The business challenge

CSRD and Double Materiality represented a heavy lift for coffee traders and roasters. Treated narrowly as reporting, the risk was misinvestment: parallel value chain initiatives, duplicated effort across companies, and sustainability spend that failed to address the most material risks and opportunities.

Internally, CSRD was often viewed at leadership level as a compliance obligation rather than a strategic exercise. At sector level, companies operating in the same origins prepared in isolation, creating unnecessary duplication and ‘competition on compliance’.

The core risk was clear: treating CSRD as reporting, when it is fundamentally a strategic and operational alignment exercise with business operations, strategy and other regulations.

The approach

I combined preparing for CSRD with a sustainability strategy review process and a data process alignment exercise. Key elements of the approach included:

• Reframing CSRD for leadership
  Positioning Double Materiality as a way to identify real business risks and opportunities, delivering a stronger data warehouse for purposes beyond CSRD, building stickier relationships with commercial stakeholders, guide smarter investment decisions, support sustainability-linked financing, and align sustainability strategy with core operations, rather than as a compliance checklist.

• Cross-functional alignment inside the organisation
  Working closely with sustainability, finance, legal, operations, IT and senior leadership to establish shared ownership of the process. This included regular cross-department check-ins, close coordination with finance leadership, and clear roles and responsibilities across functions.

• Early pre-competitive sector coordination
  Convening conversations across coffee traders and roasters, together with sector bodies, to align on shared value-chain risks and opportunities, common data and assumptions, consistent interpretation of ESRS topics to include in reporting framework.

  The aim was to reduce duplication, avoid false competition on compliance, and enable more coordinated, cost-effective responses to shared challenges.

• Deliberate prioritisation
  Supporting leadership in making explicit choices about what mattered most, and what did not, to prevent the organisation from over-engineering the exercise.

Throughout, I deliberately avoided treating the work as a stand-alone reporting exercise, outsourcing strategic thinking, or leaving CSRD with a single function. The emphasis was on decision quality, alignment, and building a foundation that could be sustained.

The outcome

As coffee markets tightened and regulatory timelines shifted, leadership attention temporarily moved toward short-term commercial resilience. Parts of the CSRD work were therefore paused. Importantly, this was not due to a lack of clarity or momentum, but a deliberate reprioritisation in response to market conditions.

The early alignment work proved valuable precisely because it:

• Created a shared understanding that CSRD is a strategic and operational issue, not just a reporting task

• Clarified material risks and opportunities across the value chain

• Reduced duplication through early pre-competitive alignment

• Strengthened collaboration between sustainability, finance, legal, IT and operations

• Ensured the organisation could resume CSRD work from a position of coherence and strategic intent, rather than starting from scratch

The work laid a strong foundation for a more coordinated, cost-effective, and business-relevant response to regulation, freeing up capacity to focus on real value-chain change rather than compliance theatre.