July 31, 2024
At B Local, our focus is amplification, collaboration, and supporting fellow B Corps with a mandate to do good as we do well.
Reunion Coffee Roasters is the next in our Spotlight series with a goal to promote B Local member businesses, as well as bolster greater community through shared learning and experiences.
Talk to me about your WHY. Why a purpose driven business and why the pursuit of B Corp
As an early-ish adopter of the BCorp certification, it came to me at a time (11 years ago), when I was looking for help to make our business more sustainable and simply couldn’t find it. The certification, and assessment, was such a find for us, to help give structure to our work and data-collection, but also as a way to find and figure out best practices for our future evolution. BCorp has been an amazing tool in our sustainability journey.
What does being a B Corp mean to you? To your team? To your customers?
To me, being a BCorp is about being part of an incredible community. It's not without its work and challenges, but knowing what it takes to attain, and maintain, certification, really gives us a sense of comradery with other BCorps because we know that we’ve all chosen to take the difficult but ultimately worthwhile path. We were among the first 1000 BCorps, and we feel a great sense of pride in being a part of the community for so long.
As a local Ontario business, how do you engage with and support your local community? Can you share any recent initiatives or partnerships that highlight your community involvement?
We belong to a number of trade organizations (Coffee Association of Canada, the Specialty Coffee Association, etc) as well as our local BIAs and the Ontario Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium. It’s important to us that we have a diverse network to discuss our challenges and successes with, so we can all continue to learn from each other. It never ceases to amaze how we can learn as much from another manufacturer, or even retailer, as we can from another coffee roaster. Particularly when it comes to our sustainability and social programs. Being narrow minded in where you look for learnings is a fast path to stalling out progress. So we're very excited to be re-engaging with the local BCorp community to help us move forward and improve.
