Grace Farms Foods Case Study

Laying the Foundation

Overview

Grace Farms Foods sells coffee, tea, and cookies, and was founded to fund the work of the Grace Farms Foundation. The company is wholly owned by the Grace Farms Foundation, and 100% of its profits supports Grace Farms Foundation's work to end forced labor forever. Grace Farms Foundation’s mission is to pursue peace through five initiatives — nature, arts, justice, community, and faith — and Grace Farms, a SANAA-designed site for convening people across sectors. Its stake in the ground is to end modern slavery and gender-based violence, and create more grace and peace in our local and global communities. Grace Farms Foods fulfills this mission by maintaining these same values in their supply chain, with their workers, and with their direct to consumer products. 

The challenge

As a new socially and environmentally-driven consumer products brand, Grace Farms Foods’ leadership wanted to know which impact measures were critical to meet in the short and long term. They were also deeply committed to joining the community of businesses transforming the economic system from shareholder to stakeholder primacy. At the same time, the staff was lean, and the majority of their time needed to be spent building out the product and supply chain. 

The solution

Grace Farms Foods partnered with Impact Growth Partners within the first few months of its formation to ensure that its values were embedded in the company’s operations and policies as early as possible. B Lab, the nonprofit certifying organization, has a special designation for companies operational for less than one year that are putting themselves on the B Corp path - Pending B Corp. To achieve Pending B Corp Certification, a newly formed company fulfills the legal requirement and completes the B Impact Assessment.

Grace Farms Foods re-incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation, and used the 200+ B Impact Assessment questions to build themselves as a best-in-class impact business:

  • Wrote a supplier selection policy that made Grace Farms Foundation’s efforts to end modern slavery actionable for the company’s decision-makers,

  • Created measurable social/environmental KPIs that would be tracked and reported on.

  • Customized more than 10 of Impact Growth Partners’ policy templates.

  • Integrated into the local B Corp community through a leadership mixer and individual introductions. 

Grace Farms met the measures for Pending B Corp Certification with a two-hour call, once a week, over the course of approximately 10 weeks, without detriment to start-up growth and performance.