Fueling Bottom Line Growth with a Small Sustainability Team

Core Challenges Facing Food Industry Sustainability Teams

Small sustainability teams, often made up of just one or two people, are feeling the squeeze of using limited time and resources to meet increasing requirements. Cate highlighted three interconnected challenges that have emerged repeatedly across conversations with brands, suppliers, and partners:

• Managing a surge in downstream data requests. With more retailers, foodservice providers, and CPG customers setting science-based targets, suppliers are being asked to provide detailed, product-level sustainability data, frequently in different formats, scopes, and timelines. For small teams, keeping up with the volume, accuracy, and inconsistency of these requests has become a major resource drain.
• Communicating sustainability impact with credibility. Even companies making genuine progress are grappling with how to talk about it. The fear of greenwashing, and the increasingly complex regulatory landscape around sustainability claims, has led many to hesitate or stay silent. But silence can mean missed opportunities to engage customers and partners.
• Staying agile amid shifting priorities. As business conditions, regulations, and leadership agendas evolve, so too do sustainability targets. Small teams often find themselves caught between long-term impact planning and short-term requests, whether from marketing, procurement, or the C-suite. This makes it difficult to maintain focus and momentum.

Below is a summary of how Red Gold, Ingredion, and Tractor Beverage Co. are successfully turning sustainability needs from friction into opportunity by leveraging the right tools, aligning internal teams, and anchoring their efforts in data-driven insights.

Red Gold: Turning Data Burden into Data Value

As the largest privately-owned tomato processor in the U.S., Red Gold fields regular sustainability data requests from large retail partners, often asking for similar information in slightly different ways. With a lean team and no central system for managing those requests, their procurement lead and de facto sustainability manager, Sandrea Elam, was spending 70+ hours a week manually responding to audits and tracking metrics across spreadsheets.

By implementing HowGood’s Latis platform, Red Gold centralized their data and gained the ability to report across Scopes 1, 2, and 3. This not only saved time, but uncovered insights that shifted their sustainability strategy. For example, granular reporting helped surface areas for operational improvement they hadn’t considered before, and even became a tool their family farmers could use to improve practices. Most notably, it’s now easier for Red Gold’s ownership team to stay engaged with sustainability – they can access dashboards and metrics directly without needing manual updates.

Tractor Beverage Co.: Building an Impact Story That Sells

Tractor Beverage is a fast-growing organic drink company poured in Chipotle and other foodservice locations. Their sustainability work is deeply tied to soil health and regenerative agriculture, but like many brands, they initially struggled with how to credibly validate and communicate that story.

To bridge that gap, they partnered with HowGood to develop their Organic Impact Tracker –  a customized tool that calculates five metrics, including water saved, carbon emissions avoided, and synthetic pesticides avoided. The tracker has since become a core asset for the brand, used in onboarding, sales, marketing, and customer reporting.

Every team member at Tractor is trained on the tracker, and it’s used to customize sustainability communications for each foodservice partner, from showing gallons of water saved on a campus dining menu board to highlighting carbon impact for corporate buyers. It’s also directly tied to growth: the company reports progress toward eliminating over 1,000 tons of synthetic pesticides as part of their internal performance targets.

Ingredion: Making Sustainability a Strategic Business Tool

Ingredion, a global ingredients company and Fortune 500 brand, operates over 50 facilities worldwide. Their sustainability team, once a one-person effort led by Brian Nash, has grown in response to increasing customer demands, regulatory complexity, and internal expectations.

Ingredion originally partnered with HowGood to support new product development aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But over time, they’ve expanded use of the platform to support marketing, sales, and procurement. For example:

• Their marketing team uses data from HowGood to demonstrate the sustainability value of reformulated products, including one cheese cracker reformulated with pea protein that cut the product carbon footprint by nearly 50%.
• Their procurement team now consults sustainability metrics to choose sourcing locations when multiple options are on the table.
• The ability to deliver customized insights on-demand has transformed conversations with strategic customers, allowing Ingredion to respond to complex and often conflicting sustainability requests more efficiently.

Rather than spending weeks manually gathering data, their team can now deliver tailored insights in minutes, freeing up time for higher-impact work and helping them maintain credibility with both customers and leadership.

Transforming Sustainability Into A Business Driver

One major takeaway across the discussion: sustainability data isn’t just about reporting – it’s about enabling smarter decisions across the organization.

“Start with your data,” emphasized Sam. “Once you have clarity there, it becomes easier to automate, respond to customer needs, and connect your sustainability strategy to real business outcomes.”

From streamlining audit responses and reducing workload, to powering sales enablement and procurement strategy, each team demonstrated how sustainability can be a force multiplier, even when bandwidth is tight.

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