Measure to Improve poses a critical question in its latest blog post: Who Should Be in Charge of Sustainability? Hint: It’s Not Just Marketing or Food Safety. Written by Founder Nikki Cossio, the piece explores why sustainability can’t fall solely on traditional departments and outlines a more effective, collaborative path forward.

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.

Sustainability Green Team

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.