A Food Systems Scorecard for Regenerative Brands: First Application to Small and Mid-Sized Firms

Food and beverage brands that hold sustainability certifications are rarely assessed on the wider set of food system issues that certifications cover only in part, such as farmer and community economics, biodiversity, climate action, supply chain transparency, nutrition, and gender equity. We introduce the Regenerative Food Systems Brand Scorecard, a company-level instrument that takes a broader food systems approach, and report its first application. The scorecard assesses a consumer-facing brand from public evidence against a 127-point rubric: six base categories worth 103 points, two “bonus” categories worth up to 24 points for strengths that only some business models can show, and a deduction for documented third-party criticism. For this initial application we drew candidates from the leading segments of established registries, including the 100 percent tier of Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) and high-scoring B Corps, and scored 96 companies. Scores ranged from 0 to 72.85 (mean 33.32, median 32.83). Farmer and Community Economics and Supply Chain Transparency did most of the separating (correlation with total score 0.76 and 0.75), while certification, capped at 10 points, contributed a moderate share (0.52). A preliminary exploration of whether scores predict financial performance found that too few of these companies publish financial data for a meaningful test. We report the instrument and its first results, and set out what they imply for buyers, funders, and small brands.