The Jolly Hog has become the first UK meat company to become B Corp certified, recognising the brand’s investment in social corporate responsibility.
The certification means the Bristol-based brand joins a growing group of companies who are focused on pursuing purpose as well as profit.
The Jolly Hog co-founder Olly Kohn said becoming a B Corp felt like “a real milestone” for the brand, adding that as a family company “it’s always been deeply ingrained in us to do the right thing by our team, our consumers and our planet”.
B Corp has 5,575 certified businesses globally across a range of industries.
Achieving B Corp status follows a raft of CSR commitments by The Jolly Hog in recent years, including the launch of a FareShare partnership last year.
“Four years ago, when we first thought about applying it felt like a natural fit for us to help shape the way we run our business,” said Kohn. [Brothers] Max, Josh and I are extremely proud to be the first UK meat business to be a B Corp.”
The brand started as an independent, family events business in 2007 but now sells Great Taste Award-winning meat products across UK supermarkets.
“This doesn’t mean we are perfect or better than anyone else, it just means that we are genuinely trying to be better as a company for everyone involved,” said Kohn.
The meat industry has been under fire for some time about its environmental commitments. Most recently, in August, new research from Oxford University found that many meat alternatives had a fifth to less than a tenth of the environmental impact of meat-based equivalents.
This was met with criticism from the meat sector, which said it missed out information on carbon sequestration and lacked information on origin.
“There are large factors that simply haven’t been included in the calculations, for example the origin and method of production of ingredients is not accounted for,” said a spokeswoman for the British Meat Processors Association. “Brazilian beef has a very different eco-profile to British beef.”
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