GRI plans food and beverage reporting standard as first test of faster process

The Global Reporting Initiative has announced plans to write a sustainability reporting standard for food and beverage companies, and the project doubles as the first test of a faster standard-setting process at the organization. GRI has posted the plan to its project page, and ESG Today reported it; neither says when an exposure draft will appear or when the finished standard would apply.

GRI describes its standards as among the most commonly accepted global frameworks for corporate sustainability reporting, built so companies disclose consistently across industries and give investors and other stakeholders something comparable to read. They are written by the Global Sustainability Standards Board, and since 2021 the organization has added sector standards on top of the general ones. Beginning with oil and gas, the sector layer extends to coal, agriculture, aquaculture and fishing, mining, and textiles and apparel; it identifies the impacts that matter most in a given industry and captures what stakeholders expect companies to report about them.

The food and beverage project would cover food processing, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage manufacturing, and tobacco products, reaching past a company's own operations into value chains tied to agriculture, aquaculture and fishing. GRI's project page makes the case for the sector directly: these industries account for around a third of global emissions, have a direct effect on people's health, and carry safety risks for workers. Peter Dawkins, a senior manager of standards at GRI, said the sector's value chains run into some of the most pressing sustainability challenges, citing climate change and biodiversity loss alongside working conditions and public health.

Sectors enter the development queue based on how serious and how likely their impacts are, with weight also given to a sector's size, its distribution around the world, and how many organizations are positioned to use the standards. GRI said food and beverage was picked to pilot the streamlined approach, meant to significantly cut development time, because of the scale and breadth of the sector's impacts.

The procedural half has the longer reach. The first sector standard, for oil and gas, was published in 2021, and food and beverage is only now beginning, a gap the streamlined process presumably exists to narrow. If it compresses the cycle, the sector layer becomes easier to extend to industries that today report under the general standards alone, which is the part companies outside food and beverage have reason to follow. Neither the coverage nor the project page puts a date on the exposure draft or estimates how much of the development cycle the new approach is expected to remove.