COURTESY/Debbie Flynn Photography — Community Natural Foods has been doing good for its community and business for years, here, Bruce Martin (middle) general manager, poses with the team.
You know them as the organic market around the corner.
They may be a little different than most grocery stores in the city, but there’s a reason for it: Community Natural Foods’ social conscious business strategy not only looks out for its shareholders, but its employees and the environment, too.
Community Natural Foods, named one of Canada’s 50 top managed companies, has recently become certified as a B Corporation. The B is for “benefit.”
“We’ve been around forever,” says Bruce Martin, general manager of Community Natural Foods, established in 1977. “We’ve been conducting ourselves in this way forever and we really wanted to work on getting validation of that, so that we could appropriately go out and brag to our customers.”
B Corporations (B Corps) are designated by American-based B Lab, a not-for-profit organizations that puts companies through an extensive questionnaire about social and environmental performance and requires tangible proof for the answers. Only about one in 10 companies that apply make it through to accreditation. In the United States, almost 1,000 organizations are B Corps, and in Canada it’s even fewer: just over 100.
Martin says Community Natural Foods has always been on a path to implementing higher business practices wherever it can, it was just a matter of going through the application process for certification — which is out of 200.
“You need 80 to qualify … we got over the 80, but we still have a long way to go and a lot of things we can do.”
“It’s almost akin to … peeling a cabbage. There’s a lot of layers and a lot of things you can do, and we are only partly down the road in terms of what you’d want to do as a company around how we treat our employees, around environmental issues, around our corporate governance, how we treat our vendors, the quality of the products that we have. There’s just a lot of attention to detail that’s necessary and a lot of opportunity for continuous improvement.”
For its employees, Community Natural Foods has implemented benefit enhancements including flexible benefits, universal purchase discount and employee-directed training that cost less than 1 per cent of payroll expenses.
For the money-makin’ side of things, face-to-face marketing has been key in bringing new customers to the business. The company still maintains its co-operative advertising program but continues to reduce print waste.
And for the environment, Bullfrog power is used at all locations, and within a year of installation Community Natural Foods’ electrical consumption went down by 25 per cent.
“Many businesses wouldn’t believe that spending more on employees, paying a premium for power, and choosing a grassroots approach to marketing would contribute positively to a triple bottom line — but sustainable practices will pay dividends to your staff, your community and your business, all while helping the planet — just trust and give it a try,” says Martin.
COURTESY/Community Natural Foods