SPECIAL REPORT
As CSO roles are cut or reassigned, concerns have been raised over a deprioritisation of the sustainability function. Should we be worried? Or is this a sign that sustainability has finally come of age?
When Starbucks recently axed its chief sustainability officer (CSO) role, along with other team members, the backlash in sustainability bubbles across social media was fast (and furious).
“This is the world’s largest coffee shop chain, and a business employing nearly 400,000 people basically saying, ‘Sustainability doesn’t matter to us’,” noted one of the many posts shared on my stream as the news broke in May.
“The only thing Starbucks managed to cut by 50% is the sustainability team,” quipped Vojtech Vosecky, the circular economist who has over 180,000 followers on LinkedIn (2,500 of which gave the ‘thumbs up’ to his upper cut on the coffee chain which garnered hundreds of reposts).
Starbucks is not the only firm feeling the heat over its CSO function this summer. McDonald’s has also reassigned its global CSO, with the fast food chain’s executive lead for diversity, equity and inclusion, picking up the portfolio. Subway had a head of sustainability for the EMEA region but does not appear to have one now.
Does this game of musical chairs among CSOs and sustainability leaders represent the abandonment of sustainability as a strategic pillar within organisations, or a positive evolution of sustainability strategies and the people best suited to run them?
Footprint has spoken to CSOs, or equivalents, from a range of companies working within the hospitality and foodservice sector, as well as those who supply them or provide services to the sustainability function (like carbon footprinting and ESG consulting, for example) in order to cut through the noisy headlines portraying the death of the CSO.
Fire and fury
“Maybe this move, which is happening in numerous other companies we broadly agree are leaders, is actually a sign of being behind or being far ahead, and we need to ask tougher questions?” suggested Alison Taylor, in her “cautious” post on the Starbucks CSO story this summer. “Maybe fixating on the CSO role is a lazy, headline-driven way to look at what’s going on? Maybe the most advanced companies have actually got so far along with ‘integration’ that they have specialists in finance, risk, procurement, compliance etc, so this is a sign of success?”
Taylor’s careful commentary amidst the fire and the fury over recent months is in part down to her lack of insider knowledge on what is actually going on at Starbucks (which has been cutting jobs left, right and centre as it remains under considerable financial pressure). However, as a clinical associate professor at NYU Stern School of Business in the US, she has spent the past two decades consulting with multinational companies on sustainability and tracking the changing of the (green) guard; her voice is one of reason and authority.
“A lot is changing in real time, and it’s fascinating, and counter-intuitive,” she wrote in 2023, teeing up a report for Harvard Business Review (HBR), co-authored with Robert Eccles, a visiting professor at Said Business School at Oxford University. The two experts detailed how CSOs in some firms are more involved in investor meetings; how they have adopted a more strategic position within the business and now guide the company through tricky topics and inevitable trade-offs. Some CSOs have evolved from “stealth PR executives” to “spearheading the true integration of ESG issues into corporate strategy”, they wrote.
This is the kind of positive shift that practitioners of sustainability have advocated for years. It is also the argument made by those who are making changes to the top tiers of their sustainability teams: this is not ignoring sustainability but integrating it into the bones of the business. Whether this represents rhetoric or reality is the cloud that hangs over such decisions.
“The debate about a centralised team versus [sustainability] embedded into other departments is always a consideration. Both can work or fail,” explains the sustainability lead at a major UK foodservice company, who prefers to remain anonymous. The discipline to focus on priorities, coordination to avoid duplication and mixed messages, and simply “having good people – for example effective communicators backed by data”, are all key, he says, adding: “I am perhaps old school in thinking the presence of a CSO will make the agenda progress faster.”
Slice and dice
Some agendas are progressing faster than others. The pace of change in relation to reducing carbon emissions, for example, is far too slow across many companies within hospitality and foodservice. This is not the fault of CSOs alone, however the redrawing (or rubbing out) of short-term net-zero and other ESG targets, combined with the reshaping of sustainability leadership teams and roles in some companies, has led to conjecture that sustainability is quietly being deprioritised.
“Is the chief sustainability officer becoming obsolete?” wondered Hayatte Loukili, at EnableGreen in a July blog. Her glass is half full (perhaps unsurprisingly as co-founder of an international executive search agency focused on sustainability, ESG, and climate-related roles). “While CSO titles may be disappearing, sustainability itself is not being abandoned,” Loukili wrote.
In fact, hiring “remains strong”, she says, particularly for heads of sustainability and sustainability directors. Sustainability spending is up, not down. “What we are witnessing is not a retreat, but a restructuring,” she adds, as more companies fold ESG oversight into other existing c-suite roles – most often the chief financial officer (CFO) or head of corporate affairs.
This year’s tenth sustainability census, published by recruitment firm Acre and spanning 2,300 sustainability professionals across the world, echoes this: there is a “meaningful slowdown” in team expansion (43% versus 65% two years ago), but the teams are “stable rather than contracting”. Almost two thirds (64%) said their budgets had stayed the same or increased. And 21.7% of organisations are formally embedding sustainability objectives into the bonus structures of their wider workforce, which “drives further accountability and one would hope, acts as an incentive to integrate sustainability into the rest of the business”, Catherine Harris, Acre executive director for sustainable business, tells Footprint.
However, there’s a fine line between integration and dilution. Some former Starbucks employees have spoken out about the change in philosophy there, with “repeated layoffs” and the “gutting of the sustainability and ethical sourcing teams”.
McDonald’s, meanwhile, has struggled to translate sustainability ambition into action. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise against the baseline, with the leadership team “actively reassessing” its 2030 emissions reduction goal. “As we’ve been working through our most recent data for 2025, we’ve gained a clearer view of both our progress and the challenges ahead — particularly the risk to delivery of scope 3,” explained Beth Hart in an interview with Trellis in May. Hart is no longer CSO – she is vice president, global category head of beef, with her CSO responsibilities being picked up by Suheily Natal Davis, who has become chief sustainability, social impact and inclusion officer.
Nestlé, another food and drink company to have adjusted the responsibilities of its CSO, albeit with greater responsibility and at a higher level, is moving in the right direction under its comprehensive net-zero strategy, so whether changes to the top team destabilise this or drive it remains to be seen (the company was approached for an interview).
What we do know – from various surveys and research on the matter – is that in many companies there (still) remains a gap between commitment and action. In a follow-up to their HBR report, Eccles and Taylor, together with Globescan and Salesforce, surveyed sustainability executives and those with other business functions. “The hope and intention are there,” they found, with 93% of respondents feeling that sustainability was ‘very’ or ‘fairly important’ to commercial success. But from there it “unravels”, they noted, showing a “serious lack of real commitment which demonstrates the sorry state of sustainability for many, if not all, companies today”.
Headlines since point to a deeper nosedive in sustainability ambition and action. “The situation is dangerous and frankly surreal since our environmental and social challenges are only getting more obvious and more expensive,” wrote Andrew Winston, one of the world’s leading voices on sustainable business, in late 2024. “Sustainability isn’t dead,” he added, “[but] it’s being targeted”.
The (green)lash hangover
This is the so-called greenlash – a political and social backlash against environmental policies, often driven by perceived economic burdens and the costs of delivering net-zero – which has already derailed Europe’s green transition and is central to the UK Reform Party’s agenda as it targets an election win in 2029.
There are worrying signs that this politics of fear is beginning to stick, leaving sustainability leaders stuck. How on earth can we plan our short and medium-term activity when the geopolitical landscape remains so chaotic, the CSO at a catering company asked me last year. Her sustainability programme has stood firm (though like others they are having to pull the plug on some plans in order to prioritise) but elsewhere targets are shifting as companies fall short on the commitments made during the golden (green) years at the start of this decade when capital was available and climate was a top priority for CEOs.
Remember that COP in Glasgow, for example, in November 2021, when you couldn’t move for net-zero pledges. Asset managers told me at the time that there was no better time for them as money poured into ESG programmes, backed from the very top. Deloitte and PwC research shows this green acceleration, including the hiring of CSOs, began in 2018, when issues such as climate and racial and gender equality started to influence investor and CEO decision-making, with the covid-19 pandemic further fuelling this uptick in sustainability leaders to crunch numbers, set targets and develop strategies.
Now all the talk is of a downturn, which is most acute in the US. “This is not the most fun time to be in corporate sustainability in the United States,” Winston wrote last month, as he picked up on results of the two most recent surveys of CSOs. Weinreb Group, a sustainability recruiter in the US, reported the number of CSOs in US public companies had dropped from 216 to 193. As Winston noted: “The number of CSOs is down, but up dramatically over the last fifteen years. Perhaps some companies that pulled back were never committed to begin with; so that’s probably not much of a loss in actual action.”
Weinreb also found that only 14% of CSOs now report to the CEO (fewer than in recent years). In the Globescan survey of 234 senior leaders from a wide range of industries about the value of sustainability, just 36% said the CEO is “very engaged”, down from 55% a decade ago. Acre’s census, meanwhile, shows CEO ownership of sustainability has fallen from 41% in 2023/24 to 32% this year. CSO ownership has also dropped from 36% to 19%. “One interpretation is that sustainability is maturing […] that it is becoming diffuse, embedded across multiple functions rather than owned by one,” the census reads.
Signs of maturity
This chimes with the experiences of those working at the coal face of sustainability within the sector. Across hospitality, executives in property and procurement teams are increasingly involved in discussions previously centred around the sustainability team, for example. “Hospitality doesn’t have many CSOs so we are seeing more people with more roles involved,” explains Bob Gordon, director of the Zero Carbon Forum, which works with a range of businesses across the sector. “I think sustainability is maturing,” he adds.
At Sodexo, the team spearheading many of the initiatives includes sustainability, finance, legal and risk executives. Establishing this group “has really paid off” because it maintains momentum on cross-functional initiatives and banishes the silos that can be a bugbear for many sustainability professionals, explains Claire Atkins-Morris, sustainability director for UK&I at the contract caterer.
CSOs I have spoken to in the past feel the need to show ‘disruptive leadership’ – but that’s difficult when they may not sit on the board, let alone feed directly into the CEO. There are exceptions, especially among the purpose-led brands. Take Oatly, which has no CSO. “Our CEO and CSO are one and the same thing, and then we have sustainability embedded more throughout the organisation,” says Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at the dairy alternatives company. Reid’s role focuses on driving systems change, and she has colleagues at the same level working on nutrition and the “doing less bad” parts of the business and supply chain, which includes the carbon reduction and regenerative farming programmes, for example.
In other companies the wheels are not so much greased as braked, often by the ‘anti-CSOs’, who will push back on change – the kind of change required to meet the various crises the world is facing. As the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership has noted: “Crises no longer present themselves in isolation, but as part of an interconnected and hugely complex web of crises. As well as lacking clear pathways to a sustainable future, leaders face a barrage of market, political and media pressures, together with high geopolitical and social instability and exponential tech-driven change.”
This can be a motivator for some. “[…] there are a lot of big complex hairy challenges out there to solve,” Yum! Brands CSO Jon Hixon said in an interview for the Weinreb survey, adding that he “likes” tackling those challenges. Yet an uncertain corporate landscape is also forcing businesses into difficult decisions. CFOs may have embraced the sustainability agenda in some cases (either willingly or forcibly) but this will also be among the first places they look when the penny-pinching begins, according to EY, a consultancy that regularly surveys the c-suite of global firms.
Currently, there’s a lot competing for executive attention, including geopolitics, supply chain disruptions (partly climate-related), new ESG reporting regulations, tariffs, energy crunches and AI to name a few – so the findings of those recent CSO surveys were probably not surprising to many. “[…] the focus is much more on compliance and regulatory requirements,” Winston explained. “In general, the ambition level seems muted, and there’s a rising attempt to lock down commitments and be clearer about what companies can accomplish.”
Everyone’s evolving
This is certainly the message that comes through among those shifting their ESG targets (the net-zero element of which will be the subject of a forthcoming Footprint in Focus feature). The weeding out of what can be done now and will make the most impact, through both an environmental and economic lens, is what CSOs are having to grapple with. It is a tough job requiring a thick skin and a specific skillset. “[…] corporations must be more candid and realistic about problems they suggest they can take on,” writes Taylor in her book, Higher Ground, adding that leaders should “spend less time claiming to make the world better – and more time making their businesses better”.
For this, they must lean on the CSO, who in turn has to seize this opportunity. Pamela Meyer is an author and expert on the art of deception. In researching her new book, ‘How to read the room’, she found anecdotally that CSOs have “hard jobs” because unlike others in the c-suite their role often relies much more on persuasion than others realise. “I have found that effective CSOs are often extraordinary connectors, reaching across divisions, filling gaps and constantly providing information to the uninformed,” Meyer tells Footprint. “One wouldn’t think extroversion and people skills would be so critical to the success of a job that tends to attract a lot of geeks, but my experience has been that those qualities can be crucial to a CSO’s success,” she adds.
This is certainly the impression I have when speaking to CSOs, the consultants who work with them and those who recruit them into top positions. “I’ve been here 16 years ….sometimes I forget about the ‘brand’ I have within the organisation,” explains Sodexo’s Atkins-Morris, whose role has been expanded (at her own request). “My job is to look around the corner,” she says. That is, arguably, trickier than ever, though access to data and technology has helped free up CSOs. Atkins-Morris is “driven by data”, she explains during a frank conversation about the landscape for her and her peers currently. “We forget the data rigour we have [as sustainability leaders], that others don’t have,” she adds.
Indeed, Deloitte has previously referred to the CSO as a company’s “sensemaker in chief”, which certainly resonates with the likes of Matthew Isaacs, founder of the carbon accounting platform MyEmissions, which works with a range of hospitality and foodservice company sustainability leads. “I think sustainability professionals will end up with one of the most comprehensive overviews of how a company works and operates,” he explains. Being the “owners” of such information allows them to then “take that context and influence” – from the cost of ingredients to their carbon footprint and potential supply risks, and how that weighs against alternatives and new production models.
This data infers a lot of power on sustainability leaders and their teams. They are still collecting data and keeping up with new reporting requirements but are also incredibly well-placed to horizon-scan. “They are becoming strategic stakeholders that understand the business,” says Isaacs.
The future risks that sustainability strategies were meant to head off are already starting to bite. This month, the Zero Carbon Company, part of the Zero Carbon Forum, published estimates that this year’s heatwaves cost UK hospitality £95m in extra energy, or £3.2m for every single heatwave day, with pubs taking the biggest hit. Given the increasing impact of the climate on crops like wheat and barley, the price of bread and beer is only going one way. Throw in the war in Iran and problems with supplies of fertilisers, and the challenges companies in this sector face look greater by the day. But so too does the importance of sustainability in every part of the business: from ingredient sourcing and operational efficiencies, to optimising food waste and menu innovation.
The narrative around net-zero, for example, is very much around resilience and risk currently; CSOs feel that if this brings their insights to the top table and puts them in a position to influence then this has to be seen as positive. “I think sustainability is growing up,” says Oatly’s Reid, “and the days of having one person to cover everything from CSRD [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] to sourcing are gone.”
Others feel the same way. Zero Carbon Forum director Gordon is a former head of sustainability at Nando’s UK&I, and recalls one of his first internal presentations for the chicken chain. “It was 2012,” he explains, “and they saw me as the ‘local community guy’ who would help distribute some food to people down on their luck. They put me on to speak last and my response was to stand up and challenge them. I said ‘this [job] matters. Climate change matters. It’s going to change everything’.”
That includes the role of the CSO. Whether the change is for better or worse, only time will tell.
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