Our B Corp Certification

A Certified B Corporation is a company verified against a standard covering governance, workers, community, environment and customers, and legally committed to weighing all of them in its decisions rather than shareholder return alone.

The B stands for benefit. The standard is run by B Lab, an independent non-profit, and more than ten thousand companies hold it across over a hundred countries, which is what makes it an international standard rather than a badge. It is reassessed every three years.

The assessment is about the business rather than anything it sells. It looks at how we buy, how people here are paid and supported, what the space consumes and what happens to what it throws away. Those are the parts of a health and wellness space a patient never sees, and they are the ones it is interested in.

Optimal health is not something a person reaches in isolation. It is shaped by the environment they live in and by the people around them, which is why Social sits alongside Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual in our five pillars of health.

Both of those lead to the same place. If the environment a person lives in dictates how healthy they can be, our own footprint is part of their care rather than separate from it. If health is social, then how we treat the people who work here and the neighbourhood we sit in is part of the same work. Helping people is our business, so social impact is not an adjacent commitment. It is the business.

That is what we mean by full circle care. A patient's environment is part of their health rather than the background to it, so we would rather help lift it than treat somebody and send them back into it unchanged.

The certification is where we put that on the record, and where somebody outside this business checks whether we are living up to it.

It started before the doors opened, with the footprint of this space weighed while it was being built. You can learn more on our sustainability page.

We make the everyday decisions on the same terms. We buy from local vendors who work the way we do, and we run talks and events in the neighbourhood instead of only opening the doors each morning.

We measure our waste production, and we have protocols for using less energy and generating less of it. The kitchen runs zero to low waste. Bring your own vessel and the cafe takes something off the price, and we pay attention to microplastics in what we serve and in what leaves the building.

The assessment comes round every three years and the aim is to score higher each time. That is what keeps a certification a standard rather than a label. The standard itself is set out at bcorp.com.