Open Farm Earns B Corp Certi?cation

Jul 12, 2024

TORONTO, - For the past decade, Open Farm has been on a mission to drive positive change, and today, they're proud to announce their oﬃcial certiﬁcation as a B Corporation™ (B Corp). As a leader in ethically and sustainably sourced pet food and with a mission to Do Some Good for Animals and the Planet, B Corp was a natural progression in Open Farm's promise to pets and their parents.

"As a company that has always prioritized the welfare of animals and the planet, we're extremely proud to join the ranks of other businesses committed to holding themselves to a higher standard," said Jacqueline Prehogan, co-founder and Chief Brand Oﬃcer at Open Farm. "Not one single decision is made at Open Farm without considering our mission, and being B Corp certiﬁed brings yet another layer of certainty for pet parents about our commitment to excellence."

Open Farm takes responsibility for its impact by setting the highest standards and obsessing over every detail to deliver on them. Throughout the certiﬁcation process, they completed over 200 questions to assess the company's impact on community, employees, customers and the environment. To become a B Corp, a company needs to score at least 80 points. Open Farm scored 102.8, making it the highest-scoring dog and cat food brand sold coast to coast in North America. This score reﬂects their obsession with delivering the highest standards in animal welfare, sustainability and transparency, and their commitment to creating a fair and inclusive work environment.

Open Farm has been proud to partner with the Pet Sustainability Coalition (PSC), who has had a front row seat to their journey toward B Corp™ certiﬁcation.

"Open Farm has been a leader among PSC's members and we worked closely with them over the past 18 months to support them in their pursuit of B Corp Certiﬁcation," said Jim Lamancusa, Executive Director, PSC. "We're incredibly proud of them for this achievement. Their innovative supply chain practices and the Open Farm Promise reﬂect a commitment to sustainability and transparency which are foundational to PSC's goals as well as the rigorous requirements of B Corp Certiﬁcation. B Corp is one of the most comprehensive sustainability standards in the world and a major accomplishment that aligns deeply with PSC's mission to advance proﬁtable business through environmental and social practices. We congratulate Open Farm!"

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids