Ooni is a Certified B Corp!
We are delighted to announce that Ooni is now a Certified B Corp™!After undertaking a rigorous assessment and verification process, we have joined a community of like-minded companies and leaders using business as a force for good.
“This is huge news for Ooni. We’ve always strongly felt that business should be a force for good and becoming a certified B Corp has been an ambition of ours for a long time. It was an incredibly thorough process that has resulted in best practice across the entirety of the business. These policies and practices are now locked into the way we work at Ooni, which is a massive step on our path to becoming a regenerative business.”Darina Garland, co-CEO and co-Founder of Ooni
So what is a B Corp?
B stands for Benefit for all.
The world we operate in faces significant challenges, which cannot be solved by governments, non-profits and individuals alone. Businesses today have a greater responsibility than ever to positively impact all stakeholders — workers, communities, customers, and our planet. And that’s where B Corps come in.
B Corporations (or “B Corps”) are companies that have been verified by B Lab™ to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Certified B Corps have all gone through the “B Impact Assessment” - a rigorous assessment with over 200 questions across 5 areas: governance, workers, customers, community and environment. A business must also amend their Articles of Association - embedding a legal commitment to consider the impact of all decisions on all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
The B Corp community spans 89 countries, 159 industries, over 500,000 workers, and now over 6,242 B Corps.
Ooni’s certification
To become certified, a business must achieve a verified score of 80+ points on the assessment - the average score for businesses is around 50.9. We certified with a score of 80.1. We’re thrilled to certify but are conscious there’s still a lot of work to do.
Check out our B Corp profile for our scores across the categories.
We first started using the B Corp framework to shape how we use Ooni as a force for good back in 2017 when we were a team of just 17. A lot has changed since then (we’re now over 350 people sharing the joy of pizza in over 80 countries worldwide), but our values and passion for pizza and the planet has grown even stronger.
The framework led us to implement new projects (such as changing our pensions to an ethical fund, measuring our carbon footprint across our supply chain) and formalised a lot of things we were already doing. Evaluating all aspects of our business deepened our understanding of our impact and what we should be aiming for. In 2022, we pledged to become a regenerative business - to return more to society, the environment and the global economy than we take out. We want to focus on all stakeholders for the good of society and our planet - this aligns with the B Corp movement.Our vision is to help people around the world make pizza at home in a way that has a positive impact on the planet and its people. As part of this, our strategy is steered by our quadruple bottom line drivers of People, Planet, Profit & Pizza - the 4 Ps!
We submitted our assessment in October 2021 then underwent verification with the B Lab team in autumn 2022. The process was extremely thorough and involved many teams from across the business. It took us around 18 focused months in the end and we certified on 9th January 2023.
Next steps
Our B Corp certification is a big cause for celebration, but it is by no means the destination. We know there is a lot of work to be done and our experience of verification has only galvanised our passion to do better and improve our score year-on-year.
This is just the beginning.
B Corp Certification does not mean that we’re perfect, nor that we have achieved our highest impact. It does show that we have stepped into a framework for continuous improvement - we must meet rising standards for social and environmental performance and will have to recertify again in 3 years’ time - January 2026.
Check out our Impact Page and 2021 Impact Report for some of the initiatives that helped us meet our B Corp certification. A full update with more recent initiatives will be published in the next few months in our 2022 Impact Report.