What Consumer Sustainability Expectations Mean for Procurement Teams

Demand-side pressure is reshaping supply chain strategy. Here's what the research says — and what procurement professionals should do about it.

Procurement has always been caught between two forces: what the business needs and what the market can deliver. In 2025, a third force has become impossible to ignore: what end consumers are demanding — and how those demands are propagating upstream through supply chains, landing squarely on the desks of procurement professionals.

The evidence is clear that sustainability is no longer a brand communications exercise. It's a supply chain performance requirement. And the organisations that treat it as such — embedding it into supplier selection, contract management, and performance monitoring — are building a genuine competitive advantage. Those that don't are accumulating risk.

Here's what the research tells us.

Consumer Demand Is the Upstream Pressure Point

PwC's 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey, drawing on responses from over 20,000 consumers across 31 countries, found that 85% of consumers are experiencing the disruptive effects of climate change firsthand — and they're adjusting their purchasing behaviour accordingly. Forty-six percent said they are actively buying more sustainable products. Critically, they're willing to pay for the privilege: on average, a 9.7% premium for sustainably produced or sourced goods.

That premium only holds, however, if brands can substantiate their sustainability claims. Euromonitor's Voice of the Consumer: Sustainability 2025 research identified a growing wave of "greenwashed out" consumers — shoppers who have become actively sceptical of vague environmental claims and are increasingly scrutinising supply chain specifics. Responsible sourcing emerged as one of the most important sustainability criteria for 45% of consumers surveyed.

The implication for procurement is direct: the sustainability claims a brand makes in the market are only as credible as the supply chain behind them. Consumer-facing marketing teams are increasingly making promises that procurement teams are expected to keep.

The Sustainability Mandate Has Reached the CPO

Corporate sustainability commitments are no longer aspirational — they are operational targets, and procurement is increasingly the function responsible for delivering them.

The EcoVadis and Accenture Sustainable Procurement Barometer 2024, which benchmarks sustainable procurement practices across industries, found that more than 70% of companies now cite "delivering on corporate sustainability goals and commitments" as a top procurement driver — up from 63% in 2021. That's a meaningful shift in just three years, reflecting how rapidly ESG has moved from a CSR function to a core procurement mandate.

CIPS data reinforces this trend starkly: the proportion of organisations formally assigning ESG delivery responsibility to their procurement function has doubled in the past twelve months alone. Supply chain leaders are now expected to implement net-zero targets alongside traditional cost and supplier management functions — a significant expansion of the CPO remit that many organisations are still structurally unprepared for.

Scope 3 Is the Defining Challenge — and Most Organisations Are Behind

For the majority of businesses, the largest share of their carbon footprint sits in Scope 3 — the indirect emissions generated across their supply chain. It is also, by far, the hardest category to measure and manage. And the data suggests most procurement functions are still in early stages.

CIPS research found that just 26% of public and private sector organisations have measures in place to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in their supply chain — the Scope 3 category that procurement teams are primarily responsible for. That means nearly three-quarters of organisations are flying blind on what is likely their most material climate exposure.

The regulatory trajectory makes this position increasingly untenable. ESG disclosure requirements — including the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and equivalent frameworks emerging in other jurisdictions — are mandating Scope 3 transparency at a pace that procurement teams must match. Organisations that have not yet built supplier data collection and emissions monitoring into their procurement processes face a significant compliance risk as reporting timelines tighten.

McKinsey's analysis of the 2024 procurement landscape identified Scope 3 emissions management as one of the central challenges for CPOs, noting that geopolitical disruptions and climate-related supply chain risks are already prompting organisations to rethink their globalised sourcing strategies. Sustainability and resilience, in this framing, are not competing priorities — they're increasingly the same priority.

The Integration Gap: Ambition Versus Execution

One of the more candid findings in the EcoVadis/Accenture Barometer is the gap between sustainability ambition and operational integration. While the majority of organisations report some form of sustainability integration into key procurement processes, only 30% of those integrations are rated as "very or extremely effective".

Digital integration of ESG data via API — the kind that enables real-time supplier performance monitoring — averages just 10% across procurement processes.

This matters because manual monitoring doesn't scale. As supply chains grow more complex and sustainability reporting requirements become more granular, organisations that depend on periodic supplier questionnaires and spreadsheet-based tracking will struggle to keep pace. The EcoVadis Barometer flagged insufficient global visibility across supply chain sustainability risks — particularly in deeper supply chain tiers — as a key barrier to meaningful progress.

There's also a data collection problem upstream of the integration question. CIPS has noted that collecting emissions data from suppliers is only part of the challenge. The harder task is turning that data into actual emissions reductions through structured supplier engagement — a capability that requires investment in both technology and supplier relationships.

Supplier Engagement: From Compliance to Collaboration

The framing of sustainable procurement has evolved considerably. Early approaches — audits, codes of conduct, minimum compliance thresholds — were necessary but insufficient. They created accountability without capability-building, and they tended to concentrate sustainability effort in first-tier suppliers while leaving deeper tiers opaque.

The leading organisations profiled in the EcoVadis Barometer have moved to a collaborative model: working with suppliers to build sustainability capability, rather than simply screening for it. This involves sharing technical resources, co-developing decarbonisation roadmaps, and in some cases providing financial support for suppliers undertaking energy efficiency or renewable energy investments.

McKinsey's 2024 CPO guidance explicitly identifies working with suppliers to establish clear guidelines, support, and incentives for sustainable sourcing as a prerequisite for future-proofing the supply chain. The insight here is that a procurement team's ability to deliver on Scope 3 targets is directly limited by the capability and willingness of its supplier base. Building that capability is a strategic investment, not an administrative overhead.

The Regulatory Horizon Is Moving Fast

Beyond consumer demand and corporate commitments, a third pressure is accelerating the pace of change: regulation. The CSRD, the EU Deforestation Regulation, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D), and equivalent legislation in the UK, US, and Asia-Pacific are collectively creating a mandatory sustainability reporting and due diligence framework that extends deep into supply chains.

For procurement teams, this means sustainability assessments are becoming a legal requirement, not a differentiator. The organisations building the data infrastructure, supplier relationships, and internal capability now will be best placed to meet compliance obligations as they crystallise — and to avoid the reputational and legal exposure that comes with being caught unprepared.

Gartner has predicted that 70% of technology sourcing, procurement, and vendor management leaders will have environmental-sustainability-aligned performance objectives for their functions by 2026 — a signal that sustainability KPIs are becoming as standard in procurement as cost and quality metrics.

Five Actions for Procurement Leaders

Taken together, the research points to a clear agenda for procurement professionals navigating the sustainability transition:

Treat Scope 3 measurement as foundational. You cannot manage what you don't measure. Building supplier data collection into standard procurement processes — from onboarding to contract renewal — is the prerequisite for everything else.

Align procurement KPIs with corporate sustainability targets. If net-zero is a corporate commitment, it needs to be reflected in supplier selection criteria, contract terms, and performance scorecards. Ad hoc sustainability initiatives won't close a Scope 3 gap.

Move from audit to engagement. Supplier sustainability performance is a function of supplier capability. The most effective sustainable procurement programmes invest in supplier development, not just supplier screening.

Invest in digital integration. Real-time ESG data, integrated into procurement platforms, is the difference between visibility and guesswork. The 10% digital integration rate the EcoVadis Barometer recorded represents a significant structural vulnerability for most organisations.

Map your regulatory exposure now. The reporting and due diligence requirements coming into force across multiple jurisdictions will reshape what's required of supply chains. Procurement teams that map their exposure proactively — rather than reactively — will have a material advantage.

The Strategic Opportunity

The pressure on procurement to deliver sustainability outcomes is intensifying from every direction: consumers demanding supply chain transparency, corporate boards setting net-zero targets, and regulators mandating disclosure. That's a lot of headwind.

But it's also a significant strategic opportunity. Procurement functions that move beyond compliance — that build genuine supplier relationships, data infrastructure, and sustainability capability — are well placed to contribute to competitive advantage in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. The organisations that get this right won't just reduce their supply chain risk. They'll build the kind of credibility with consumers, investors, and regulators that endures.

The gap between where most organisations are today and where the evidence says they need to be is wide. Closing it is the defining procurement challenge of the decade.

Sources: PwC Voice of the Consumer Survey 2024 (20,000+ respondents, 31 countries); EcoVadis & Accenture Sustainable Procurement Barometer 2024; CIPS Global State of Procurement & Supply 2025; CIPS / IntegrityNext State of Sustainable Procurement 2025; McKinsey Procurement 2024: The Next Ten CPO Actions; Euromonitor Voice of the Consumer: Sustainability 2025; Gartner.