The retreat everyone's talking about isn't happening. The best retailers are moving sustainability into the commercial core, and pulling ahead of everyone still treating it as a reporting exercise.
There's a popular story online saying that the sustainability wave has crested: budgets under pressure, net zero commitments softening, the market having supposedly spoken. It's wrong. What looks like a retreat is a repositioning. Sustainability has moved from the edge of corporate strategy into its operational core, because the problems it addresses, supply volatility, cost inflation, regulatory exposure, resource scarcity, are now core commercial problems.
You cannot report your way to resilience, and the best retailers have stopped trying.
That change is already separating the businesses that can act from the ones that can only report. Here is the cost of being in the second group.
Inventory distortion is projected to cost retailers $1.77 trillion in 2025, roughly 7 to 8% of retail sales.
Nearly one in five items in a typical UK weekly shop is unavailable on shelf.
Retailers lose around 46% of intended purchases when a product is out of stock.
Up to 25% of those customers don't come back.
These aren't sustainability problems. They're revenue, margin, and trust problems. Solving them takes real-time supply chain intelligence, not annual reports.
The leaders already know this. Sustainability directors who once presented to the CSR committee now sit in the commercial review. More than 10,000 companies have set science-based targets and, as SBTi CEO David Kennedy puts it, the focus has moved to execution. The gap between the companies executing and the ones still reporting is widening every quarter.
Our latest Green Paper lays out what's driving the change, and what the businesses ahead of it are doing differently. Inside:
Why adaptation now matters as much as carbon reduction, and the commodity data behind it
How compliance became a commercial decision rather than a cost centre
What closing the Scope 3 execution gap actually takes
Why nature and water risk are really supply risk
The question is no longer whether sustainability has grown up.
It's whether your business has kept pace.
Jason Barrett
CEO and Founder
Jason Barrett is the CEO and co-founder of Mondra, where he leads strategy, partnerships, and coalition-building to accelerate climate impact at scale. With 20+ years in digital transformation, he previously co-founded a $50m tech business and is recognised as an award-winning systems thinker. Jason launched the BRC Mondra Coalition in 2022 to address Scope 3 emissions across the UK food sector using AI and automated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
