What we learned at B-Lab Champion’s Retreat 2026: Is the B Corp movement still worth it? We Think So.
In 2025, Dr. Bronner's, the family-owned castile soap company with the highest B Corp score on record, announced it was leaving the movement.
I'll admit it, I was shaken.
I've spent years inside this world. First at Ben & Jerry's, an early B Corp adopter back when the certification was in its early days. Then, on the consulting side, helping other companies navigate the journey to certification. Dr. Bronner's wasn't just any company walking away. They were the high-water mark. The conscience of the movement. If they were out, what did that say about the rest of us?
So when B Lab US & Canada hosted their bi-annual Champions Retreat in Milwaukee last week, I went with questions.
I wasn't alone. The room was full of CEOs from major multinationals, founders of mission-led startups, and consultants like me. Almost everyone had arrived with some version of the same question: Where is this movement now, twenty years in? What does V2.1, the new standards, actually mean? And under all of it: is this still worth the cost?
Because the cost is real. Certification is more complex than it used to be. Consultants cost money. The logo doesn't always land with consumers, as most still couldn't pick it out of a lineup (but that is changing, see below). So if you're a CEO weighing the recertification fee against next year's marketing budget, the question is fair: what am I actually getting?
How we got here
It helps to remember how big this got, and how fast. B Corps existed in relative obscurity for years. Then 2020 happened. COVID. The murder of George Floyd. A racial reckoning that pushed companies to declare what they actually stood for. Suddenly, every brand wanted to prove it cared, and B Corp became one of the few credible ways to do that. The movement swelled to over 10,000 certified companies globally.
That kind of growth comes with a price. The same standards that worked for a 50-person values-led brand were now being applied to the multinationals — Nespresso, Unilever, Danone, Nestlé Health Science. Dr. Bronner's argued for years that the standards weren't strong enough to hold those companies to account. That sharing a logo with Nespresso, a company with a documented record of supply chain issues, diluted what B Corp was supposed to mean.
They weren't wrong to ask the question. And when they didn't get the answer they wanted, they walked away.
A different way to read it
Being in Milwaukee made me see B-Corp differently. I had been thinking about B Corp the way most people think about it — as a certification. A credential. A marketing badge that says "trust me, I'm one of the good ones." And on those terms, Dr. Bronner's critique is relevant. If the badge isn't rigorous, it’s worthless.
But that frames B Corp as a club. And the people who built it never thought of it that way.
The retreat included a memorial for Andrew Kassoy, B Lab's co-founder, who died last June from cancer. I wasn't sure the memorial was for me; I never knew Andrew personally. I almost skipped it. I'm glad I didn't.
His widow, Margot Brandenburg, spoke. So did B Lab Director Andy Fyffe and co-founder Bart Houlahan. And what came was a reminder of what this thing was actually built to do.
Andrew was clear, from the beginning, that the goal was never to build an army of B Corps. The goal was to build a parallel structure. Something that could sit alongside the dominant model of shareholder primacy so that when the current system fails under the weight of its own contradictions, there's a viable alternative already in motion.
That language, parallel structures, comes from the literature on civil resistance. Erica Chenoweth's research on how movements actually succeed makes the case that durable change rarely comes from confrontation alone. It comes from building the institutions of the future inside the shell of the present, until the new ones are simply more functional than the old.
That reframe changes everything about how you read the Dr. Bronner's exit. And it changes how you read V2.1.
What V2.1 actually does
The new standards are tighter. Companies will need to perform across seven specific impact areas — climate, human rights, fair work, environmental stewardship, JEDI, governance, and collective action — rather than picking and choosing their strengths. There's more accountability for supply chains. There's a higher floor. There’s a 5-year road map that requires continuous improvement across all impact areas. There will also be third-party certification. A separation from B-Lab that creates the standard, and the team that audits performance against it. It’s the separation required by ISEAL for credible certifications.
Is it everything Dr. Bronner's wanted? No. They've said as much. But it's a meaningful step in the direction they were pushing, and it's worth noting that the pressure they applied from the outside almost certainly helped get us here. Sometimes, the people who leave change things more than the people who stay.
The harder question for the rest of us is whether we understand what we're actually part of.
B Corp is collective action — it’s a parallel structure being built in real time, with real legal infrastructure and real accountability, by people who are betting that the dominant model is on borrowed time. You are not buying a logo, you are participating in active resistance. You are building a community of practice that is rewiring the economy in service of all.
As Andrew Kassoy said: “In a time when so many people are careless, and so many people lack moral courage, it's up to us to double down on care and courage. And that's a hell of a lot easier, and a hell of a lot more powerful, if we do it together.”
I went to Milwaukee with questions. I left with one clearer conviction: the movement isn't dead. It's growing up. The new standards raise the floor, which makes the certification harder to fake and more defensible to your board. Consumer Awareness is growing (51% in the UK and growing everywhere else). B2C retailers like Sephora, and Grove Collaborative use B-Corp Certification as part of their third-party brand curation. Meanwhile, regulatory tightening on sustainability claims is making third-party verification more valuable, not less. So yes, B-Corp is still worth it.
Meeting the new standards
Reassured on merit. How do you go about meeting these rigorous new standards? Just about everyone I met at the conference had the same question. The most helpful session of the conference was Ripples to Roadmaps, which was a panel of early adopters who had already brought B-Lab’s standards to life in their companies. These companies ranged from a small local coffee shop, Bear Lake Coffee Co., to a medium-sized meat delivery company, Butcher Box, and an extra-large multi-national Burton’s Snowboards. Each business demonstrated how they were applying the standards at a scale that was right for their business, acknowledging where they had already made strong strides in impact areas and vulnerably sharing where they had gaps.
I left the session, armed with more practical examples of how the requirements could be met for our micro, small, medium, and large clients, and with a greater understanding of how the 5-year roadmap approach would look in practice. The other key nugget I learned is that, going forward, B-Lab will be adding key account managers to businesses to help them have a consistent point of contact for any queries. This will help to clarify points on the standards, but they can’t give you guidance on how to apply them inside your business - for that, you still need consultants like us.
Five Key Tips for Getting Started:
1. Set up your questionnaire at B Impact Assessment based on your business size and sector to see how the impact areas are applied to your business.
2. Conduct your gap analysis of impact areas across the 5 year period
3. Build your B Team, the cross-functional team that will help you pull together information across the company.
4. Talk to other B-Corps and share best practice.
5. Don’t panic! You are likely already doing more than you think you are.
If you're a B Corp navigating V2.1, or weighing whether to start the journey at all, get in touch, building the internal case and living it is what we do.
