Path to B Corp Certification
Stay up to date with us as we advance our company toward a B Corp certification.
What is B Corp?
The B Corp Certification recognises businesses that use their operations as a force for good. Certified B Corporations meet rigorous standards for social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. This demonstrates that business success can be measured not only by financial results but also by the positive impact created for people and the planet. Through continuous improvement and stakeholder-focused decision-making, B Corps help build a more inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy.
Seven Impact Topics
Purpose and Stakeholder Governance (PSG)
At ISIFARMER, our purpose is not a statement that sits alongside the business — it is the business. We exist to democratise urban entrepreneurship and accelerate social inclusion by enabling people from vulnerable backgrounds to lead high-tech vertical farms in underused city spaces.
Our shareholders have made that purpose legally binding. They have unanimously amended our Articles of Association to commit the company to generating positive social impact, and to require our directors to weigh the interests of workers, customers, suppliers, communities and the environment — not only shareholders — in every decision they take.
We have identified and mapped 43 stakeholders across six groups, and we engage them through defined mechanisms following the inclusivity, materiality and responsiveness principles of the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard. What we hear reaches decisions at two fixed points: a quarterly impact review led by our Chief Impact Officer, and an annual review by our Sole Administrator as highest governing body, who examines progress against our ten KPIs, our social and environmental performance, and how stakeholder interests shaped our choices.
Anyone affected by our work can raise a concern through our published Grievance Procedure — anonymously through bilingual online forms, by email, in person, by post, or through someone they trust. We acknowledge every concern within five working days and aim to reach an outcome within 30 days. No one who raises a concern in good faith faces any consequence for having done so.
Read our Grievance Procedure
Fair Work (FW)
ISIFARMER is a small team, and most of the people building it today do so as founders, collaborators, volunteers and university interns rather than as payrolled staff. We treat that as a fact to be addressed rather than a detail to be glossed over: formalising employment as we grow is one of our ten tracked KPIs, with 25% of the team on fair-work-aligned contracts in our 2026 baseline year and a target of 100% by 2030.
In the meantime, our commitments do not depend on contractual status. Our Grievance Procedure, JEDI Policy and Accessibility Policy apply to everyone who works with us — including interns, volunteers and collaborators without a formal employment contract — and every policy and training material is available in Spanish and English so that language excludes no one.
Everyone who joins is introduced to our purpose, our 2030 roadmap and the standards of behaviour we expect before taking on responsibilities. We ask for feedback and act on it, and anyone can raise a concern without fear of retaliation.
We would rather describe the workplace we actually have, and show what we are changing, than describe one we have not yet built.
Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI)
Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion are not additions to ISIFARMER’s mission — they are the mission. We exist to open agricultural entrepreneurship to people who have been shut out of it.
Our public JEDI Commitment Statement, approved by our highest governing body, names the people we are most accountable to: people with intellectual disabilities, women survivors of gender-based violence and trafficking, and young people whose education or employment history has been interrupted. We deliver our ISI-Impact programmes with third-sector partners including Fundación Down Madrid, and we design our training, technology and equipment around the different starting points of the people who use them.
We are especially accountable to our urban farmers and to the volunteers and collaborators on our team, because they have the least power to influence our decisions or to choose an alternative. We design our practices with their needs first.
We maintain inclusive-language guides in both our working languages, one for internal communications and one for external communications and content. We are also assessing how accessible our platform, equipment and training actually are, using feedback from the people who use them. That assessment is under way rather than finished, and we will publish what it finds — including the barriers we have not yet solved.
Anyone can raise a concern about equity or inclusion through our grievance channels, anonymously if they prefer.
Read our JEDI Commitment Statement
Climate Action (CA)
ISIFARMER supports the global ambition to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in line with the Paris Agreement. A simplified version of our Climate Action Plan is published for anyone to read.
Controlled-environment agriculture is part of the response to a food system exposed to climate change: it decouples production from weather and soil, eliminates pesticides, and shortens the distance from farm to plate to a few city blocks. But it is not emission-free, and we say so. Its footprint concentrates in purchased electricity, and growing indoors uses more energy than growing in a field. We show that trade-off rather than only the favourable side.
Our first measured baseline, taken from 20 supplier invoices covering June 2025 to June 2026, is 6,052 kWh of electricity and 50 m³ of water. All the electricity we buy is certified 100% renewable through Guarantees of Origin, and has been since June 2025, so our market-based Scope 2 emissions are nil. We report the market-based and location-based figures together every time, and we never describe our operations as zero-emission on the basis of the market-based figure alone.
Our plan sets five targets: complete a full screening greenhouse-gas inventory by mid-2027 and repeat it annually; keep 100% certified renewable electricity at every supply point we control; assess the climate and sustainability practices of our major suppliers; publish an annual climate progress report from 2027; and track water use and closed-loop reuse every quarter. We have not set an emissions reduction target yet, because we will only have a complete emissions picture after the first full inventory.
Read our Climate Action Plan
Human Rights (HR)
Respecting human rights is the baseline responsibility of any business: to avoid harming people through its own activities, and to help address harm connected to it through its business relationships. It comes before the positive impact we aim to create, and we accept it in full.
Our public Human Rights Commitment Statement commits us to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, to the International Bill of Human Rights — the Universal Declaration and the two Covenants that accompany it — and to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. It applies to our own operations and to our business relationships across our value chain.
The issues most relevant to us are fair and transparent pay and working conditions; equality, non-discrimination and inclusion, with particular attention to people at heightened risk of exclusion; freedom from forced labour and child labour, above all in our supply chain; occupational health and safety in our growing facilities; freedom of association; and the privacy of the people whose data we hold.
Our due diligence is proportionate to our size and grounded in real figures. We assessed the human-rights and environmental impacts of our three most material purchases for June 2025 to June 2026 — around 55% of everything we spent with suppliers — identified from our accounting records rather than estimated. We found no actual adverse impacts, and we identified genuine risk in construction labour and in the outsourced cleaning and security work at the market that hosts us. We are candid that our leverage over a shared municipal market’s contractors is limited, and we have set our actions accordingly.
Anyone can raise a human-rights concern through our Grievance Procedure, which is designed against the effectiveness criteria of UN Guiding Principle 31. Where we cause or contribute to harm, we will provide for or cooperate in remedy.
Read our Human Rights Commitment Statement
Environmental Stewardship and Circularity (ESC)
We measure our environmental impact before we describe it. For June 2025 to June 2026, our first operating year, we recorded 6,052 kWh of electricity and 50 m³ of mains water from metered supplier invoices, against 676 kg of produce harvested.
Water is where our model does most of its work. Our hydroponic system runs on a closed loop: we estimate that around 96% of the water in the system is recirculated and reused, and we draw only 50 m³ of new mains water a year. That percentage is calculated from our pump’s rated flow rather than read from a meter, so we publish it as an estimate in the range of 93–96%, and we are installing a flow meter to sharpen it.
Our waste is structurally low because of how we sell. Microgreens leave the hub alive in their carton trays, so the tray, the growing substrate and the roots go with the product. What the hub itself discards — inbound packaging, seed bags and substrate from failed batches, roughly 218 kg last year — goes to the market’s recycling containers, so effectively none of it reaches landfill. We produce no hazardous waste, because we grow without pesticides. These waste figures are first-year estimates based on collection volume, and we are moving to weighing.
Energy is the honest trade-off in indoor farming, and we do not present it otherwise. We buy 100% certified renewable electricity, generate none on site, and track energy per kilogram harvested — about 8.95 kWh — as the measure that will show whether we improve as we scale.
We also weigh environmental impact when we buy, assessing our most material purchases each year and preferring recyclable and lower-impact materials as our volumes grow.
Government Affairs and Collective Action (GACA)
ISIFARMER does not currently engage in lobbying, and we say so publicly. We do not seek to influence legislation, regulation or public-policy decisions — directly or through intermediaries — at any level of government, and we make no financial or in-kind contributions to political parties, candidates or campaigns.
We do work with public institutions, and we are clear about the difference. Agreements for the municipal market space that houses our hub, applications to public funding programmes, routine regulatory compliance and factual responses to public consultations are not attempts to influence public decisions. Our Responsible Lobbying Policy defines that boundary in writing and is published on our website.
Although we do not lobby today, we have published the full policy rather than a bare declaration, so the framework exists before it is needed. It commits us to lobby only where doing so contributes to a positive impact on society or the environment, to base any position we take on reliable or scientific data, to a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and bribery, and to review the public positions of any association we join. Our Sole Administrator is the only person who may authorise lobbying or a political contribution, and every decision is recorded in our Public Affairs Register — which currently carries a reviewed nil return.
Where we do act collectively is in research and partnership. Between 2024 and 2025 we took part in an Erasmus+ partnership with the Association for Vertical Farming, Edugarden gUG, Fundación Down Madrid and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, examining whether game-based methods can make complex sustainability topics accessible to adult learners, including people with intellectual disabilities. We hosted the Madrid meeting, ran a hands-on workshop with six participants from Down Madrid’s Focus Labora programme, and rebuilt parts of our ISI-Campus training around what the research found — including that gamification complements hands-on technical training rather than replacing it.
Read our Responsible Lobbying Policy
