Big News on the B-Corp Certification Front

This article was originally published in May 2022. Updated in July 2022.

The results of our B-Corp (re)certification are in. Our new score? Outstanding! Here’s how we’re raising the bar every step of the way.

*pats self on back*

We’re proud as heck to be using our power within the marketplace to help tackle social and environmental challenges alongside +4,400 other for-profit businesses globally. But being a B-Corp is a journey, not a final destination. And every 3 years, we undergo a nitty-gritty recertification process to maintain our B-Corp status.

With our business back under the B-Corp microscope, we spent months holding our breath. Till finally, our day of reckoning arrived. And ‘cause we can't resist the urge to spill the beans any longer..*drumroll please*

Tony’s recertified with: 125 points! This is our highest score to date. *can we get a WOOP WOOP* Here’s how it panned out.

Where we did guuud
We earned ourselves another A+ for purpose. #NoSurprisesThere. We are an impact company, after all. Our reason for being was built on the notion that purpose and profit are a balancing hiact (if only this were the norm and not the exception *sigh*).

Thanks to a string of proactive initiatives - like our recently published annual FAIR report 2020/2021 and ongoing child labor monitoring and remediation system (CLMRS) - another area we pulled off a rather show-stopping performance in was transparency and ethics.

And let’s give a big round of applause for Tony’s Open Chain. Thanks to our sweeter than cupcakes 5 Sourcing Principles, key elements like our long-term partner contracts and 100% traceability policies are shaping up to be the crème de la crème of the chocolate industry.

And since we firmly believe that everything is always better together, we’re pretty pumped about our performance in the field of community action. Cool beans, aye?

Room for improvement
While all of the above is fine and dandy, there were some areas where we can (and must) step up our game (especially if we want to take home the ‘extraordinary’ cake in 3 years time).

For starters, Team Tony's isn’t the most intersectional team on the planet. And we don’t have enough women or minorities in leadership positions. Full stop. We’re actively working on developing a more inclusive recruiting hiring process. In the long run, this will funnel directly into our efforts to boost representation in leadership positions.

We’re also not quite there yet with our environmental efforts. Yes, we offset everything we do. Yes, we diligently crunch the numbers on our emissions and report on them year-over-year. But let’s be honest, in 2022, that should all be kind of baseline, shouldn’t it?

Sustainability is not about sustaining the status quo but striving to improve current circumstances. Since the climate clock is ticking, we’re working on setting more detailed targets for controlling and, above all, decreasing our emissions. Keep your eyes peeled for our next annual FAIR report for an update on this towards the end of the year.

The bright road ahead
To put our new score into perspective: B-Corp scoring ranges from 80 to 200 points – the higher, the better.

And because being outstanding (aka getting ≈ 100-149 points) is outstanding but being extraordinary (aka getting ≈ 150-200 points) is, well, extraordinary, we’ll keep workin’ as hard as ever to raise the bar even further next time ‘round.

So there you have it. While there’s plenty of work to be done, the roads lookin’ bright for doin’ even better business. And if we can do it, every company can!

The cherry on top

​​​​​​​Fresh outta the oven: we just got wind that Tony’s was named a Best for the World B Corp in 2022!

It turns out that our B Corp score in the impact field ‘governance’ made it into the top 5% of business in our category (aka companies with 50 – 249 employees) worldwide. This means top points for our overall mission, ethics, accountability and transparency.

We're part of the crème de la crème of the global impact scene. As an impact company that makes chocolate, this news really takes the cake. Give it up for another milestone!