Big B Corp news
Ring out the bell peppers: we’ve just had our B Corp recertification confirmed. Not only has Oddbox made the cut for another three years, we’ve also increased our overall score from 93.1 to 97.7.
Being a business for good has always been important to us. So becoming a B Corp back in 2020 was a huge moment for Oddbox – as well as giving us a strong set of standards to maintain, we also love being part of a friendly and inspiring community of other like-minded businesses.
To keep your B Corp certification, businesses have to reapply every three years, giving all kinds of evidence about how you’ve met a higher standard of ‘social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability’ in five key areas of impact. Here’s how we did this time:
Workers: increase from 13.9 to 24.3
We’ve been making lots of changes in this area, so we’re chuffed with our new score. From becoming London Living Wage certified to improving our benefits, upping pension contributions and expanding internship and learning and development opportunities (plus loads more good stuff), we’re making Oddbox a better place to work.
Governance: increase from 13.8 to 17
The increase is down to changes we’ve made in how we include impact in our decision making, with more social and environmental goals for the team and at board level. We also surveyed our customers and team to understand more about what matters to them.
Environment: increase from 13.3 to 25.3
Recent improvements include moving to green-certified buildings, considering environmental impact in our product design and revamping our waste management. We’ve also changed to new, better ways of measuring our carbon footprint. (More in our latest Do Good report.)
Customers: increase from 3.7 to 4.7
This category looks at a company’s relationship with its customers through the ‘quality of its products and services, ethical marketing, data privacy and security and feedback channel’. Just as we always have, we collect feedback from our community to help guide us when it comes to our boxes and how we communicate. So we’re really pleased that our hard work has been recognised here.
Community: decrease from 48.2 to 26.1
This one looks disappointing, but we knew it was coming. The decrease is mainly because we dropped our old commitment of giving 2% of our revenue to charity through surplus fruit and veg donations. It isn’t that we’ve stopped donating (we’re actually donating loads overall); we’ve just got better at reducing the amount of surplus we have. So it’s all positive, despite the drop.
According to B Corp, the median score for ordinary businesses who complete the B Impact assessment is 50.9. So we’re over the moon with our new score of 97.7, especially as it reflects a lot of the hard work we’ve been doing behind the scenes and outside the box.
You can read all about how Oddbox works as a business in our latest Do Good report, and we’ll be sharing lots more throughout B Corp Month when it rolls around in March. But for now, we’re off to celebrate the big B with a platter of broccoli, Brussels and beetroot. Brilliant.
