OUR WORK

Retail Impact Initiative: Accelerating Supplier Sustainability Performance through Shared Insights

This hands-on initiative goes beyond exchanging best practices—it leverages EcoVadis scorecards to create a shared pool of suppliers. While keeping client-supplier relationships confidential, it identifies overlaps and aligns efforts for both members and suppliers to drive progress in environmental, social, and ethical practices.

What we do

Most of the environmental, social and ethical challenges the world is facing are too big to be solved on an individual company level. Retail Impact Initiative members aim to overcome this problem by engaging their suppliers in their sustainability rating and improvement journey as a peer group using the EcoVadis solution as a standard and thus reducing the burden on suppliers.

How we do it

Retail Impact Initiative members use the EcoVadis Sector Initiative Ratings platform to enroll their suppliers in the EcoVadis assessment process. The results of these assessment processes – the scorecards – are shared in a common pool which all current and future Retail Impact Initiative members have access to.

Sector Initiatives can share several thousands of scorecards in their pool. The bigger the size of the pool, the deeper are the insights into the industry sustainability performance. It is the backbone for sector view dashboards and gives the directions to groups like Retail Impact Initiative what to prioritize.

The EcoVadis platform also provides actionable sector and members’ view data tools in order to identify the risks and pain points.

The EcoVadis value proposition is to accelerate individual members’ programs and to drive impact at scale underpinned by verified data collected through the assessments

More about Sector Initiatives

How we measure that pooling efforts pays off

10%
10% of EcoVadis enterprise sustainable procurement customers are Sector Initiative members and more are following their example.
30%
Requesting companies in a Sector Initiative have generated over 30% of EcoVadis scorecards.
33%
Over the 5 past years we recorded a 33% higher average Net Conversion Rate (ratio of rated versus invited suppliers) → save effort and resources.
9%
Once assessed, trading partners and suppliers are more likely to continue demonstrated by a 9% points lower churn rate (suppliers stopping their reassessments).

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What is a Sector Initiative – The Retail Impact Initiative (RII)?

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Become a member

A Retail Impact Initiative membership is open to companies that have an industry and purpose fit with the members and fulfil the initiative’s membership requirements.

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