Executive Summary:
- B Corp is certification that recognizes businesses that meet a high standard of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
- At Manukora, we are proud to have this certification for two years running, especially as we press onward and closer to our goals.
B Corporation (B Corp)
If you haven’t heard of it yet, let us introduce you to one of the business world's most meaningful certifications. If you're a pro, feel free to skip down to the Manukora mindset.
B Corp is a rigorous certification that recognizes businesses that meet a high standard of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. B Lab is a third party, nonprofit network that administers the certification. Their mission is to transform the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet and the B Corp certification system is the vehicle for doing so.
“The B Corp community works toward reduced inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high quality jobs with dignity and purpose. By harnessing the power of business, B Corps use profits and growth as a means to a greater end: positive impact for their employees, communities, and the environment.” - The B Lab
Once a company is certified as a B Corp, it’s required to re-certify every three years, so businesses are consistently held accountable.
Check out some of FAQ’s about B Corps.
The Manukora Mindset
We are privileged that our backyard is a relatively untouched corner of the world. Consequently, a care for and understanding of the land has always been at our core.
These environmental values are central to how we operate; however, we haven’t spoken much about them, for fear of not being perfect, struggling to condense our planetary and social aspirations into words, and concerns that we can’t live up to our promises.
As we embark on our second year as a certified B Corp and press closer towards achieving some key goals, we feel it’s only right that we provide a more transparent view of what is happening in this space at Manukora.
Our Journey to Certification
We’re a Mānuka business that does things differently. Globally, the honey industry has been focused on high volume production; yet, this is often detrimental to the bees and their habitats, and directs profits away from local beekeepers and communities.
Our model is unique; we have established long standing relationships with master beekeepers in remote regions of New Zealand. Together, we are building a way of business which prioritizes the health of the bees and their habitats, whilst supporting and nurturing relationships within the local communities that this magical resource originates from.
In the years following our inception, we noticed that many of the businesses we looked up to were Certified B Corps, and we were inspired by the B Corp community's commitment to continuously strive for a better way of doing business. From that time, we followed the lengthy, challenging and sometimes daunting certification process to figure out where our strengths and weaknesses lay in conducting better business. It took us two years of dividing and conquering, business evolutions, collecting documents, and ensuring the entire team was aligned with the vision to achieve the certification.
“We have always admired businesses that achieve rapid growth by connecting with a large community of people through alignment on purpose and values.” - Mike Bell, Founder and CEO
On January 5 2022, we officially became B Corp certified. The B Corp values are now a key part of our culture and mission. Becoming and remaining B Corp certified requires input from the entire team, so it has been instrumental in aligning individuals in the organization on a shared purpose.
Beyond our own four walls, we are proud to be part of a community of businesses and people that share these values and are taking serious steps using business as a force for good.
Our Roadmap
Although our dedication to the B Corp certification influences a lot of our thinking, this is just one mechanism to achieve our overarching objective: To ‘aggressively reduce our footprint whilst scaling a meaningful handprint’. That involves an ambitious roadmap through to 2035. The result will look like this:
- “The entire business and supply chain run on renewables.”
- “Leave no footprints, only handprints.”
All ambitious goals require good planning, so we’ve broken these down into steps. What we plan to achieve by 2025, then 2030 and finally, how the business should look in 2035. Below is a look at our 2025 targets.
B Corp best for the world companies are “top-performing B Corps creating great impact through their businesses” (B Lab). This is split out over the five key categories; community, customers, workers, environment and governance. Given our overarching environmental focus, we’re pursuing the environmental category. To achieve this, we’ve narrowed our focus down to ethical production, materials and carbon.
“These companies are leading the way towards a more sustainable and regenerative planet by putting their impact on the air, climate, water, land, and biodiversity first in their business practices.” - B Lab
- Ethical production
Disturbingly, pollinators globally are in decline and there are multiple factors that contribute to this, including habitat fragmentation, pesticide use, climate change, and the spread of emergent pathogens, parasites and predators.
We are proud of the progress we have made to date within this area:
- The co-development of an elevated beekeeping/harvest standard with our master beekeeping partners, which we call “The Art of Ethical Beekeeping."
- 100% Glyphosate Residue Free certification for all Manukora honey sold in the United States.
-
Going beyond New Zealand, we have partnered with the world's largest non-profit focused on pollinator health: Pollinator Partnership.
We are doubling down on this, our goal is to ensure all honey sources obtain official Glyphosate Free certification by 2025 to enable us to offer this certification to all markets (currently only in the USA). This requires a lot of work with each and every landowner, beekeeper, and our certifier. Our longer term hope is that New Zealand will be able to join the ranks of other countries who have total bans on glyphosate.
- Materials
A circular economy is an economic system based on the reuse and regeneration of materials or products, especially as a means of continuing production in a sustainable or environmentally friendly way. This spans across the entire supply chain, from harvest to our customers!
The thinking we follow here is relatively simple in practice: refuse, reduce, reuse, and recycle. From just existing, we know this is a challenging task, especially in the production of consumer goods. But it’s an exciting challenge for us. We have our fair share of materials nerds at Manukora, who have recently been busy sourcing ocean waste plastic lids (watch this space!), procuring and using carbon negative sugar cane pallet wrap (instead of the miles of single use plastic usually required to wrap goods for transport) and achieving a huge milestone of already diverting 68% of our waste to recycling or being reused (getting up near that 90%!).
That’s in addition to years of previous work to have FSC Certified paper and cardboard, 100% recycled PET and BPA + phthalate free jars, 30% recycled paper and soy-based inks labels and recirculating water used for cooling and heating (to name a few!).
The challenge going forward is to strategize how to swap out the essential materials that are currently hard to imagine production without.
- Carbon
Carbon emissions are a big issue for the planet. Almost everyone / every industry is contributing to the rise in global carbon emissions, it’s impossible for this not to be a key goal for our business.
Over the medium term, we aim to use our business model to empower carbon sequestration through a dedication to planting and regenerative farming with our key partners. However, our first milestone is to become Climate Neutral Certified by March 2025.
“To become Climate Neutral Certified, a company must show that it is working to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from making and delivering its products and services - and compensates for all of them, every year.” - Climate Neutral
The Climate Neutral organization makes it possible for us to measure and offset our footprint so that we can compensate for our emissions. It’s complex, time consuming and there is no one way to do this, so we’re putting our heads together to strategize how this looks for Manukora.
- More than the environment
We’ve chosen ‘environment’ to be best for the world in B Corp, as it's a crisis affecting all of us and our habitat that’s accelerating at a scary speed. But that’s not to say that everything else is forgotten, and that’s what we love about the B Corp certification. It also requires the highest standards across four other key sections; community, customers, workers and governance.
The key theme amongst all the pillars are people. Without an amazing, happy, and committed team, reaching our goals would simply not be possible. Culture and community are paramount to doing good business, but even more so to achieving what we’ve laid out above, which goes beyond the standard 9-5.
We’re committed to promoting work-life balance, providing comprehensive healthcare and childcare policies, prioritizing career development, adhering to rigorous workplace safety protocols, paying good living wages across the business and fostering a culture that people love to be a part of.
Wrapping Up
In this attempt to summarize our thinking and evolution from the past few years we hope you can sense the importance of this all to us at Manukora.
With our flagship MGO 1000 Manuka Honey, leading among our Trending Products, we're setting new standards in quality and sustainability. Every jar from our Manuka Honey Collection symbolizes our promise of purity and integrity.
We're proud to share insights on Project Non-GMO Verified, reinforcing our commitment to natural production. Our dedication to traceability, highlighted in Back to the Source, ensures that each spoonful is a testament to our ethical practices.
Furthermore, we delve into the longevity of our products in Does Honey Expire, emphasizing our focus on lasting quality. Lastly, our exploration of the Benefits of Bee Pollen underlines our holistic approach to health.
We are extremely grateful to those out there trailblazing in this space by using business as a platform for large scale positive impact. We are driven to join these ranks in the coming years and we look forward to having you along for the ride!
