Client Stories

HG & Co

A family distillery with a sustainable approach

HG & Co is an independent London family run company dedicated to making the best-tasting gin for five generations.

They are making great strides to advance their sustainability initiatives across the distillery, packaging and ingredients. HG & Co use English wheat spirit in their distillation process which is sustainably sourced and, post-distillation, their used botanicals become animal feed.

The family are laying the foundations to realise their ambition for the whole HG & Co Group to become certified B Corps, setting the tone for the industry and for family businesses.

B Corp

Key Information

Service
B Corp

Industry
Food & Beverage

Size
100+ Employees

Challenge

“Our mission is to run our Family Distillery with a sincere and genuine approach towards sustainability.”

HG & Co

Challenge

For family businesses, there’s a lot more at stake

For the Hayman family, distilling alcohol is not just a commercial endeavour – it is entwined with their heritage. They care deeply about the people they work with, maintaining their integrity as a family business and in the industry as a whole.

They also recognise the important role they play in the community, from raising money for schools, supporting a London hospitality charity, Beyond Food to preserving local commons and their wildlife. They have various accreditations and an ethical trade policy but wanted to formalise what they do across the business.

HG & Co decided to pursue B Corp certification and started going through the assessment tool, but wanted reassurance they were answering the questions correctly and that the corresponding score was accurate before submitting.

Approach

Approach

A framework for formalising action and driving improvements

Seismic conducted a full review of HG & Co answers on the B Corp assessment to confirm the accuracy of their score. They were sitting between 50 and 60 points (the average score for non-B Corps is 50) and needed to get to 80 points if they wanted to certify.

Recognising the breadth and depth of the B Corp assessment, the group has started using it to steer their sustainability strategy. Their work towards the 80-point threshold acts as a framework to implement improvements in their business. For example, they already had a strong score under health, wellness and safety, so they focussed on the environment, developing a sustainability policy to cover aspects they had been missing.

“It was great to have a sounding board in Seismic to ask, ‘What more should we be doing?’. We are not there yet, but we are very much committed to do more, formalising what we do and communicating it effectively.”

Miranda Hayman
Co-owner of HG & Co

Impact

“After going through the B Corp assessment – a kind of ethical audit – you look at everything with a different lens, thinking how you can make things better for the people we work with and all of our stakeholders.”

HG & Co

Impact

Invaluable insights, improved communications and relationships

HG & Co Group really valued the analysis of their answers on the B Corp assessment tool, prompting them to amend their code of conduct and some of their policies.

Their B Corp journey has also helped them to communicate better about their impact, influencing top level decision-making and transforming interactions with contacts familiar with the movement. The B Corp assessment insights have also proved valuable for their ‘Investors In People’ accreditation, improving the team’s understanding of key people issues.

HG & Co’s Impact Business Model (IBM)

Due to their wider work with vaccines and pharmaceutical goods, supporting purpose-driven enterprises and the NHS, and through an innovative, circular economy approach in their manufacturing, HG & Co’s Group now realise they may meet the B Corp impact business model criteria. This is because they are designed to create a specific positive benefit for one of their stakeholders. If they do, their score would rise to just shy of the 80-point minimum required for certification.