By Benjamin French, Global Head of VIVE
The demand for sustainable product is real. The value is unlocked by asking the right question, to the right person.
In my conversations with producers and traders, one frustration keeps coming up. When they ask a buyer how much more they will pay for “sustainable product”, they rarely get a clear answer, and almost never a number. It’s easy to take that as a sign that the demand isn’t really there. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. More often, the problem is asking the wrong question. And it’s made worse by asking the wrong person.
A word that has outgrown itself
“Sustainability” now covers so much ground that it has almost stopped meaning anything specific. Carbon, human rights, water, soil health, deforestation, biodiversity, living wages and reporting compliance all sit under the same umbrella. A word that means everything is very hard to put a budget line against. So when you ask about a sustainability budget, you often get blank looks. But that’s not a sign of less interest. It’s a sign of more. Each of those areas now has its own regulation, its own frameworks, its own targets and, increasingly, its own team. Sustainability hasn’t shrunk. It has grown up and split into disciplines.
Ask a better question
The conversation changes when you stop asking about sustainability and start asking about outcomes. Does the business have decarbonisation targets and Scope 3 numbers to hit? Is there a human rights due diligence programme? A water stewardship commitment? Is regenerative agriculture on the sourcing roadmap?
Ask those questions and you start to find the real decisions. Behind each one sits a KPI, a team and, very often, a budget.
Just as important is who you ask. The commercial buyer negotiating on price is often not the person who holds those budgets. Money for decarbonisation may sit with a climate or Scope 3 team. Human rights due diligence may sit with legal or compliance. Regenerative agriculture may sit with a sourcing programme or agronomy lead. Ask the buyer across the table about a premium for sustainable product, and the honest answer may simply be “not from my budget”.
The catch: budgets in silos
The difficulty is that these budgets are hard to spend well on their own. The carbon team needs primary data from farms, not industry averages. The human rights team needs evidence from the people actually doing the work. The regenerative agriculture lead needs proof that practices are changing in the field, not just in a policy document. Every one of those needs leads back to the same place: the farms, mills and facilities at the start of the supply chain. If each team commissions its own audit, suppliers drown in audit fatigue and buyers end up with fragments of the picture that don’t quite join up.
Impact is generated in one place. It makes sense to verify it once, and in one place.
Why we’ve gone modular
That thinking has shaped how we’ve evolved our services. Rather than one fixed offer, we’ve moved to a modular approach. A buyer can start with the issue they have a budget for today and build towards the whole picture, without starting again each time. The foundation is the VIVE Programme for broad responsible sourcing. “Responsible sourcing” can sound vague, so it’s worth being specific about what it means in practice.
Through an annual independent on-site assessment, VIVE verifies what is actually happening on supplying farms. On the people side, that covers child and forced labour, health and safety, fair wages and working hours, freedom of association, grievance mechanisms, and community and land rights. On the environmental side, it covers water use and protection, soil health, responsible use of fertilisers and agrochemicals, biodiversity, and deforestation and conversion of land. Underneath sit governance, farm economics and traceability, so claims can be followed back to source.
VIVE also tracks a small set of hard numbers over time: fertiliser use, agrochemical use, water consumption and emissions. The first year sets a baseline, and every year after shows whether things are getting better. Because VIVE is benchmarked against other programmes and mapped to the main EU reporting and due diligence rules, one assessment can do the work of several.
Adding carbon and regenerative agriculture
Two further modules turn that foundation into a fuller picture of impact. The first is carbon measurement. Through VIVE Climate Action, primary data on farm inputs and processing energy is used to calculate emission factors for specific crops and supply chains. Scope 3 reporting can then be built on real numbers rather than industry averages.
The second is regenerative agriculture verification. Harmonised with the SAI Platform’s Regenerating Together Framework, it confirms that regenerative practices are being implemented and monitored on farms. It assesses outcomes such as soil carbon, water, biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions.
Seeing the whole picture
Put these modules together and something useful happens. You can see where impact is actually generated: on which farms, at which mills, in which supply chains. That impact is verified once, independently, on the ground. It can then be connected to demand, meaning the buyers and teams who have targets to meet. The carbon team, the human rights team, the water team and the regenerative agriculture lead are each still spending their own budget. The difference is they’re now spending it against the same trusted evidence.
So the real question was never whether buyers have a budget for sustainability. It’s whether the budgets they do have are connected to what’s happening in the supply chain. That’s the gap we’re working to close. If it sounds familiar, we’d love to talk.
