In this episode of Getting Down to Business, host Lauren Everett and co-host Briana Humes sit down with Tess Hart, co-founder of Triple Bottom Brewing, to talk about the impact of certification on employees, workplace culture, and the community. Triple Bottom Brewing is a certified B Corp brewery in Philadelphia that's been making waves with its commitment to employee welfare and community engagement since it opened its doors in 2019.

Tess and her co-founders chose the name because of their focus on a "triple bottom line" of beer, people, and the planet, with a mission to create jobs for people facing barriers to employment. Going through the B Corp certification process in 2020, at the height of the pandemic was challenging. “We built the brewery with some of the B Corp goals already in mind,” Tess says. “(Because of the pandemic) lots of different priorities come up for a business owner, so some things went on pause, but ultimately certification was a really great learning opportunity. Honestly, I feel like I learned more about the business and know the business better as a result of that process.”

Supporting and measuring impact

One of the biggest benefits of going through the B Corp certification process, Tess says, was that it forced them to take the time to build the infrastructure to support their values. For instance, Triple Bottom had always committed to paying their employees at least $15 an hour. “But we hadn't written it anywhere, we just said it when we were onboarding people,” she recalls. “And so I realized we have to write this down, this has to go in our handbook, otherwise it literally doesn't count for B Corp to get those points. But it's also something that theoretically we could change our minds on, and there would be no one the wiser who could hold us accountable.”

The encouragement to set goals and measure progress was another big benefit. “We have a triple bottom line, and our environmental work really is checking some boxes, but there's so much more opportunity for us and it starts with measurement and we just hadn't even built the infrastructure to do that,” Tess says. “And so one of our amazing bartenders has taken it upon herself to figure out the measurement piece of so much of what we do from our energy use to our waste collection and finding new waste management partners who can actually help us quantify how much of what type of waste we're diverting from landfills and things like that.”

Impact on employees

For Tess and the rest of the leadership team, being a certified B Corp aligns with long-held personal values. And for employees—whether they were aware of what a B Corp was or not before joining the Triple Bottom team—there’s also a sense of pride. “It's an incredible talking point that they have when they are behind the bar or at a farmer's market,” she notes. “We're woman-owned, which is super rare in our industry, and we're the only B Corp brewery in the state of Pennsylvania. And it's this very easy validating point of: this is something that makes us really different.”

That sense of pride sets the tone for the workplace culture as well, which Tess describes as amazing. “It's this beautiful culture of joy and collaboration and just incredible kindness and respect for all different types of people,” she notes. “And we have an amazing general manager who really embodies that and I think helps to instill that in new team members. And so it's just constantly being reinforced. And I think again, a lot of the way that we've now sort of institutionalized that culture is because of the B Corp certification.”

For more information about B Corp Certification and how to measure your company's impact, visit https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/programs-and-tools/b-impact-assessment/