The Badge Means Nothing If the Intent Is Not There

When a community of purpose-driven businesses decides that its very name should reflect what it stands for—being on purpose, not just being local—you know something real is happening.

I want to say what I actually believe about certification—and why Fire Lily chose it anyway.

A Business as an Extension of Self

When I first imagined building a business, I wanted it to be an extension of me. My values. My history. My privilege and my adversity. I wanted to use it as a platform to challenge the norm. That was 2008. The B Corp movement was in its infancy—the first 82 B Corps had been certified just a year earlier.

I am not a believer in certification marketing. Sometimes I find it manipulative. The badge means nothing if the intent is not there. A logo on a website does not make a business purposeful. Purpose makes a business purposeful.

Business should be founded on purpose. The purpose of ours is fixing a supply chain that keeps people in poverty.

I Drank the Kool Aid

For many years I approached Kenyan coffee’s supply chain with the status quo thinking: that farmer poverty was a social problem. I had seen farmers work incredibly hard to produce coffee only to go bankrupt because the prices they received were below their cost of production. Within a year or two, they were in debt. And then we—the industry, the consumers, the certifiers—would talk about “poverty in coffee communities” without ever interrogating what put the farmers there in the first place.

I drank the social problem Kool Aid.

I grew up in a small Kenyan community where we grew a cash crop—a commodity for export—and because we had no control of the supply chain, our community fell into this same trap. I watched it happen to people I knew. I lived inside the system that the industry talks about from the outside.

A Supply Chain Problem, Not a Social Problem

Then I stopped drinking the Kool Aid.

Coffee does not have a social problem. It has a supply chain problem. The supply chain creates the poverty. When a farmer receives a price that is below what it costs to produce the coffee, that is not a social failure. It is a structural one. It is a choice the supply chain makes, and it is a choice we can unmake.

That is what Fire Lily exists to fix. We negotiate directly with our farmers based on their cost of production and what constitutes a living wage—not a commodity benchmark, not a “fair trade” premium tacked onto a broken baseline. The price starts with what the farmer needs, not what the market dictates.

On Purpose, Not for a Badge

We do this on purpose. Not because we are a B Corp. Not because we want to maintain our certification. We do it because this is why the business exists. B Corp certification is a trust signal—it tells the world that we are legally accountable for our impact, not just aspirationally committed to it. But the certification did not create our purpose. Our purpose existed first. The certification is proof, not motivation.

Fire Lily holds a B Impact Score of 100.1. That number means something because the work behind it means something. Every bag of our single-origin Kenyan coffee is traceable to the highland farms where it was grown. Every purchase puts money directly into the hands of the people who grew it. No middlemen. No commodity floor. No exploitation dressed up as tradition.

The B Corp movement matters because it gives businesses a framework to be held accountable. But the movement only works if the businesses inside it are there for the right reasons. The badge means nothing if the intent is not there.

Our intent is there. It always has been.

Spark Change.