Starbucks’ CSO Shake-Up and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability

In September, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol marked two years of his turnaround plan, which has reshaped the company around its coffeehouse experience, streamlined operations and tighter cost controls. In May, the company folded its standalone chief sustainability officer role into a broader remit as part of a round of more than 300 corporate job cuts. Sustainability now sits with Kelly Goodejohn, a 20-year company veteran who also leads social impact, and the company says the two functions of work belong together. But Starbucks is also reassessing its 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goal, raising a question about how its sustainability commitments will be maintained as the work is reorganized. 

Much of the commentary has treated the decision as a verdict on corporate climate commitment. That is the less useful reading. The more useful one is what the decision says about a model most large companies adopted over the past 15 years, and whether it was ever designed to carry the weight placed on it.

The CSO role grew quickly. The Weinreb Group’s 2025 survey reached a record 215 chief sustainability officers, and nearly 90 percent said they now spend more time on regulatory compliance than two years earlier. The title did real work: it gave sustainability a seat, a budget and a name in the annual report. What it rarely came with, however, was control over the decisions that determine a company’s footprint, including capital allocation, procurement, product design and executive pay. In most organizations, it was a voice without a vote.

Starbucks’ own figures show this without needing to blame anyone. Its carbon footprint grew 3 percent between 2019 and 2024, driven largely by dairy and coffee, while the company reports that emissions from its operations and electricity fell 17 percent in fiscal 2025 compared with its 2019 baseline. The part a sustainability team can reach directly moved. The larger challenge sits in the menu, the supply chain and the store estate, which fall under other executives. That is not a failure of the people in the role; it is a description of where the levers were.

So the question worth asking is not why the role was cut, but whether the work survives it. If removing one executive substantially changes what a company does on climate, the strategy lived in a department rather than in the business model. If the work carries on inside the business units, as Starbucks says it intends, the change could be a step forward. On the day of the announcement, the two look identical.

Finance is usually where this is decided. Kearney’s 2025 survey of 500 CFOs found that 93 percent recognize the business case for sustainability and 69 percent expect higher returns from it than from traditional investments, yet 61 percent still treat it primarily as a cost. That is less a contradiction than a timing problem: the returns may take years to materialize, while budgets are set in quarters. When sustainability is treated as a cost line, it tends to lose when margins tighten. When it is treated as a question of risk or revenue, it tends to survive.

The companies whose commitments have outlasted leadership changes put the work inside operating jobs. Walmart ran Project Gigaton through procurement and supplier relationships, announcing in 2024 that suppliers had reported projects expected to exceed its goal of reducing, avoiding or sequestering one billion metric tons of emissions across its value chain by 2030, years ahead of schedule. Interface, meanwhile, has pursued its Mission Zero commitment since 1994, embedding sustainability in product design and operations across three decades of leadership change.

The pattern is familiar from the inside. Having led and advised FTSE100 and Fortune100 companies, I found that the hardest conversations were rarely with skeptics. They were with believers whose reporting structure made cutting the rational choice. What changed outcomes was never the seniority of the title. It was whether the CFO, the procurement lead and the remuneration committee each owned part of the result.

That points to a practical division of labor. The CFO owns capital allocation and carbon pricing. Operations and procurement own supply chain exposure. The board’s risk committee owns physical and transition risk. The remuneration committee owns incentives. The sustainability leader becomes the architect and auditor of that system rather than the sole owner of outcomes the role cannot control. Investors can ask the same of any company in their portfolio: Has the sustainability strategy ever changed a commercial decision?

None of this makes a dedicated sustainability leader redundant. Most large companies still need someone who can interpret regulation, translate the science and hold the whole picture across functions. The argument for integration is about ownership, not headcount, and cutting the specialist before the business has taken on the work simply moves the gap somewhere harder to see.

There is also a measurement problem underneath this. Companies, like economies, have been run to maximize output, a corporate equivalent of GDP measured in sales, margin and quarterly growth. A better companion measure is what I call Gross Domestic Resilience: the capacity of a business to keep delivering through supply shocks, climate impacts, new regulation and shifting consumers. Measured that way, the people watching coffee-crop and dairy risk are not overhead.

Titles will change and structures will shift. The test is simpler: Would the strategy survive if the person who championed it left tomorrow?

Sandhya Sabapathy is a former FTSE 100 sustainability director and founder of Kaleidoscope, an advisory practice built on the Impact Prism resilience methodology. She is the author of Burn Bright, Build Slow: How to Build a Just Climate Future, and has spoken at the World Economic Forum, COP and SXSW.