Following its seventh anniversary, Creature Comforts announced it has earned official B Corporation (B Corp) certification making it the 16th brewery in the country to achieve the certification.
The Athens, Georgia-based brewery joins a growing group of over 4,000 for-profit companies committed to being a force for good by using the power of businesses to build a more inclusive and sustainable economy. These companies span over 150 industries in 74 countries and meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
“This is a truly monumental moment in our young history at Creature Comforts,” said CEO Chris Herron in a release. “From the beginning, we have desired to build a better brewery, but until we found the B Corp framework, it was hard to define what that meant and how to track our progress. We are incredibly proud to take a moment to reflect, celebrate, and honor all of the hard work already done by our team to achieve this challenging certification, while also recognizing and committing to all the purposeful work still ahead.”
Herron spoke with Brewer about the certification a few months back in preparation for the July/August 2021 cover story on the company. There we asked how becoming B Corp Certified would help in recruiting like-minded individuals that want to work for the company to lead it into the future. One thing that Herron said that stuck out was every 100-year-old company was seven years old at one point.
“I think Creature’s probably much more difficult to get into at this point in time,” he said in the interview. ”We’re much more values-driven in the hiring process. We have far, far tougher criteria, to be honest. And not that an early employee wouldn’t have passed through that, the vast majority of them are still here. We want people that are values and purpose-driven. We want people that align with building that kind of business.”
For people who don’t align with the brewery’s ideals, Herron said he wants them to go be happy somewhere else.
”I used to want to build a company that made everybody happy,” he said. ”I think the leadership and all of us just thought that was the dream. But you kind of realized as you start to get to a certain scale, that you just can’t do that. You can’t make every single person happy. By trying to do so, we were leading the company at times in the past like that and that’s not the best way to go. We really had to stop and say, ’Well, what is it that we want to build?’ and once we align on those values, and that purpose and that mission, then we could use that lens that we can start looking at everything through.”
That view now is clearer in terms of hiring, personnel decisions, product quality, investment, community impact, sustainability initiatives , and more.
“That becomes the lens that you start to look at everything through,” Herron said. “I hope that Creature is somewhere that people will aspire to come work at. I think it should be difficult to get a job here. I don’t want us to be a place where it’s difficult to keep a job, but it’s certainly much more standard and value-driven.
”Performance is obviously important. But it’s not just performance in terms of execution metrics, but also how you perform just as a person. We want to make that move. That wasn’t always the case, we didn’t have that direction early on. We’re very excited about the direction we’re heading out.”
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