For the past three years, Grupo La Cumbre has been undergoing a business transformation process aimed at integrating sustainability into its business strategy. As part of this process, the company achieved B Corp Certification this year—a major milestone that accelerated and validated a journey that continues to evolve.
La Cumbre is a family-owned company based in Rosario, Argentina, with more than 40 years of experience in the food industry. In 2023, it began a process to incorporate sustainability more systematically into its management practices. The company already had numerous initiatives and good practices in place; the goal was to build on that foundation and develop a shared strategy.
For a company built on more than four decades of history, this journey also meant taking a fresh look at the way it had always done things. “For us, it was important to go through this process while respecting our essence, but also allowing ourselves to evolve,” says Virginia Alabarce, Director of Human Resources and Sustainability. To move forward, La Cumbre decided to bring in an external perspective that could help the company review what it was already doing and raise new questions. “We felt that an external perspective could help us do exactly that: ask ourselves new questions, organize, measure, and professionalize many practices that were already in place and, above all, challenge us to go a little further.”
“There was a lot to build on, but we needed to organize and systematize what was already being done and define where the company wanted to go,” recalls Claudia Almenárez Mendoza, who led the process on behalf of FIXIT. The challenge was to move from existing practices toward a systematic and in-depth approach to impact management, embedding sustainability as a cross-cutting business priority and within the company’s governance, rather than treating it as an initiative owned by a single department. Ultimately, the goal was to bring impact increasingly closer to the heart of the business.
As part of this process, La Cumbre decided to pursue B Corp Certification. Rather than being an end in itself, certification helped deepen work that was already underway: reviewing different dimensions of the company, measuring its impact, and identifying what still needed to change. “We didn’t want to do this just to obtain a certification. We wanted it to be a genuine opportunity to look inward, recognize everything we were already doing well, and also have the courage to see what we still needed to transform,” Virginia explains.
Three years later, those questions now extend to the business itself. Changes in the market and in the ways products are made and consumed are now part of the conversation around the products La Cumbre offers and the transformations the company will need to navigate in the years ahead. Sustainability is thus becoming part of a broader discussion about the evolution of the business itself.
One of the clearest signs of this transformation can be seen in how people across the company understand their own role. “When different members of the team began to understand that their everyday decisions also shape our impact, I felt that something had truly changed. Sustainability was beginning to move beyond being a project and becoming a shared way of looking at the company,” says Virginia.
“B Corp Certification invites you to look at yourself in the mirror,” Virginia says. And perhaps the most challenging aspect of that reflection is that it does not end with certification: it also helps reveal what still needs to be reviewed, strengthened, or transformed.
For La Cumbre, the challenge now is to begin a new cycle with the focus and depth the company needs at this stage. It has already begun an innovation process focused on its business model and products—where the greatest potential for both impact and competitiveness lies.
Learn more about Grupo La Cumbre’s sustainability strategy | First Impact Report