Client Stories

innocent Drinks

A brand on a mission to help people and the planet live well and die old

innocent have always stayed true to their belief that business has a greater role to play in the world than just making profits.

Becoming a B Corp was a natural step in innocent’s sustainability journey. Using B Corp as an ongoing improvement tool is now their strategy.

B Corp

Key Information

Service
B Corp

Industry
Food & Beverage

Size
1,000+ Employees

Challenge

“Becoming a B Corp provides external validation to our core values and the assessment behind it helps a company run a responsible business.”

Karina O’Gorman
Head of the Force for Good Team at innocent

Challenge

To gather innocent’s B Corp behaviour and embed it into the business

With purpose at the heart of everything innocent does, the challenge thanks to their organic growth was to bring together all of the great work they do and formalise it as proof for the B Impact Assessment (the online tool that is used to certify as a B Corp), to ensure the 80-point threshold was achieved.

Beyond their certification, innocent aims to drive transparency of environmental, social and governance actions across the business and help all their people understand the role they play in being a B Corp.

Approach

“We use it [the BIA] as a framework to identify how we can do better in all areas of our business: we use BCorp as a guide to do the best we can.”

Karina O’Gorman
Head of the Force for Good Team at innocent

Approach

Using B Corp as a strategy framework rather than a certification

Seismic supported innocent to understand what B Corp was and how the B Impact Assessment (BIA) worked, helping them to establish how many points they had and where improvements could be made. If you’re looking to achieve B Corp certification, our expert consultants have a 100% success rate for clients.

Seismic works with innocent’s Force for Good team to fill in the assessment every year as a tool to drive continuous improvement.

One way innocent embed B Corp is through their ‘B Keeper’ network, an internal team of sustainability champions that exist across the business. This network grew from 13 to 33 people during the certification process, an additional 20 volunteers, with innocent linking the B Corp journey to their performance objectives.

A challenge many large companies face is how to collect all the data needed for certification. Seismic worked with innocent to create 3 new impact tools to solve this problem.

These tools were crucial to measure innocent’s impact across the business and to secure the information needed to fill out the assessment accurately, so they could seek B Corp certification.

The innocent office promise tool

The ‘innocent office promise’ is a software tool which helps people understand what B Corp says about an office’s sustainability.

How It Works:

innocent’s office angels (office managers) are trained to use the tool to determine the B Corp score of each office.
The information is fed back centrally so innocent can see how offices are performing and share learnings to develop improvements globally.
A core part of this tool was setting individual improvement targets for each office.
Seismic engaged all 15 innocent offices to measure their water, waste, energy, purchasing, recycling and wellness activities.

Impact

Impact

A continuous improvement success story

innocent certified with 92.5 points on the BIA in 2018. In 2021 they recertified with 105.2 points – making them one of only a few B Corps around the world who are both a $1bn brand and have a score of over 100.

Each year innocent go through the assessment and work out their BIA score in order to identify improvements. Using B Corp as a framework gives innocent a set of areas to focus on each year that dovetails with their sustainability strategy, such as improving their supply chain, giving them improvement targets to work to.