Social Nature is now B Corp Certified! Reflections from our Founder

As long as I can remember I’ve wanted to do good.

Not just in my spare time but also in my career. I wanted to work towards the change I wanted to see in this world — in fact my first business at age 25 was called TheChange, it was a local green business directory that profiled all the businesses that were working towards building a more sustainable future from vegan restaurants, to hemp clothing stores to organic spas to eco-friendly building companies!

I’ve always loved the fast paced #makeithappen world of business. Yet as a business student I didn’t feel compelled to work for any of the purely profit driven companies that were just representing business as usual, and were often doing more harm than good in this world. I wanted to be part of the change and do my part to help chart a new way of doing business.

I learned about the B Corp movement when it first launched in 2006. At the time I was working for a local green business network and completing my business degree. B Corp shared my vision of using business as a force for good and I was inspired to do my part to show that business could profit with a purpose.

So I launched my second business called ethicalDeal, which was a natural evolution from the local green business directory that I’d launched earlier that year. ethicalDeal introduced people to the greener choices in their city at 50% off making it easy for people to try something new like a vegan restaurant, a naturopath, a hemp clothing store or an eco-friendly hair dresser.

ethicalDeal promoted over 1,000 local green businesses across Canada — it got to the point where I’d be visiting different cities across Canada and almost every green business I came across had been profiled on ethicalDeal. At that point, I knew it was time to expand my impact.

So I asked my community how else I could help them make greener choices? They quickly replied with help me make greener choices around my daily habits, like what I eat for breakfast, what I clean my house with, and what I put on my skin — essentially help me discover healthy and sustainable groceries. ethicalDeal launched a grocery division that worked with over 30 local retailers across Canada as pick-up locations for the healthy and eco-friendly grocery products that we offered for sale online.

The success of these grocery deals eventually turned into my current business Social Nature, which introduces one new better-for-you product a day to our community of 1M shoppers across North America. Each product is offered for a limited period of time for free after which it’s available at an exclusive discount to everyone who expressed interest in trying it. Our community members help us inspire other people to #trynatural by sharing their product reviews with friends on social media, to-date this social sharing has influenced over 14M people to #trynatural!

Although I’ve been using business as a force for good for over 15 years and across 3 businesses, this year, I felt compelled to deepen my commitment by taking the steps to officially join the B Corp community — almost as a challenge to ourselves to continue to get better as we scale and to inspire other companies to join the movement. Today there are over 6,000 companies in the world who have joined the B Corp movement and formally committed to operate with a triple bottom line and to be part of the change.

In order to achieve B Corp certification, a company must:

• Demonstrate high social and environmental performance by achieving a B Impact Assessment score of 80 or above — we scored 97.8!
• Make a legal commitment by changing the corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. For us this included becoming registered as a Benefit corporation and including a clause in our shareholders agreement that reads:

“The Company will promote responsible consumption and production in the consumer packaged goods market to the benefit of people and the planet (the “Benefit”). In pursuing this Benefit, the Company will conduct the Company’s business in a responsible and sustainable manner.”

• We’ve also committed to publishing an impact report every year, setting impact targets and auditing our impact every 3 years.

Our next big goal that we’re working towards at Social Nature is to 10x our impact — we want to help 10,000 natural products get discovered by 2025 (which will also be our 10th year in business) and influence over 100M people with our #trynatural product reviews.

Here’s to being the change we want to see in this world and a big thank you to my team of changemakers that are joining me on this journey!

~ Annalea Krebs, Founder @socialnature