Capstone Project

Project: Maepole B Corp Certification Consultantation

Project Description: Begin B Corp certification process for local Athens restaurant, Maepole.

Project Purpose:

“B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials. In order to achieve certification, a company must: 

• Demonstrate high social and environmental performance by achieving a B Impact Assessment score of 80 or above and passing our risk review. Multinational corporations must also meet baseline requirement standards. 

• Make a legal commitment by changing their corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders, and achieve benefit corporation status if available in their jurisdiction. 

• Exhibit transparency by allowing information about their performance measured against B Lab’s standards to be publicly available on their B Corp profile on B Lab’s website.  ” – B Corp Website

Project Overview: As a last minute project add on, our team was given the unique opportunity to learn about the involved efforts that go into the B Corp certification process when starting from square one. Over the semester, we were able to accomplish the following: finalize the assessment to receive a raw score, complete a formal point matrix, and deliver an active action plan to be delivered to the client. With our proposed ideas/goals, Maepole would be able to jump from a score of 34.6 to 56.6 which, if successfully implemented and verified, would get them just  23.4 points shy of the 80 point qualifying threshold for certification.