You’ll see it printed on every Nespresso pack: “Nespresso is a certified “B Corporation,” indicating a leader “in the global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy.” Yet Nespresso may have changed the B Corp movement as much as it has changed the company, by opening the door to more large companies pursuing the status, changing the scale of the movement for good.
Many were surprised back in 2022 when Nespresso was awarded the prestigious B Corp certification. Nespresso, after all, is a fully-owned subsidiary of Nestle. Some consider Nestle to be “one of the most hated companies in the world” for its work in authoritarian countries, its embrace of the privatization of water, and the occasional scandal over its food products.
Nespresso has had its own share of criticism. During its B Corp certification process, British Channel 4 revealed children as young as eight picking coffee beans on farms that supplied Nespresso. In light of that revelation, coupled with other human rights violations on Nespresso’s coffee farms, a faction of the purpose-driven B Corp community voiced disapproval of Nespresso joining their ranks.
CEO Guillaume Le Cunff, who drove the coffee maker’s B Corp certification, doesn’t buy into the skepticism, he told me at the company’s headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. “Nespresso is a genuine, committed, purpose-driven organization,” he said. “There is no shame to be successful as a business, to generate more impact. You can be a big corporation and not be a bad guy.”
Part of being one of the good guys, Le Cunff says, is becoming a B Corp. First, because it transformed the company and its employees, making it more transparent and internally aligned. And second, because a big corporation like Nespresso, with its scale and capacity for impact, can significantly drive the kind of systems change to which the B Corp movement aspires. “It’s all about impact,” he said.
The rigorous B Corp certification process requires companies to provide thousands of data points, make them transparently available, and change their legal status. Nespresso had to investigate, publicly acknowledge, and improve the human rights violations in its coffee supply chain. It not only announced that it had “zero tolerance” for child labor, but it also put a team of investigators on the case and hired agronomists, social workers, and two NGOs to help prevent abuses.
Then there is Nespresso’s impact. As an avid Nespresso drinker, I know just how much waste its signature pods generate. When I lived in New York, I just threw all the metal caps away, assuming they’d never get recycled. But just weeks after I left NYC in November 2019, the company announced that it had worked with the city to enable small aluminum recycling. And it initiated programs in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, building alliances with other coffee makers, lobbying governments, and underwriting metal recycling systems. By doing so, Le Cunff says, Nespresso is helping provide solutions to food and energy consumption and waste.
As a company with over $6 billion in global revenue, perhaps Nespresso’s greatest impact since becoming certified is creating another tier of B Corps, helping pave the way for other big companies.
At first B Lab was designed for small companies with a maximum of $100 million in revenue, and some small, wary B Corps have looked down on larger, noncertified ones. Nespresso’s induction forced a shock wave through the community, but it also made the B Lab founders more committed to welcoming big brands. According to B Lab, currently, of the 6,837 B Corps, 124 have 1000 or more employees.
“If we want to change the system, we need to change companies of all sizes—big business, too,” the B Lab global leadership said in an open letter following Nespresso’s accession, signaling that other big corporations are welcome. Will more of them get on board?
Peter Vanham
Executive Editor, Fortune
peter.vanham@fortune.com
This edition of Impact Report was edited by Holly Ojalvo.
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