At AB Tasty, being sustainable has been in our DNA since day one. We want to grow our business for sure, but money is not our main life goal. By developing the company, we want to have a bigger impact than only what our tool can do (and it can do a lot!). We also want to leave our mark by acting positively to change people’s lives.
And by people, we mean: our employees, our clients, our partners, and also people who will never deal with our business because they have no reason to. That’s why we’ve implemented, through the years, many initiatives that have a positive impact on our communities.
Ecological actions
🗑️ Promotion of new habits to reduce waste
Every month, we welcome newcomers from each office to our onboarding week at our HQ in Paris during which we gift them a reusable tote bag with many useful items, among them: a mug so all employees can act ecologically by keeping it all day and therefore reducing waste, a glass lunch box they can use to bring food or get food from local restaurants in order to limit the amount of single-use containers and bags.
We also have water refill stations at all the offices and for instance, in the NYC office, we have AB Tasty water bottles given as gifts for our local seminar. In Paris, we work with Castalie to provide micro-filtered water to employees. We don’t use plastic bottles, neither plastic glasses!
♻️ Encourage people to recycling
The AB Tasty Paris office works with Recyclage Eco-Citoyen (Eco-Citizen Recycling), a company fighting for recycling, since November 2017. This partnership allows us to sort, harvest and recycle our daily waste (paper / cardboard / cans / bottles and also computer equipment and furniture) by promoting access to employment for disabled workers, but also to put back into the consumer circuit the processed waste. Many reasons for us to act with them!
When you walk through our Paris office (our global HQ), you see several recycling boxes in which employees put their recyclable waste. Once a month, Recyclage Eco-Citoyen collects it and, with the hard work from people with disabilities, everything we throw away is turned into furniture and supplies (e.g: notebooks) for school children.
🐝 ABees Tasty
This brand new (and first) hive grows our AB Tasty team members to… a lot of individuals! Our tiny and newest team members are busy doing their part for the environment and are also providing a little sweetness to their human team members.
- It’s AB Tasty branded, which means we not only sent money to sponsor the beekeeper’s work, but also to create a new hive.
- The hive is built with local wood from sustainably managed forests, which allows it to have a small carbon print, but also built by a company that only hires people with disabilities.
- Bees are located in Auvergne (France), in preserved areas rich in plant biodiversity.
Social actions
♿ Work with ESATs
In order to promote healthy habits, we provide fruits for employees in many of our global offices. In Paris, we work with Recyclage Eco-Citoyen (Eco-Citizen Recycling) for this service (as they promote access to employment for disabled workers). We try to work as much as possible with companies who share our values and act for a good cause. Recyclage Eco-Citoyen is an ESAT (French organization that helps disabled people back into work), so we’re able to also support others in our community by purchasing fruits from this organization.
We also partner with another ESAT which is named “L’Esperance”. They print our business cards, our flyers or any booklets we need.
💗 Sharing pledge signed with EPIC
In 2018, AB Tasty’s founders decided to sign EPIC’s sharing pledge. Therefore, if AB Tasty is sold or if it goes public, shares will be given to EPIC so the money EPIC receives will be sent to an NGO from its portfolio.
What is EPIC’s sharing pledge?
EPIC has created the “sharing pledge,” which invites interested individuals to pledge a percentage of their shares (for founders) and carries interest/management fees (for VCs) to selected charities around the world. The pledge is part of the nonprofit Epic, which was created in 2014 to help “make giving the norm.”
❤️ Direct contribution to NGO
At AB Tasty, we use a system named Briq to help us scale our recognition-rich culture. Each one of us is granted with the mission of showing our teammates they matter, celebrating victories big and small…and keeping our values and spirit alive on a daily basis.
The purpose is simply to spread kindness and “reward” your colleagues everyday using slack, by sending virtual tokens (the briqs).
Employees can redeem the briqs gifted to them for products from a personalized shop. One of the products in our shop is a “10€ to a charity donation”. Each quarter, we define a NGO to which we will send money collected thanks to the briqs donation made by employees.
Since this has been implemented, AB Tasty contributed to the following causes:
- March 2019: 2,990€ to Doctors without Borders
- April 2019: 1469€ to help rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral
- June 2019: 796£ to Stonewall
- June 2019: 570€ to Abracadabox
- September 2019: 150€ to EPIC
- October 2019: $1,419.00 to the Amazon Forest Fund at Earth Alliance
- January 2020: 1400€ to help WWF in Australia
- April 2020: 1361€ for corona virus research
- June 2020: 325€ to Le Refuge
- July 2020: 390€ for Beirut
- October 2020: $670 for NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
- December 2020: 340€ to Make a Wish
- January 2021: 1300€ to ARC Foundation (Cancer Research)
- June 2021: 230€ for Perce-Neige
- June 2021: 380€ for Le Refuge
These small actions add up to a larger impact, and we will continue finding ways to make a positive impact not only for our business but our communities.