In July 2026, Caffe Inc. became a Certified B Corporation™, verified by B Lab across our governance, workers, community, environment, and customer impact. It’s a milestone that reflects something we’ve believed in since day one. Turning coffee waste at large scale into something valuable and running a responsible business are the same goal, not two separate ones. For us, scaling impact and scaling responsibly must go hand in hand.
What Is a Certified B Corporation™?
B Corp™ Certification is not a label any company can claim on its own. It’s a verification process, run by the nonprofit B Lab, that assesses a company’s entire operation, not just its product. To qualify, a business must score at least 80 points across five areas of impact:
- Governance
- Workers
- Community
- Environment
- Customers
That structure is what makes the certification meaningful. It looks at how a company operates end to end, not just the story it tells about its product.
Becoming a Certified B Corporation™
When coffee is brewed, only around 20% of the bean is extracted into the beverage, leaving approximately 80% as spent coffee grounds. Turning them into ingredients for cosmetics, food, and biomaterials has been at the heart of what we do from day one. With B Corp™ Certification, this model has now been independently verified, line by line, against a global standard.
Our Score, In Context
Caffe Inc. earned an overall B Impact Score of 100.2, well above the 80-point threshold required for certification and more than double the 50.9 median score among ordinary businesses that complete the same assessment.
Our strongest category was Environment. That score includes a bonus for our Resource Conservation Impact Business Model status, a designation B Lab gives to companies whose core business model is intentionally designed to conserve resources or reduce waste. For us, that’s not a separate initiative sitting on top of the business. It is the business: turning spent coffee grounds into ingredients instead of letting them go to waste.
Governance, meanwhile, includes a Mission Locked bonus, given to companies that have formally embedded their social or environmental mission into their governing documents. In practice, this means our commitment to circularity isn’t just a stated value; it’s built into the structure of the company.
Our environmental impact is also independently measured through an ISO-certified Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), conducted by an external LCA expert. The assessment found that our process generates 75% fewer CO₂ emissions than conventional disposal practices. To date, Caffe Inc. has upcycled more than 130 tonnes of spent coffee grounds.
Source: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/caffe-inc/
Why This Matters, Beyond the Score
For us, this certification is a recognition of the work we’ve been doing to build a business that creates value not only through what we produce, but also through how we operate and the impact we create. We were evaluated across all five of B Lab’s impact areas, not environmental performance alone, which means this certification reflects B Lab’s integrated social, environmental, and governance standards as a whole.
What’s Next
This is an important milestone, but not the finish line. We’re proud of what this certification represents, and we’re focused on what comes next: scaling our impact, expanding the applications for our materials, continuing to improve our environmental performance, and helping build a more circular coffee industry.
Learn more at https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/