Is it worth being a B Corp?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's an exclusive business club with over 8,000 companies, which put environmental and social values at the heart of their work. But the B Corp badge has come under some criticism for taking on some multinational companies - some smaller businesses say that has diluted its values. We hear from Anjli Raval, who reports on what goes on inside the world's biggest companies for the Financial Times.
One of the biggest growth areas for B Corps is expected to be Africa. Tahira Nizari is the co-founder of new B Corp Kazi Yetu, selling traceable products like tea and spices from Tanzania. Max Landry at Peppy - a health tech company - who specialise in underserved areas of healthcare lets us know the hoops to join the B Corp club. Jonathan Trimble, the CEO and founder of creative agency And Rising, which helps new brands with their marketing plans tells us what he wants B Corp to change. Chris Turner, Executive Director at B - Lab UK, tells us how their standards will shift in the next year.
Produced and presented by Rick Kelsey
(Image credit: Kazi Yetu)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising black student athletes upside down. |
| 0:09.8 | Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service tells their story. |
| 0:14.3 | Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:21.3 | There are more than 8,000 companies in the world in what some consider a special club. |
| 0:27.7 | A lot of the questions are around the kind of unseen impacts that your company might make. |
| 0:32.6 | So what's your supply chaining? |
| 0:35.2 | How do you treat your workers? |
| 0:36.6 | The B-Corp Club. It doesn't mean you're |
| 0:38.8 | perfect once you get the status. But for a lot of companies, it is a symbol that you have met a certain |
| 0:44.5 | standard. In the past 12 months, B-Corps come under scrutiny over who it lets in and what it means |
| 0:51.6 | to have the badge. Stop pandering to the B corporations that are quite desperate to create a camp of |
| 0:57.8 | we're the good guys and the rest. |
| 1:00.2 | If you're not the B corporation, you're all the bad guys and we'll decide you come in |
| 1:03.1 | and you comes out. |
| 1:05.6 | We'll be speaking to the people who've jumped through the hoops and those who've locked |
| 1:09.5 | inside the decision making. |
| 1:11.4 | Some of these early adopters believe that this focus on enlisting multinationals and trying |
| 1:18.1 | to get them to be less bad is so different than being transformationally good. |
| 1:25.5 | And we'll put what we found to the organisation itself. We'll continue to |
| 1:30.4 | strive for bigger businesses to join the movement if they meet our standards. And those standards, I should |
| 1:35.8 | say, are going up. So we're working right now on some improved B-Corp standards. Hello, this is |
| 1:42.8 | Business Daily. Is it worth being a B-Corp with Rick Kelsey? |
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