To Dr. Bronner’s and many Certified B Corps, ‘Business for good’ is more than a trendy and profitable marketing strategy. As a purpose-driven company, we do business to model a more just economy, and to demonstrate that a truly constructive multi-stakeholder approach to capitalism could be the norm. The integrity of the B Corp Certification has become compromised and remaining certified now contradicts our mission.

The increasing certification of multinationals including Unilever Australia and Nespresso in 2022 followed by Nestle Health Sciences in 2023 demonstrated that B Lab is not committed to protecting the integrity of the B Corp Certification and movement, nor ensuring that the certification won’t be used to mislead consumers. 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.

Dr. Bronner’s has long advocated to B Lab that certified companies, especially large multinationals, should be required to certify all major supply chains to credible eco-social certifications in order to be part of the Certified B Corp community. This requirement would prevent companies, who have the resources and ability to certify all their major supply chains yet choose not to do so at all or only in part, from pursuing B Corp Certification for marketing purposes. In terms of agricultural land area, number of workers and farmers involved, and scale of social and environmental impact, the supply chains of large CPG food, personal care, and textile companies dwarf the impact of their operations in the countries where they are headquartered.

The raw agricultural materials a company uses—whether meat, milk, eggs, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, cotton, and any others—are often produced in terrible ways in terms of social and environmental impact. The farming and subsequent post-harvest processing of raw materials, whether in oil and textile mills, slaughterhouses, or cut and sew shops, can be done in either an unethical and extractive way or a more sustainable and generative way, in terms of farmer, worker, and animal welfare, and soil, community, and ecosystem health.

Industrial agriculture and factory farming are ecological and social disasters, and key drivers of climate change and the sixth mass extinction event humanity is causing. Requiring credible third party eco-social certification of all major multinational supply chains would protect against the B Corp Certification being misused by companies to hide these unsustainable and unjust corporate practices. While some food, personal care, and textile companies certified as B Corps do take responsibility and certify all major supply chains to credible eco-social certifications, including our esteemed partners at Patagonia, they are unfortunately a minority and this is not required by B Lab, most glaringly in the case of large multinational companies and their enormous supply chains.

We have not seen adequate, transparent, and timely action from B Lab to update the standards or certification process to address our concerns. Now, our only recourse is to drop our certification. We hope our exit will prompt necessary and overdue action, and that allies who remain B Corp Certified will continue to push to improve the standard from the inside.

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Dr. Bronner’s, the top-selling natural brand of soap in North America, and the highest scoring B Corp, announced today it will drop its B Corp Certification and not renew with B Lab, the organization that manages the well-known certification for companies with a stated social purpose.

The announcement follows a multi-year campaign by Dr. Bronner’s calling on B Lab to meaningfully improve the B Corp standard. Dr. Bronner’s believes B Lab has failed to fulfil its promise to implement new standards to prevent the dilution of the B Corp mission and protect the certification from being used by companies who seek to use B Corp for marketing purposes to portray themselves as more ethical than they are in practice.

 See Dr. Bronner’s press release on the story here.