Who Should Be in Charge of Sustainability? Hint: It’s Not Just Marketing or Food Safety

Sound familiar? A request for sustainability data comes in and gets handed off to Marketing or Food Safety. Maybe that’s happening at your company right now. If so, you’re not alone, and honestly, it’s understandable.

Marketing knows how to tell your story. Food Safety knows how to document compliance. However, neither department is designed to lead sustainability effectively, and certainly not on its own.

Sustainability Requires More

Credible sustainability stories require more than marketing; they need verified data to back them up. And while food safety teams are experts in documentation and compliance (if you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen), their scope is often limited to food safety-specific protocols. On the other hand, sustainability spans everything from water and waste to HR initiatives, packaging, energy, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Sustainability is simply too much and too broad for any one person or department to manage in isolation.

Even for those of us who’ve spent years working in sustainability, the role has shifted. Today, we see ourselves less as experts and more as generalists, people who bring together the right voices and subject matter experts across operations. That collaborative mindset is critical if sustainability is going to take root and grow within an organization.

So, Where Do You Start?

Appoint a point person, not to have all the answers, but to direct traffic. Look for someone passionate about sustainability and a strong understanding of your business operations. Their role is to coordinate, gathering data, connecting the dots, and asking the right questions.

Then, build a team around them.

We call it a Green Team, but the name is less important. What matters is that it’s cross-functional. Bring together people from operations, HR, food safety, maintenance, purchasing, growing, accounting, and any other core teams within your organization. The team should reflect your business. It should be a team that can share insights, break down silos, and help integrate sustainability into everyday work.

Green Teams help build culture. They create ownership, generate ideas, and when supported, can drive meaningful progress. For many employees, participating becomes a point of pride, especially when they see their input making a real impact.

Even more important: Green Teams build internal champions. And champions build momentum.

This isn’t about piling more work onto someone’s plate. It’s about distributing ownership and developing long-term capacity across your organization.

Need Additional Support?

At Measure to Improve, we help companies launch and support these teams. From structuring meetings to identifying which data to track and how to find it, we make the process more manageable and successful. You don’t have to start from scratch. You need a solid framework and a partner to guide the way.

Because here’s the reality: compliance in one area doesn’t equal compliance everywhere. And certification isn’t one-size-fits-all. Food Safety compliance may not meet the expectations of a sustainability audit. And Marketing can’t tell a compelling story without solid data to back it up.

So, before you pass sustainability off to Marketing or Food Safety, take a step back. Consider what you’re really asking and whether you’re setting your team and company up for success.