Unpopular Opinion: Your “Sustainability Strategy” Isn’t a Strategy if No One’s Using It – Blog 1
The Truth About Sustainability Strategies Nobody Wants to Hear
Let’s be honest—most sustainability strategies fail to deliver. They look good on paper, but fall short in practice. But why do sustainability strategies fail time and time again? It’s not just about limited budgets or a lack of innovation. Instead, the real issue runs deeper.
Everywhere you look, you’ll find beautifully designed PDFs packed with ambitious targets, visionary statements, and polished roadmaps. These documents often make their way into board meetings, internal newsletters, and corporate websites.
Yet despite all this visibility, nothing actually changes.
In fact, research shows that organisations consistently struggle to translate ambition into results, even while acknowledging the urgent need for sustainability transformation. Consequently, the gap between intention and implementation isn’t just disappointing—it’s dangerously unsustainable for both business performance and planetary health.
Why Most Sustainability Strategies Collect Digital Dust
The Misalignment Epidemic
The silent killer of sustainability initiatives? Misalignment.
For example, when your sustainability team speaks one language, commercial speaks another, and culinary doesn’t even know what the goal is—your strategy stalls before it starts. As a result, even the most brilliant strategies wither. This departmental disconnect creates a perfect storm where even the most brilliant strategies wither from lack of shared understanding.
A sustainability document becomes a true strategy only when it reshapes daily operations, investment decisions, and performance metrics—not when it simply fills a PDF on the corporate website.
The Ownership Vacuum
“Great meeting everyone! Let’s reconvene in six months to check our progress.”
Sound familiar? In the absence of clear ownership and accountability, sustainability initiatives become everyone’s theoretical responsibility and no one’s actual job. This creates what we call the “ownership vacuum”—a space where good intentions disappear into the ether of daily operations and quarterly targets.
As one food service executive told us: “We had three sustainability workshops in 2023. They all ended with enthusiasm and action items. Still, every time we returned to our desks, we got pulled right back into business as usual—and nothing changed.”
The Implementation Gap
Still, when there’s alignment and ownership, many organisations still fall into the implementation trap: jumping straight to tactics before agreeing on what success looks like.
The research backs this up. Organisations struggle with:
- Stakeholder resistance to upfront costs – Sustainability initiatives frequently require significant initial investments with longer-term payoffs, creating hesitation among leadership focused on short-term returns
- Operational confusion – Teams lack coherent directives for translating strategy into actionable steps
- Institutional inertia – Existing economic paradigms prioritising short-term profits actively undermine sustainability efforts
From Shelfware to Shared Vision: What Actually Works
Based on our experience, after working with food service teams across multiple countries: the fastest way to get your teams aligned around sustainability isn’t more top-down messaging—it’s co-creation.
Co-Creation Trumps Dictation
Put simply, when people build the plan together, they own the outcomes.
At Future Green, we’ve seen this play out repeatedly. Two years ago, a team we worked with had no real narrative in client conversations—just checklists. Today? Clients ask them for their 10-point sustainability plan before they even pitch.
What changed? They stopped treating sustainability as a specialist’s domain and started engaging cross-functional teams in creating solutions. This shift from “sustainability team’s responsibility” to “our shared mission” completely transformed how they approached implementation.
Clear Goals Beat Vague Ambitions
“We want to be more sustainable” isn’t a goal—it’s a wish.
Effective strategies anchor around specific, measurable targets that teams can rally behind. In turn, this specificity creates the conditions for actual progress rather than perpetual planning.
As one participant in our Food Vision Course noted: “For years, we had been saying ‘sustainability is important to us’ without defining what that actually meant in practice. Once we agreed on our two-year goal of reducing food waste by 35%, everything changed. Suddenly we had a North Star that everyone—from operations to marketing—could understand and contribute to.”
Structured Follow-Through Prevents Fade-Out
Here’s what kills momentum in most teams: You finish a great workshop. The post-its are glowing with potential. And then… nothing happens.
The antidote? Structured follow-through with:
- Clear role mapping that defines who owns what
- Regular check-in points built into existing meeting cadences
- Visibility mechanisms that track and celebrate progress
- 6-month follow-up sessions to review and recalibrate
The Formula for Sustainability That Sticks
After years of working with food businesses on their sustainability journeys, we’ve distilled the formula that separates successful strategies from shelf-dwelling documents:
🎯 Purpose + 🗺️ Roadmap + 👥 Confidence to Deliver
Ultimately, when teams align around why sustainability matters to them specifically, what concrete steps they’ll take, and how they’ll overcome obstacles—implementation follows naturally.
Why Co-Creation Is the Missing Ingredient
What I wish someone had told me years ago: The fastest way to get your teams aligned around sustainability isn’t more top-down messaging—it’s co-creation.
When diverse stakeholders build the strategy together, several powerful things happen:
- Shared language emerges – Teams develop common terminology and frameworks for discussing sustainability
- Hidden obstacles surface early – Practical challenges that might derail implementation get addressed proactively
- Cross-functional innovation flourishes – Solutions emerge that no single department could have developed alone
- Implementation resistance decreases – People don’t resist what they help create
This approach is particularly crucial for food businesses, where sustainability touches everything from supply chain to customer experience, from kitchen operations to marketing messaging.
As we saw in our work with Compass Group Hong Kong, bringing diverse stakeholders together created breakthrough moments that wouldn’t have happened in siloed planning.
Introducing the Food Vision Course: Strategy That Sticks
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.
In the Food Vision Course, we flip the typical approach:
✔️ Week 1: Define your purpose and 2-Year Goal
✔️ Week 4: Surface the big “Can We?” questions that are blocking progress
✔️ Week 8: Leave with a co-created roadmap and internal champions ready to lead
But what makes it really different? We focus on practical delivery—weekly reflections, pre-designed templates, prioritisation frameworks, and example timelines.
The course also ends with a 6-month follow-up session—built in from the start—to check alignment, adjust the roadmap, and make sure real progress is happening.
From Strategy on Paper to Strategy in Action
The biggest myth in sustainability? That a strong strategy is just about technical know-how.
In reality, the best strategies are:
✔️ Co-created
✔️ Communicated clearly
✔️ Owned by your internal teams
The businesses that successfully implement sustainability don’t just have better plans—they have better processes for creating and executing those plans. They recognise that sustainability isn’t a technical challenge to be solved but an adaptive challenge that requires new ways of thinking and working together.
Lead the Future of Sustainable Food
Let’s be real. Everyone says they want a sustainable food system. But when it comes to actually building the roadmap to get there, most organisations struggle with endless task lists instead of strategy, teams unsure who owns what, and client-facing staff afraid to say the wrong thing.
The truth is: sustainability feels big. Complex. Sometimes overwhelming.
That’s why our approach focuses not just on planning—but on making things make sense. For your team. For your clients. For your strategy.
If you’re ready to move beyond sustainability as a static PDF and transform it into your competitive advantage, we invite you to join the waitlist for our Food Vision Course.
Because a strategy isn’t a strategy if no one’s using it.
Lead the Future of Sustainable Food — Sign up for our course.
Click here to learn more about our Food Vision Course.
