(and How to Keep Moving)
After companies commit to certification, the real work begins. The first assessment often exposes weak points that were never visible before: scattered data, unclear ownership, and inconsistent follow-up. For many food and beverage brands, these are not new problems; they’ve simply never been mapped against a standard before.
What makes B Corp demanding isn’t the questionnaire or the evidence itself, but the coordination it requires. Information has to travel between departments that rarely work together, such as procurement, finance, HR, sustainability, and operations. Each department is involved in a part of the process, but no single employee sees the whole.
The progress slows down once certification has become a management exercise. At kindred, this is where our work with clients usually begins. Friction at the beginning stage isn’t a failure of commitment. It signals that the business is ready to grow beyond good intentions and build a system that performs with consistency.
The Friction Points in Certification
Once the decision to certify is made, the assessment quickly reveals how the company’s internal systems actually function. The friction that appears rarely has to do with a company’s values or intent. It connects functions that rarely work together day-to-day. And this is how it needs to be approached.
Across research (and practical experience), there are several structural barriers known to slow companies down.
1. Data Systems That Don’t Align
In most food and beverage companies, sustainability data sits across several functions: procurement tracks supplier performance, HR monitors workforce data, and finance manages energy and cost records. For a successful certification, these streams need to connect.
When evidence is needed for the B Impact Assessment, teams realise how much of their sustainability performance still depends on manual updates and informal tracking. Research confirms that the absence of reliable monitoring and measurement systems remains one of the main barriers to certification (Diez-Busto et al., 2022; Attanasio, 2024). For smaller enterprises, limited time and capacity can force a trade-off between maintaining day-to-day operations and gathering evidence (Carvalho et al., 2021).
2. Governance Without Defined Authority
B Corp certification expects sustainability to be embedded in governance, instead of being managed informally between departments. That requirement often exposes unclear ownership. You need to decide who decides, who approves, and who reviews outcomes.
In many mid-sized companies, sustainability accountability is dispersed across operations, marketing, and leadership without formal authority. Studies show that certification progress depends heavily on management alignment, and that lack of senior commitment is among the most common causes of delay (Diez-Busto et al., 2022; Attanasio, 2024).
3. Limited Time and Planning Capacity
The process demands coordination, documentation, and follow-up across multiple teams. Managers already balancing production cycles, procurement schedules, and audits often find that certification competes with other core priorities.
Research identifies this time pressure, the limited ability to plan medium- and long-term actions, as a recurrent structural constraint (Diez-Busto et al., 2022). Progress slows not because the work is complex, but because capacity is already stretched.
4. Gaps in Knowledge and Technical Training
Even motivated teams often lack a shared understanding of what the certification entails. Each of the departments approaches the B Impact Assessment from its own perspective, which often leads to inconsistent documentation.
Many organisations begin without sufficient internal knowledge of the framework or trained staff to coordinate implementation (Diez-Busto et al., 2022). Implementing sustainable practices can also require new technical skills or vocational retraining for managers (Attanasio, 2024) to implement new sustainability practices.
Without this preparation, companies spend time reworking documentation or over-engineering evidence late in the process.
5. Cultural Resistance to Change
Certification formalises what was once informal. It replaces verbal agreements and goodwill with documented systems and defined rules. That transition can meet resistance if employees see it as extra work rather than an operational improvement.
Several studies describe this internal resistance as one of the most underestimated barriers to progress (Diez-Busto et al., 2022). Addressing it early, through communication and role clarity, reduces tension and accelerates adaptation.
What These Friction Points Reveal
Each pressure point in certification shows how the organisation currently works. The data gaps point to integration issues. Governance friction exposes where authority is shared but not formalised. Time pressure signals that sustainability runs parallel to operations instead of through it. Knowledge and cultural resistance suggest that sustainability is understood as a responsibility, not yet as a process.
Each of these points out what part of the system is misaligned with the rest of the operations. The companies that progress fastest are those that treat friction as information.
In one mid-sized food producer kindred supported, the first BIA submission revealed a different kind of issue. The company had strong data and genuine commitment, but no shared structure for review. Procurement, HR, and leadership all tracked relevant indicators but never together.
After mapping how information moved between functions and defining who signed off on decisions, the company cut review time in half and reduced rework across its next verification cycle. We see similar dynamics in other organisations, in different contexts, but with the same underlying mechanics.
Examples from the Field
Ella’s Kitchen illustrates this clearly. When the UK-based baby food company became a Certified B Corp in 2016, leadership used the framework to verify its own practices but also to influence its supplier network. The company built the B the Change survey, based on the B Impact Assessment, to benchmark their partners’ performance across environmental and social indicators.
By measuring their network’s strengths and gaps, they turned certification from an internal goal into a shared improvement mechanism. That visibility strengthened supplier accountability and deepened trust.
Danone approached certification as a way to integrate sustainability into its financial and management systems. In 2018, the company negotiated a lower interest rate on a US$2 billion credit facility after independent verification confirmed its positive environmental and social performance. Teams began treating impact metrics with the same discipline as financial indicators, using them to guide decisions, not just to report progress. (Finan, 2020)
How to Work Through the Friction
Certification becomes more manageable when sustainability operates through the same routines that already guide finance, procurement, and quality management.
Begin by mapping how information moves through the organisation, where it originates, how it’s verified, and at which point decisions are made. This helps reveal where accountability exists informally and where it needs to be formalised.
Next, bring sustainability discussions into existing review cycles rather than creating parallel ones. Consistency builds predictability and keeps decisions tied to current data.
Lastly, clarify who is responsible for adjusting the course when indicators shift. Defining these points of accountability is what turns sustainability from an agenda item into a functioning system.
How I Can Help You
At kindred, I work with food and beverage companies to reach that stage, to build the system, so that sustainability becomes part of daily management. Our B Corp Readiness Mapping Session helps you see how close your current structure already is to the certification requirements. You can also join the newsletter for regular insight into how the new B Corp standards are evolving and what that means for your operating system.
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