The organic soaps company Dr. Bronner’s has announced it will be dropping its B Corp certification.
Dr. Bronner’s says B Lab’s standards are weak, and that some multinational corporations are now using its seal—an encircled B, which became a symbol that businesses can be “a force for good”—as a form of greenwashing.
The company mainly takes issue with B Lab’s increasing certifications of multinational corporations such as Unilever Australia, Nespresso, and Nestlé Health Science—and the fact that these businesses are not required to provide third-party certifications on the humans rights or environmental impacts of their supply chains. Instead, a business can still get a B Corp certification by scoring high in other assessment areas, such as if it monitors waste or has a certain percentage of management from underrepresented populations.
To Dr. Bronner’s, this means B Lab is failing to ensure that its certification “won’t be used to mislead consumers,” David and Michael Bronner, the company’s CEO and president, respectively, said in a joint statement. “Sharing the same logo and messaging regarding being of ‘benefit’ to the world with large multinational CPG companies with a history of serious ecological and labour issues, and no comprehensive or credible eco-social certification of supply chains, is unacceptable to us.”
A B Lab spokesperson says the nonprofit remains “deeply committed” to its mission, and that “catalyzing business as a force for good is a journey rather than a destination.” It has been working with its member businesses, advocacy groups, and independent experts to strengthen its standards, and in early 2025 will publish new requirements. These updated standards, the spokesperson says, “address today’s most urgent social and environmental challenges, providing clear, impactful requirements that companies must meet in order to deliver leadership and systemic change.”
Dr. Bronner’s first became a certified B Corp in 2015, the same year it became a benefit corporation—a separate, unrelated legal designation that allows companies to pursue social good instead of simply profit. In the years since, it’s become one of the top-scoring B Corps. The company currently has an overall score of 206.7 (reportedly, the highest score ever awarded by the non-profit), and the B Corp website notes that the median score for “ordinary businesses” is 50.9. The minimum score to become a certified B Corp is 80 points over five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers.
EI Comment: The B Corp movement encourages businesses to become good corporate citizens. Many of the pioneers in the sustainable food & cosmetics industry are B corps, however the movement has received criticism in recent years because multinationals have now got certification. One solution is to have tiers of certification: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. this would differentiate companies like Dr. Bronner’s with ones that have lower scores. Another possibility is to encourage B corporations to adopt third party certification for some of their products. This would ensure there is more of a ‘level playing field’ for certified companies.
