By Emma Karp, Sr. Product Manager, TraceGains — As legislation and growing consumer demand increases pressure on food and drink brands to deliver against sustainability objectives, F&B companies are no longer just making sustainability promises for branding purposes. With decarbonization targets and net-zero commitments in place, they are now prioritizing building strong, reliable, and adaptable supply chains that can survive real-world disruptions.
In practice, that means moving from broad targets to item-level insight, being able to see the climate impact of an ingredient or packaging component, and compare it against similar items in the same category. That’s what turns sustainability from a reporting exercise into a sourcing decision. The real unlock is comparative context: not just “what’s the footprint?”, but “is this higher or lower impact than comparable options in the category?
Building resilience through shared data
With food companies facing more frequent climate volatility, with unpredictable weather increasing pressure on water and land use, and persistent supply disruptions across agricultural and packaging inputs, regulatory expectations around environmental claims and verifiable traceability are tightening. The result is a more pragmatic sustainability conversation – F&B companies need to prove they actually know where their ingredients come from, back up their environmental claims with item-level climate intelligence – data that stands up to internal challenge and external scrutiny – and demonstrate they can keep their supply chains stable despite disruptions in today’s market.
Across the food ingredients and raw materials sectors, the sustainability narrative is maturing. The question is no longer whether companies have set targets, but whether they can prove progress using auditable data while managing near-term shocks – everything from geopolitical instability to extreme weather conditions – which will continue to have a knock-on effect on supply. This is particularly true for commodities such as cocoa, coffee, sugar and vegetables. In late 2024 alone, devastating weather coupled with high demand resulted in a 300% decline in production.
The companies best positioned for 2026 are those treating sustainability as part of core supply assurance: mapping their upstream networks, identifying the few categories that drive the majority of risk and impact, and establishing traceable, repeatable ways to collect and validate supplier data so decisions can be made faster, even when information is imperfect.
From headline targets to operational resilience
For much of the past decade, sustainability efforts were often organized around annual reporting cycles and long-term goals. Data collection was episodic, and supplier engagement was frequently reactive. But this approach is showing its limits. Climate impacts do not arrive neatly aligned with reporting deadlines, and supply disruptions rarely wait for perfect information. Operational resilience,therefore, requires a different approach.
Instead of treating sustainability data as an output, companies are starting to treat it as an operational input. Knowing where ingredients originate, how they are processed, and which regions or commodities are most exposed to climate change, geopolitical instability, and tariff uncertainty enables procurement, R&D, and quality teams to make informed trade-offs in real time.
This also helps brands to find dual sources for ingredients and to reformulate products in line with changing health regulations, while targeting ongoing organoleptic and sensorial demands – the way the product tastes, smells, looks and feels. All this depends on the upstream visibility and transparency during the procurement process with consistent and repeatable data that can berefreshed, compared, and improved over time. Those companies that wait for complete emissions models across every supplier risk paralysis through indecision, while companies that build foundational data workflows can act sooner – and refine as they go. The goal isn’t perfect models everywhere – it’s reliable, repeatable insight that improves over time and supports real choices.
Ingredients suppliers as Scope 3 accelerators
Nowhere is this more evident than in Scope 3 emissions – indirect greenhouse gases generated in a company’s value chain, which can often represent a significant percentage of a business’s total footprint. For most food manufacturers, the majority of their environmental footprint sits outside their direct operations, embedded in purchased ingredients and packaging. While this makes ingredient suppliers central to progress, it also highlights bottlenecks.
Ingredient companies can act as Scope 3 accelerators for their customers when they pair innovation with transparent, trustworthy data. On the product side, this includes reformulation toward lower-impact inputs, the use of upcycled streams – taking leftover or unused food materials and turningthem into new products instead of wasting them – and the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices where outcomes can be evidenced. On the data side, it means providing item-level environmental attributes that are consistent and comparable – so manufacturers can measure impact, compare options within a category, and defend the decisions they make.
When these two elements come together, customers can quantify changes, understand trade-offs, and defend claims. But when they do not, even well-intentioned innovation struggles to scale. A lower-impact ingredient that cannot be supported with credible data remains a pilot, not a platform for reduction.
One of the most significant tools to unlock this benefit is standardization. When suppliers are asked to respond to a different sustainability questionnaire for every customer, progress slows, and data quality suffers. Making it easier for suppliers to ‘respond once and share many times’ allows primary data to replace assumptions, benefiting the entire value chain.
Where focus is shifting in 2026
Looking ahead, three priorities are emerging for food and ingredients companies navigating sustainability in 2026.
First, data foundations. This means establishing repeatable processes to collect core information from suppliers, such as origin, processing steps, packaging composition, and baseline emissions or activity data, so sustainability reporting is not an annual fire drill. The goal is not exhaustive coverage on day one, but a system that can scale as the company grows.
With better data comes the ability to identify the few categories that account for the majority ofimpact, with agricultural commodities and packaging frequently dominating these profiles. Leading companies are now using hotspot insights to inform sourcing strategies, R&D pipelines, and supplier engagement, rather than treating sustainability as a separate function.
The other important impact is regulatory-ready workflows. Sustainability investments increasingly need to serve multiple purposes, and the same upstream data used for Scope 3 calculations should also support compliance, risk management, and customer inquiries. Designing workflows that can meet overlapping requirements reduces duplication and increases return on effort.
Regulation as a catalyst, not a distraction
Regulatory developments in Europe are already accelerating this, with two milestones in 2026 placing renewed emphasis on upstream data.
The EU Deforestation Regulation will require large and medium operators to demonstrate plot-level origin and due diligence for commodities such as cocoa, coffee, and palm oil. This shifts expectations from general sourcing statements to verifiable evidence embedded in everyday processes.
In addition, the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation will raise the bar on packaging design, recyclability, and producer responsibility, demanding greater transparency into packaging bills of materials and closer collaboration with suppliers.
At the same time, requirements under the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive continue to evolve. Timelines and scopes have been adjusted, creating uncertainty for some companies. In this environment, one-off compliance projects are a risky strategy. Investing in shared data infrastructure allows companies to adapt as rules change, rather than rebuilding processes each time. This is where network scale matters. When supplier and item data can be maintained once and reused, companies get faster comparisons, fewer dead ends, and a clearer view of what “better” looks like across a category, not just within a single supplier relationship.
Building resilience through shared data
The common thread across sustainability, Scope 3, and regulation is upstream visibility. Fragmented, bilateral data collection is no longer sufficient for the pace and complexity of today’s challenges. What is emerging instead is a more networked approach to supplier information, one that allows data to be maintained once, verified, and reused across numerous cases.
This model does more than improve reporting efficiency. It enables faster decision-making, supports targeted action, and strengthens trust across the supply chain. Most importantly, it helps shift sustainability from aspiration to execution.
As climate pressures intensify and regulatory scrutiny increases, the food companies that succeed will be those that understand sustainability not as a standalone initiative, but as an extension of supply assurance.
The next phase of sustainability is decision-grade data: item-level insight, category context, and repeatable supplier workflows. TraceGains Carbon Insights is built to support exactly that – so teams can make calls faster and stand up their claims.
Find out more at tracegains.com.
