Sustainability demands in the food and beverage industry are escalating at an unprecedented pace. With increasing pressure to address agricultural emissions, water-intensive production processes, and supply chain impacts, food companies are facing an urgent need to adapt. As consumer expectations shift and environmental challenges grow, companies must not only meet regulatory requirements but also demonstrate meaningful progress toward sustainability.
In Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) has significantly expanded the disclosure obligations for businesses, ensuring that sustainability is front and center in corporate reporting. This regulatory shift is coupled with rising demands from major clients and retailers, who are increasingly relying on frameworks like CDP to assess environmental impacts and drive transparency across supply chains.
With the upcoming CDP deadline fast approaching, ESG teams are facing a critical moment. The pressure to submit accurate, detailed data is mounting, and it’s clear that manually answering environmental questionnaires will no longer cut it. The task has evolved from simply reporting more to responding better, ensuring data accuracy, timeliness, and relevance—faster than ever before. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to be informed and prepared. Automation is not just a helpful tool; it’s an essential strategy to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of sustainability reporting and stay ahead of compliance deadlines.
CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) is the world’s leading environmental disclosure system, designed to help companies report on their environmental impact in a standardized format. The system covers crucial areas such as greenhouse gas emissions, climate strategy, water stewardship, deforestation risk, and governance policies. By responding to CDP’s questionnaires, companies can demonstrate their environmental responsibility and share critical data with investors, customers, and regulators.
The CDP online portal typically opens each year in the second quarter, and for 2025, it will be accessible to companies required to disclose ESG information starting the week of June 16. CDP encourages businesses to begin preparing their responses well in advance of the portal's opening. For assistance, CDP has made helpful guidance documents available on their website.
In terms of deadlines, there have been updates for 2025:
It's recommended to start preparations early to ensure a smooth process and utilize CDP's available resources to support your submission.
CDP is widely adopted across industries, with over 23,000 companies submitting disclosures in 2023. It has become a critical tool for assessing environmental performance, and over 280 major buyers now require CDP responses from their suppliers. This growing demand means that companies must prioritize accurate and timely reporting. Furthermore, CDP’s questionnaires are highly repetitive—around 80% of the questions remain the same year after year. This makes it a recurring task for companies, adding to the pressure to ensure that responses are consistently accurate and up-to-date.
Given its recurring nature and high stakeholder visibility, automating CDP responses is essential. It streamlines the process, reduces the risk of errors, and ensures that ESG teams can quickly and efficiently handle annual reporting, allowing them to stay ahead of deadlines and meet the increasing demands for transparency.
The food and beverage industry faces intense scrutiny when it comes to sustainability, and for good reason. This sector is inherently complex, with a wide range of challenges that make ESG compliance especially difficult.
Key factors contributing to the overwhelm include:
In addition to these challenges, companies often face dozens of overlapping ESG questionnaires from various stakeholders—ranging from well-known frameworks like CDP to platforms like EcoVadis, and even private-label retailer forms. These questionnaires often ask the same questions but in different formats, adding to the complexity and increasing the time spent on data collection, review, and submission.
The result is a massive amount of duplicate work. ESG teams are forced to gather the same data multiple times, provide inconsistent answers across different questionnaires, and struggle to meet tight deadlines. This leads to delayed submissions, missed deadlines, and the risk of inaccurate or incomplete reporting, which can damage a company's reputation and its relationships with clients.
It’s a painful reality that most CDP and third-party questionnaires repeat the same core questions year after year. For example, a food company may be asked to provide energy consumption figures, waste management practices, or carbon emissions data each year. Despite this, ESG teams often find themselves manually retyping the same answers, digging through past files, or worse—starting from scratch every time.
This process wastes hours, if not days, on repetitive work that doesn’t add value. Given that the core data often remains unchanged (with minor adjustments or updates), ESG teams could easily reuse previous responses or integrate data from existing records. Yet, without a streamlined way to access, store, and reference this information, teams are left doing repetitive work, which significantly slows down the reporting process and wastes valuable time that could be spent on more strategic sustainability initiatives.
ESG teams frequently rely on various internal departments—such as operations, procurement, and finance—to provide data for their questionnaires. But the reality is that many of these teams are already overwhelmed with their own tasks, and receiving repeated requests for the same data year after year can cause stakeholder fatigue.
For example, the procurement team might be asked to provide a list of suppliers or update sustainability performance data multiple times throughout the year for different questionnaires. As these requests stack up, stakeholders may become less responsive or less accurate in their submissions, leading to delays and inconsistent inputs. When ESG teams need to chase down information across different departments, it adds to their workload and creates friction that further slows down the process, often pushing reporting deadlines to the edge.
Managing ESG data manually is like trying to keep track of a dozen versions of a document across different channels. ESG teams often juggle answers across spreadsheets, email threads, documents stored on shared drives, and outdated templates that are no longer in use but still being circulated. This disjointed approach leads to confusion, errors, and, ultimately, version control issues.
With multiple stakeholders contributing to the process, it’s easy to lose track of which version is the most up-to-date or which set of answers has been finalized. As a result, data may be duplicated or outdated, leading to discrepancies in the final responses submitted to different frameworks like CDP, EcoVadis, or private-label retailer questionnaires. These inconsistencies put the company at risk of non-compliance, or worse, reputational damage. Without a centralized and automated system to track and manage version control, ESG teams are left navigating a minefield of manual processes that only increase the risk of mistakes.
Beyond the annual questionnaires from frameworks like CDP, many companies receive hundreds of one-off ESG surveys from clients, investors, regulators, and other stakeholders. These surveys often come with tight deadlines and unique formats, forcing ESG teams to adapt on the fly to each new request. The diversity in question formats and data points makes it challenging to develop a standard response template, which further adds to the workload.
Without a unified, centralized strategy for managing these external requests, ESG teams are constantly reacting to each new questionnaire, pulling data from different departments, and attempting to meet ever-tightening deadlines. This constant pressure leads to burnout, inaccuracies, and, ultimately, a reduction in the effectiveness of the ESG program. The more surveys that pile up, the more overwhelmed the team becomes, often scrambling to prioritize one request over another, leaving some surveys to be completed with rushed or incomplete information.
Automation offers a powerful solution to the challenges food and beverage companies face when completing ESG questionnaires. By streamlining processes, reducing human error, and saving valuable time, automation allows ESG teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks. Here's how automated systems, like Passionfruit, can transform ESG questionnaire completion:
Passionfruit takes the entire process of answering customer questionnaires and audits off your hands. Whether it’s an Excel file, Word document, PDF, or an online portal, Passionfruit can automatically handle the entire task. The AI maps each question to your company’s relevant data and documents, auto-filling answers and even showing you the source for each answer with a confidence score. This means that when a customer asks, “What percentage of this packaging is recycled plastic?” Passionfruit can pull the answer directly from your latest sustainability report, providing an accurate, citation-backed response. With this system, teams no longer have to re-enter the same data repeatedly or worry about formatting – the AI ensures accuracy from the start. Passionfruit even supports pre-set templates for common frameworks like CSRD, CDP, and EcoVadis, staying aligned with industry standards as they evolve.
One of Passionfruit’s key strengths is its seamless integration with your workflow. The platform connects with your internal systems, document repositories, and communication tools like Outlook. This means when a colleague’s input is needed, Passionfruit can automatically trigger a request and capture the necessary information. It even logs every response and its source, giving you full visibility into what information has been shared and with whom. Once the questionnaire is complete, Passionfruit allows you to export the responses directly into the required format, eliminating the need for manual data transfers. This workflow integration saves time, reduces errors, and gives you better control over your compliance process
Passionfruit isn’t a general-purpose AI; it’s purpose-built for food industry compliance and sustainability. This specialization means Passionfruit understands the nuances of questions like “Do you have a policy on fair working conditions?” or “Describe your allergen control measures.” Because it has been specifically trained on the complexities of food safety and sustainability, Passionfruit can provide more accurate, context-aware answers than a general AI tool. It ensures that responses are not only correct but also relevant and aligned with your company's sustainability goals.
FrieslandCampina, the Dutch dairy giant, faces an overwhelming number of hundreds of ESG questionnaires per year—all with similar questions but presented in different formats. This led to a time-consuming and inefficient process for their ESG team, requiring constant data retrieval, rewriting answers, and coordinating across multiple departments.
By integrating Passionfruit to automate their ESG answering process, FrieslandCampina was able to tackle these challenges head-on, achieving significant improvements:
The result? More time for strategy and meaningful sustainability work, and far less time spent answering the same questions over and over. With automation in place, FrieslandCampina can focus on driving their sustainability goals forward—confident that their ESG reporting is accurate, efficient, and aligned with the latest regulations and expectations.
While CDP is one of the most recognized ESG frameworks, the challenges of questionnaire completion extend far beyond it. Automated solutions, like Passionfruit, offer much more than just streamlining responses for CDP submissions. Here’s how automation can help you tackle a broader range of ESG challenges across multiple frameworks and stakeholders:
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and EcoVadis are becoming increasingly critical for food and beverage companies, and their reporting criteria often overlap with those of CDP. Automated systems can take the validated responses from CDP and repurpose them across other frameworks like CSRD and EcoVadis. This not only saves valuable time but also ensures that your answers are consistent and aligned across different reporting requirements.
By leveraging the same structured answers across multiple platforms, companies can meet the compliance demands of various frameworks while minimizing the need for duplicative work. This is particularly important as regulations around sustainability grow more complex and deadlines become tighter. Automation simplifies the process and accelerates time to compliance, making it easier for teams to stay ahead of shifting regulatory landscapes.
Beyond standard frameworks like CDP and EcoVadis, companies often face a wide variety of custom surveys from retailers, suppliers, or partners. These could include PDF forms, supplier assessment portals, or ESG audits—each with its own set of questions and formatting requirements.
Manually reformatting answers for each unique survey can be incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. Automation systems like Passionfruit can seamlessly adapt existing answers to any format—whether it's a simple questionnaire or a complex audit—without compromising the accuracy or integrity of the responses. Whether you're dealing with a retailer's bespoke ESG questionnaire or a custom portal used by a key supplier, automation ensures that responses are consistent, timely, and meet the specific formatting requirements, without needing to start from scratch each time.
Every time an ESG questionnaire is answered, it creates a potential risk. Inconsistent responses or outdated data can undermine your credibility and expose your company to potential liabilities. This is especially concerning when dealing with regulatory bodies, investors, or customers who rely on accurate and up-to-date information to make informed decisions.
Automation helps mitigate these risks by adding structure, approval workflows, and version control to the process. With automation, you can ensure that every response is reviewed, validated, and up-to-date before submission. Version control ensures that only the most current, approved answers are used, reducing the risk of errors, omissions, or outdated information being submitted. This structured approach not only helps protect your brand’s reputation but also strengthens your overall ESG risk management strategy, allowing you to confidently manage and mitigate risks associated with inaccurate reporting.
With questionnaire automation in place, ESG professionals can:
The growing demands for ESG transparency, especially within the food and beverage industry, are creating both challenges and opportunities for businesses. With regulatory requirements like the CSRD and increased expectations from clients through frameworks like CDP, companies are facing mounting pressure to submit accurate, timely, and comprehensive data. Manual processes simply cannot keep up with these demands.
Automation is the key to transforming ESG reporting. By integrating platforms like Passionfruit, businesses can streamline the process, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and speed. This approach reduces the burden of repetitive tasks, mitigates risks related to data discrepancies, and frees up valuable time for ESG teams to focus on driving meaningful sustainability outcomes.
As ESG expectations continue to evolve, automation offers the agility needed to stay ahead of deadlines and maintain compliance, ensuring that companies are not just meeting regulatory requirements but also positioning themselves as leaders in sustainability. The future of ESG reporting is automated—ensuring that teams can focus on innovation and transformation, rather than getting bogged down in the logistics of questionnaire completion.
