B Corp Certification Provides Purpose for Ozery Family Bakery

By Lorrie Baumann

For 2020, Ozery Family Bakery will be dressing up packages of its Morning Rounds, Snacking Rounds, Lavash and ONEBUN sandwich buns with the company’s new B Corp certification from B Lab. The company joins just a handful of bakeries on the B Corp roster of businesses committed to progress on social and environmental issues as well as profit. “The world can only get so far by Ozery being part of B Corp, but we hope that larger companies will be inspired to participate,” said Guy Ozery, who serves as the company’s co-President along with his brother Alon. “We didn’t start our social and environmental issues when we started B Corp – they were before that. This provides a systematic way to build targets and organize initiatives and to communicate strategy with the team.”

B Corp certification requires a company to complete an extensive self-assessment of the company’s commitments to a triple bottom line that encompasses social and environmental performance as well as profitability and to trace adherence to those goals through the company’s supply chain. Different companies will measure their own goals in those areas in different ways, so different companies’ emphasis is likely to tell a unique story about what the company stands for.

Ozery Family Bakery has built its business over the past 22 years on five pillars: consumer and product, business and profits, community, team members and the environment, said Guy, so that the company was already aligned with B Corp, but the assessment tools provided by B Lab provided a means of bench-marking the company’s progress on its goals and incorporating those objectives into the company’s overall strategic plan, which currently runs though 2022. “I think it’s important to make sure that the B Corp initiatives are integrated into the company’s planning process,” he said.

While environmental goals have a place among the company’s five pillars and in its strategic plan, its social goals with respect to its community and team members are the subject of its initial emphasis as it embarks as a B Corp, said Guy. In its initial self-assessment, the Ozery Family Bakery team had to think about what has given them the most pride in the company’s accomplishments, and two of the most important milestones that they remember are the day that they could afford health benefits and the day that they started a profit-sharing program, Guy said.

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“We also have a very strong program of social activities through the year – a winter party, summer barbecue, quarterly outing or get-together – all to create an environment that’s more than people just coming to work – it’s a community,” Guy said. The company’s social activities also include a monthly birthday celebration with cake in honor of team members who have birthdays during that month, a social lunch with Alon and Guy that welcomes new team members and a monthly office meeting and lunch where the team shares ideas and talks about the company’s values.

In its wider community, Ozery Family Bakery expresses its commitment to kids and nutrition – a natural connection for a company that bakes wholesome bread products. The school nearest the bakery is part of a neighborhood that faces socio-economic challenges, so Ozery provides its Morning Rounds for free to the school’s breakfast program, and volunteers from the company are part of a collaboration with a non-profit organization to build a garden and maintain it through the year. “We do a planting day with the kids, help maintain the garden throughout the year, and at the end of the year, we harvest the fruits and vegetables with the kids and cook a big pot of soup,” Guy said.

The company also provides about 100 schools with its products at cost, working through a foundation that purchases the products at the company’s cost and then donates them to the schools, and it allows everyone on the company’s payroll to donate one day a year to volunteer for initiatives that are either sponsored by the company or otherwise aligned with the company’s values. “We’re hoping to be able to increase that to more days in the future,” Guy said.

Organizing those activities in which the company was already engaged with the tools provided by B Lab has given the company a way to prioritize those activities and move them forward, which is more important to Ozery Family Bakery than the marketability of the certification, Guy said. “It helps us systemize. We are entrepreneurs in spirit, and today, all of our leadership team is organized around this…. The idea of growth becomes more relevant because it’s not all about just grabbing market share, but the more you grow, the more impact you can have on all these areas, and that in itself is a great reason to grow the company. It gives us a sense of purpose.”