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“48% of companies believe technology-led sustainability initiatives increase revenues”** Accenture

The next five years will see sustainability shift from being an expensive ‘nice-to-have’ that can be passed on to consumers, to a fundamental necessity in commercially successful businesses.  

This era will be driven by commodity costs, top down pressure from regulators and large retailers, and bottom-up pressure from consumers as the impact of climate change hits closer to home. 

Beer businesses needs to see sustainability as core to successful business strategy. Moreover, it can be beers’ competitive edge.

“The likes of Tesco, Waitrose, and Sainsbury’s are saying to breweries, ‘You’ve got to start measuring your impact.’ They have set targets to reduce emissions as a business, so they rely on breweries to reduce and report their climate impact. This puts the leading industry brands at the forefront of driving sustainability impact.”

George Wade, Zevero

Failure to meet the rising bar in sustainability will be increasingly detrimental to sales and brand value.

“the craft beer mantra of ‘quality at all costs’ is over. Instead, the focus has to come from breweries and brewers learning how to efficiently produce high-quality beer in the most sustainable way possible”

Chris Lewington, Brew Resourceful

The next few years will illustrate measuring, reporting, benchmarking and investing in technology-led solutions can lead to great savings and increased sales. The implications for how this will impact retail, marketing and production are vast.

In the Horizons 2024 report we expand much further on the drivers of this trend, the implications and opportunities for beer business across product, retail and marketing. This overview is drawn from our fourth horizon “Environment”. The report builds out trends and implications for Health, Identity, the Economy and Technology. 

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