Turning Impact Data Into Risk Insight And Resilience

Many companies already measure their environmental footprint for reporting. But in 2025, the bigger question isn’t just “What’s our footprint?”, it’s “Where are we exposed, and what can we do about it?” The data companies collect for compliance holds untapped potential. Used well, it can reveal where climate and nature risks hit hardest, and where action delivers the most value. These risks are no longer theoretical. They’re already showing up on P&Ls through climate-related price volatility, rising insurance costs, disrupted supply chains, and shifting market access rules.

Impact Data as the Foundation for Risk Insight

Sustained was built to make robust environmental impact data part of everyday decision-making. 

Without accurate, product-level Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), your risk assessment can feel like guesswork. You might know there’s a risk of drought in a supplier’s region, but unless you know which products depend on water-intensive crops there, and how much revenue they represent, you can’t act effectively.

Our work with food and beverage manufacturers has shown that:

• 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage.
• Products with higher environmental intensity often face higher operational risk, the same inputs that create emissions (e.g. water, energy, fertiliser) also make supply chains more vulnerable to climate stress.
• Companies modelling Scope 3 at only an aggregate level miss the product-level hotspots where both risk and opportunity are concentrated.

From Footprint to Resilience

Climate and nature risks are material business risks. In food and beverage, they can take many forms:

Climate-related price volatility

Changing rainfall, extreme heat, and flooding affect yields for crops like cocoa, coffee, wheat, and sugar. Lower yields mean higher prices, and sometimes shortages.

• In 2024, cocoa prices surged over 200% due to poor harvests in West Africa. That shock rippled across chocolate, bakery, and dairy categories, squeezing margins.
• Coffee futures have also seen sharp swings linked to frost and drought in Brazil, directly impacting sourcing costs for global brands.

Insurance premium increases

Insurers are reassessing exposure to climate-vulnerable regions. Businesses sourcing from or operating in high-risk areas face rising premiums or reduced coverage.

• In 2023, major insurers pulled back from writing new policies in parts of California and Florida due to wildfire and hurricane risk. Food manufacturers with facilities or suppliers there saw insurance costs spike, forcing contingency planning.

Supply chain disruption

Flooded transport routes, damaged storage facilities, and port closures can halt production. Even if your operations are unaffected, a disrupted supplier can cascade into delays and lost revenue.

• The 2021 floods in Germany and Belgium destroyed warehouses and disrupted road and rail, forcing multinational F&B companies to shift production and absorb losses.

These risks are set to intensify. The EEA projects that economic losses from heatwaves and flooding could reach €1 trillion annually by the century’s end if societal preparedness doesn’t catch up. At the same time, Europe's slow adaptation leaves critical food, infrastructure, and ecosystems increasingly vulnerable.

Dual-Factor Risk: Exposure and Contribution

Our new risk assessment report looks at two dimensions:

1. Exposure Risk: The physical and transitional threats to your products and supply chain, from climate and nature impacts like droughts, floods, and wildfires.
2. Contributory Risk: The environmental stress your products and operations place on ecosystems, assessed via robust, cradle-to-grave life cycle analysis.

Why both? Because resilience depends on seeing the whole picture. Exposure risk helps you plan for future shocks and safeguard operations. Contributory risk protects your reputation, strengthens compliance, and reduces the chance your products become targets of regulation or market pressure.

From Insight to Action

Once risks are visible, they can be managed. Product-level data unlocks practical steps such as:

• Eco-design for resilience: Reformulate products to reduce reliance on high-risk ingredients, or switch to lower-impact packaging and materials less vulnerable to supply shocks.
• Strategic sourcing: Diversify suppliers and geographies to reduce dependency on climate-stressed regions. This can spread risk without adding significant cost.
• Insurance leverage: Demonstrating reduced exposure and stronger resilience helps secure better terms with insurers.
• Customer alignment: B2B buyers increasingly require defensible impact data in procurement. Credible product-level insights can make the difference between winning or losing contracts.

Why F&B Needs Product-Level Risk

Aggregate reporting hides the detail that matters most. For food and beverage companies, product-level risk analysis brings three critical advantages:

• Granularity: You can see which products and suppliers carry the highest exposure and contribution risks.
• Prioritisation: Direct resources to the hotspots that matter most financially and operationally.
• Credibility: Product-level, cradle-to-grave LCAs underpin credible claims and reduce greenwashing risk

A Faster Path to Clarity

Our Climate & Nature Risk Report is designed to give you actionable insight in weeks, not months:

• Covers up to 5,000 products 
• Visualises revenue and costs at risk
• Highlights priority mitigation actions

It’s a practical first step for manufacturers who need to understand risks before investing in longer-term resilience strategies.

Conclusion

Environmental risk is now a business reality. For food and beverage manufacturers, resilience starts with seeing clearly where exposure and contribution risks sit, down to the product level.

With robust impact data as a foundation, companies can make smarter design, sourcing, and investment choices. The result: lower costs, stronger resilience, and credible sustainability performance.