The Silent Killer? Misalignment in Food Sustainability Teams – Blog 2
The Hidden Threat to Your Sustainability Strategy
If your team misalignment in sustainability strategy is going unnoticed, it might be the hidden reason your efforts aren’t working. You may assume the issue lies with limited resources, innovation gaps, or external pressures. But more often, the silent killer is closer to home: your own internal misalignment.
When your sustainability team speaks one language, your commercial team another, and your culinary staff doesn’t even know what the goal is — your strategy isn’t just stalling, it’s slowly suffocating.
What Does Misalignment Actually Look Like?
Misalignment in food sustainability teams manifests in several telling ways:
Different Languages, Different Priorities
Picture this scenario: Your sustainability manager talks passionately about regenerative agriculture and carbon offsets. Meanwhile, your procurement team focuses solely on cost per unit. Your chefs care about taste and presentation, while your marketing team wants claims they can promote. When everyone has different priorities and speaks different professional languages, collaboration becomes nearly impossible.
Strategy Without Implementation
Another common sign is the infamous “sustainability strategy” that sits beautifully formatted in a PDF — but never makes it off the page. You’ve likely seen it before: comprehensive goals, sleek graphics, ambitious targets… and absolutely no one implementing them in their daily work.
Metrics That Don’t Match
Perhaps your sustainability team tracks carbon emissions, while your operations team measures efficiency in terms of labour hours, and your sales team only cares about revenue. With disconnected metrics, how can you possibly know if you’re making real progress?
Why Misalignment Is So Dangerous
The truly insidious thing about misalignment is that it doesn’t cause immediate, visible failure. Instead, it creates a slow deterioration that’s hard to detect until significant damage has been done.
It Erodes Trust and Momentum
When teams aren’t aligned, promises get broken. Your marketing team might promote your company’s commitment to local sourcing, only to have the procurement team opt for cheaper imported alternatives. These disconnects eventually erode trust both internally and with your customers.
It Creates Silos and Redundancy
Misaligned teams often duplicate efforts or work at cross-purposes. Your R&D team might spend months developing a low-carbon menu item that your operations team can’t actually execute, or your supply chain team might vet sustainable suppliers that don’t meet your finance team’s cost requirements.
It Prevents Systemic Solutions
Most importantly, misalignment prevents you from addressing interconnected sustainability challenges. Research shows that food system barriers are deeply intertwined—technological, behavioural, and political factors all influence each other. When teams focus only on their particular piece of the puzzle, comprehensive solutions become impossible.
Real-World Impact: When Misalignment Strikes
Let’s look at some real examples of how misalignment undermines sustainability efforts:
The Farm-to-Table Restaurant That Wasn’t
A restaurant group proudly launched a farm-to-table concept, with marketing materials highlighting direct relationships with local farmers. The reality? Their procurement system was still centralised, and kitchen managers could only order through approved vendors—none of which were the local farms featured in their marketing. The result was a disconnect between promise and reality that eventually damaged their reputation.
The Carbon Reduction Goal That Nobody Owned
A hotel chain announced an ambitious goal to reduce food-related emissions by 25% over five years. Two years in, they discovered almost no progress had been made. Why? The sustainability team that set the goal had no authority over menu development or purchasing. Meanwhile, the culinary team had never been properly briefed on how their choices affected emissions, and the purchasing team was still incentivised solely on cost savings.
The Food Waste Initiative That Fizzled
A food service company launched a food waste reduction programme with great fanfare. They invested in expensive measurement tools and training—but six months later, waste levels remained unchanged. The missing piece? The operations team was still measured on speed of service, with no incentives tied to waste reduction. When time pressure hit, waste reduction was the first priority abandoned.
How to Solve the Misalignment Problem
If you recognise these symptoms in your organisation, don’t despair. Misalignment can be fixed—but it requires intentional effort. Here’s how to start:
1. Create a Shared Language and Purpose
Begin by ensuring everyone understands what sustainability means for your organisation—not just in technical terms, but in practical, everyday language that resonates across departments.
A food service company we worked with created a simple one-page “sustainability dictionary” that translated complex terms into practical definitions everyone could understand. Terms like “regenerative agriculture” became “farming that puts back more than it takes,” making the concept accessible to everyone from executive chefs to front-of-house staff.
2. Co-Create Your Strategy
Rather than having your sustainability team create a strategy in isolation, involve representatives from every function. When people help build the plan, they’re far more likely to implement it.
One of our clients formed a cross-functional “Food Vision Team” with members from operations, culinary, marketing, procurement, and finance. They met weekly for eight weeks to co-create their sustainability roadmap. The result? A plan that everyone genuinely believed in and felt ownership over.
3. Align Incentives and Metrics
Ensure that what gets measured and rewarded is consistent across teams. If your sustainability team is incentivised to reduce emissions but your procurement team is rewarded solely for cost savings, conflict is inevitable.
4. Build in Regular Cross-Functional Touchpoints
Create structured opportunities for different teams to share their challenges and insights. This might mean weekly stand-ups, monthly cross-functional reviews, or quarterly alignment workshops.
5. Focus on One Measurable Goal at a Time
Rather than trying to tackle everything at once, align your organisation around one clear, measurable goal. Once you’ve achieved it together, move on to the next priority.
A hotel group we worked with decided to focus exclusively on reducing food waste for their first year of sustainability work. By having a single, shared focus, they avoided the confusion of competing priorities and achieved a 34% reduction in kitchen waste—building momentum and trust for future initiatives.
Breaking the Silence: Moving Forward Together
The first step to solving any problem is acknowledging it exists. If misalignment is silently undermining your sustainability efforts, bring it into the open. Start conversations across your organisation about how different teams perceive your sustainability goals and what barriers they face in implementing them.
Remember, addressing misalignment isn’t just about improving your sustainability outcomes—it’s about creating a more effective, cohesive organisation overall. When everyone speaks the same language, understands the same goals, and works from the same roadmap, progress becomes exponential.
Time to Align Your Team?
That’s why we created the Food Vision Course: an 8-week team programme designed to align your people, co-create your roadmap, and make sustainability your competitive edge.
No fluff. No PowerPoint decks. Just one bold purpose, one measurable goal, and a strategy people actually believe in.
Ready to transform misalignment into momentum? Sign up for our Food Vision Course today.
Click here to learn more about our Food Vision Course.
