Our 10 year journey to becoming a B Corp

Our mission has always been to change the way people eat, and shop, for the better. Our weekly boxes contain precise ingredients, along with easy-to-follow recipe cards, which reduce food waste - and your carbon footprint - with EVERY meal.?

What is a B Corp certification - and why does it matter?

We became B Corp certified in August 2021, joining a global community of businesses that prioritise taking collective action and building a better world. The B Corp badge is a designation that we are using our business as a FORCE FOR GOOD; by protecting the planet, empowering people and growing with purpose. It’s also a stamp of credibility for our amazing customers.?

It’s more accurate to state that our B Corp journey began in 2012, when Gousto was founded, as we’ve been focused on having a positive impact from the beginning.

Gaining B Corp accreditation, and what it stands for, really resonated with us. Crucially, it holds us ACCOUNTABLE to our commitment to continue to grow in the RIGHT way.

5 areas the application process considers

Getting here was tough, with a rigorous application process spanning 18 months of assessments, accelerating improvements across the business and providing evidence of our practices throughout the audit process. Split across 5 key areas, the assessment covers:

Governance: evaluating our overall mission, engagement around our social and environmental contribution, ethics, and transparency

Workers: evaluating our contributions to employees’ financial security, health & safety, wellness, career development, engagement and satisfaction

Community: engagement with, and impact on, the communities in which we operate, hire, and source from. Focus areas include diversity and equitable inclusion, economic impact, civic engagement, charitable giving, and supply chain management

Environment: our overall environmental management practices, as well as impact on the air, climate, water, land, and biodiversity. This includes the direct impact of our operations, e.g. supply chain and our distribution

Customers: assessment of how our customers are considered through the quality of our products and services, ethical marketing, data privacy and security, and feedback channels

The journey was worth every minute

We think the journey was worth every minute, as it commits us to retaining the highest environmental and social standards, for the long-term. With a median score for non-B Corp businesses being 50.9, our overall score of 83.4 serves as a testament to our desire for positive change being reflected in our everyday operations.?

Highlights - and challenges - from the process

Highlights included bringing together our 'B Team' - a group of passionate sustainability champions, across our Buying, People, Legal, and Health and Safety teams, to establish new practices that set Gousto up for sustainable success, now and in the future. We also loved talking to other B Corps, sharing our insights and learning from their examples.?

We incorporated a commitment to ‘The Triple Bottom Line’ in our articles of association, which posits that firms should commit to measuring their social and environmental impact - as well as financial performance - rather than solely focusing on profit. It can be broken down into the ‘three Ps’: profit, people, and the planet. Innovative companies, such as ours, are proving that it is possible to do WELL by doing GOOD.

We’ve seen a subsequent ‘snowball effect’ with our suppliers, too, with many beginning their own B Corp journeys or recently receiving accreditation. Employee engagement has also been positively impacted, which is fundamental to the success of our future endeavours.?

Our main challenge was completing the process whilst growing so rapidly - our assessment framework was changed 3 times, within those 18 months, to keep up with our scaling journey!?

Where do we go next??

Becoming certified is day 1 for us - we view this as an ongoing project and we’re already thinking about recertification in 3 years’ time.?

Our focus is to become a BETTER B Corp; we want to contribute MORE to the community, not just through our supplier partnerships, but with other B Corp members who share our passion for positive change.

We pledge to further improve our impact, through innovations such as our edible stock sachets, as well as initiatives that enable us to redirect surplus food to those in need. Redistributing meals through Fareshare in 2021, for example, enabled us to prevent 285 tonnes of Co2e from going to waste (the equivalent of taking 101 cars off the road) and saved 267 million litres of water.