jump straight into a B Corp certification, would you still need to look at things like living wage and accessibility ticks and you know, carbon clicks and all these other kinds of certifications? Is it kind of a Bit of a fast track. Hold all type of certification.

Yeah. So the best way to think about it is to meet the minimum requirement of 80 out of 200 points. Businesses we find typically are doing exceptionally well in two of the five sections or pretty good across all five. And so you don't have to be perfect in every area to meet the. I mean, 80 is kind of like, it's kind of like the building code. Like, 80 is not the target, it's the base, it's the threshold, you know. So in year one, though, if you can get to 80, you're doing really well because most businesses on first attempt score about 50 on the B Corp assessment. So to even be getting to 80, you're outperforming your peers and the market in general. So, and for me, depending on the size and scale of your business, you know, you could. There's only so many things that you can do right now, and if you can't do living wage right right now, well, that's okay. But if you can offset your emissions, fantastic. And it's not, you know, do what good you can with what you've got now with a plan to be better. And so, yeah, don't, don't be concerned that we're not doing everything perfectly. Do what you like. For my business, like, I work from home, my carbon footprint is next to nothing, so I'm less concerned about offsetting my emissions because actually it's a very small part of my business. Whereas for me, it's kind of more about customer selection because I can do more good by choosing the customers that I work with. So I'm more focused on the customer part of my assessment. Perhaps I've just got two team members, so now I'm actually going, okay, well, for my next assessment, I need to really think about workers because I'm now looking after people. So that's why it's a framework to help you choose, you know, what you can do right now. But it's the impact guide to go well, how do we become a better company over the next three, six, ten years? So, yeah, don't stress if you haven't got everything.

Awesome, guys. I think I'll probably end it there. Unless anyone else has got a pressing question. I just wanted to read out a comment from Genevieve just to Tesh to say it was an awesome presentation and she's been a business studies teacher with Young Enterprise and would love you as an inspirational speaker. So I will connect the two of you.

I've spoken at a couple of those before. Genevieve, it's a really cool scheme. The young enterprise. I'll just respond to the comment from rc, who just asked about the multicultural representation of Aotearoa within the team. I just thought that was quite an interesting question because we have about 11 different countries sort of represented within the team at the moment. So I don't know. Yeah, I think when you see a photo of people and then actually knowing what the heritage is, there's almost two different things. So we have maybe four or five Pacifica team members who are sort of fluent in Tadao or from Samoa. We have people from Singapore, Japan, Germany, France.

England, America.

Yeah, all over the place. So we've got a real mix and I think that's from Raglan as a place. It tends to sort of attract people from all sorts of countries. So, like, come on a trip and then decide, oh, actually, I want to stay here. So, yeah, so there's people in our team who have been born and raised in Raglan and then people who have ended up in Raglan from other places. So, yeah, it is. It is actually quite a diverse mix.

Thanks, everybody. Thank you so much, everyone, for attending. Carolyn will follow this up with an email and a link to the recording and any of the links that have been shared in the chat. So have a lovely day.

Further.

Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Bye, everyone.

Thank you. Bye. Bye.