As sustainability becomes a boardroom priority, FMCG companies are reassessing their environmental and social commitments. Shifts in political, economic, and shareholder pressures are reshaping sustainability strategies, influencing everything from packaging targets to dedicated ESG roles. Understanding how these changes impact FMCG talent needs is essential for businesses looking to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
Political Shifts & Corporate Reconsiderations
The re-election of Donald Trump in the US last year came with a whole range of unknowns for big business.
While the notoriously volatile POTUS was clearly going to aim his guns at tariffs and everything that came with that for overseas territories trying to do business in and with lucrative US markets, one area that also came under his spotlight was the US government’s own commitments to environmental and social governance (ESG).
His comments were a coded green light for many to rethink previous commitments to being cleaner, greener, and more equal. In the aftermath of Trump making comments about his own Federal Government’s rethink on such matters, Reuters reported that an incredible 54% of S&P 500 companies gave fewer director demographic details in 2025 proxy filings when compared to 2024. The year previous, only 7% gave fewer details.
Commitments to ESG come in many shapes and forms, and personal and corporate commitments to sustainability and acting and behaving in a more considerate way to try to reverse the negative impacts on the environment have been top of the agenda.
Surely the earth cannot afford for big business to view sustainability to be just a fad? It’s a deliberately incendiary statement, but stats might just bear out the view that the boardroom are having second thoughts about those commitments they were so public to make in recent years.
When the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
Corporate Retrenchment in Sustainability Goals
One of the world’s largest companies, Unilever, put some of the biggest names in our domestic cupboards. Marmite, Persil, Pot Noodle, Lynx, Knorr and Sure are all names that sit in their brand roster. Last year, it announced it would be rowing back on some of its biggest, headline-grabbing pledges on the environment.
As one of the globe’s largest users of plastic packaging, it had previously pledged to halve its use of new-use plastics by the end of this year. They’ve adjusted that pledge to a reduction of just a third and extended their own deadline by 12 months.
We’ve also seen PepsiCo make similar moves recently. It reviewed and reset its packaging and sustainability commitments earlier this year. Having previously pledged to make 20% of all drinks sold come in reusable packaging by 2030, it says it will now, instead, ‘continue to track’ its reusability achievements, sunsetting the 2030 goal in the process. In a similar move to Unilever, the owner of enormous brands like Pepsi Cola, Doritos, Starbucks and Gatorade is now committing to using upwards of 40% of recycled material in its plastic packaging by 2035, compared with its previous goal of 50% by 2030.
It wouldn’t be unfair to argue that the reverse gear deployed by the likes of Unilever and PepsiCo has been, in part, as a result of shareholder pressures eagerly seeking quick returns on investments—the type that is harder to deliver when long-term spending on positive environmental impact has already been pledged.
Political and economical headwinds can and will change, and in turn, that will then change organisational direction, but it feels like a dramatic shift for two of the globe’s biggest to row back in such public fashion. Do we credit them for at least being the brave ones to be public about their realignment in sustainability goals? They’re the tip of an iceberg we imagine runs way deeper under those waters that are a degree warmer.
A recent report in Palatinate uncovered this suggestion that more and more companies appear to be ‘greenhushing’ their goals and, even more strangely, their achievements in their sustainability commitments. The glare of the spotlight on those goals and achievements, it seems, might not actually be worth the positive outcomes it’s created.
South Pole, an organisation that helps businesses achieve net zero goals, produces an annual Net Zero Report. In their 2023/24 report, the analysis of 1,400 companies with dedicated sustainability teams found the majority intentionally restricting their publicity around their efforts. Even more surprising was that of those 1,400 companies, an impressive 81% of those surveyed believed they were on course to achieve their ESG goals.
So should we be at least thankful that the old issue of ‘greenwashing,’ the idea that businesses would exaggerate their commitments to look better to their customers, is now being replaced by ‘greenhushing’ because the political shift in opinion means their customers, like Trump, are now showing visible doubt about climate issues?
The Evolving Nature of Sustainability Roles
At the coalface of recruitment, are there further indicators that sustainability roles, like the very issue itself, could be showing signs of being marginalised?
Outside of the FMCG and food and beverage industries, there are indicators that the demand for such roles around sustainability may have reached its peak. PwC’s Green Jobs barometer, a detailed annual report on the volume of environmentally led job ads across all sectors in the UK, reported only moderate increases from 2023 to 2024.
This comes off the back of its 2022/23 report that showed marked decreases in the number of job ads considered ‘green.’ Between 2022 and 2023, PWC reports that the total volume of green job adverts fell from more than 330,000 in 2022 to under a quarter of a million in 2023.
There could be a range of issues at play here. Anecdotal evidence here at MacGregor Black shows a distinct meshing of what might have been a number of specific roles across the wide spectrum ‘ESG’ encompasses, with more than a number of clients, instead of looking for specific roles for sustainability, for net zero, or for cultural and societal impact, now looking for those who might consider themselves all-rounders or indeed carry expectations that senior-level roles will come with a deep understanding of sustainability regulations, for example, already garnered from previous positions, thus effectively making in-team specialists redundant. That means that leads in procurement, packaging engineers, or even data analysts and compliance leads will be the ones expected to have their ESG credentials embedded in their CV.
Some of the world’s biggest players have already signalled a shift in the tectonic sustainability plates, whether that’s from the most influential political players or from the most powerful boardrooms, and we have to consider where and how the tremors will then be felt.
Cost-cutting and strategic resets have reduced some visible roles in food & drink FMCG, but regulatory reporting burdens, supply chain complexity and ongoing consumer pressure mean sustainability skillsets remain essential. But it would seem they’re being repackaged. For recruiters and HR managers, the opportunity lies in helping businesses translate sustainability ambitions into technical, measurable roles and in upskilling the next generation of cross-functional sustainability talent.