Sustainable Supply Chains: EcoVadis After a Decade

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Ten years after their first interview, EcoVadis co-founder and co-CEO Pierre-François Thaler is interviewed by Anna Bjärkerud, EBG on what they’ve built — and where the market is heading.

When EcoVadis first joined an EBG conference in 2016 — the year sustainability became a fixed part of EBGs agenda — the state of the art was getting a supplier Code of Conduct signed into the contract. Whether anyone ever checked it was honoured was, too often, another matter. A decade on, the contrast is the whole story: from a signature on a page to a verified score that decides who wins the business.

View the interview below

Some leaders grow more cautious as their company grows. Pierre-François Thaler has gone the other way. A decade after our first conversation, the EcoVadis co-founder and co-CEO is more convinced than ever of one bold idea: that the companies buying goods and services — not governments, not banks — are becoming the most powerful force for sustainability in the world.

“Corporate value chains are becoming the number one force to drive sustainability,” he says — “more than regulation, and maybe even more than sustainable finance.” Whoever shapes where that money goes holds real leverage. And increasingly, that decision runs through someone with the title — the chief procurement officer.

From a procurement headache to a market force

Ten years ago, Thaler still had to explain what EcoVadis even was. Today he doesn’t. The company is the largest provider of sustainability and resilience intelligence for global supply chains, and the numbers tell the story: more than 175,000 companies rated, up from 35,000 a decade ago, with over $2.5 trillion in global spend now connected to its insights and, by the company’s own count, around 2,000 employees worldwide.

Most companies first meet EcoVadis through its ratings and medals — because a strong score can decide who wins the contract. “If you want to do business with large companies, you need a certain EcoVadis score,” Thaler explains. Reach Platinum, and you win RFPs. Around that core now sits a full suite: screening risk, going deep on carbon, and going deep on human rights.

The flywheel

Ask Thaler what he is proudest of, and he describes a design choice made at the very start. “From day one, EcoVadis was more than a data provider,” he says. “To have an impact, we needed to create a flywheel — a marketplace between buyers and suppliers.”

It works like this. Large buyers use the platform to understand risk in their supply chains. Because those ratings shape RFPs and real purchasing decisions, a strong score becomes a genuine economic prize for suppliers. Companies holding Platinum, Gold, and Silver medals win more business — which lets them invest in becoming more sustainable and resilient, which in turn strengthens the supply chains of the buyers who rely on them. Spin that flywheel faster, and sustainability stops being a cost and becomes a competitive edge.

The market now agrees. EcoVadis’ latest Sustainable Procurement Barometer found that the biggest driver for leaders is no longer regulatory compliance — it is innovation: how a sustainable supply chain creates differentiated products. It is the same shift, from risk and fear toward innovation and collaboration, that was already taking shape when we first spoke a decade ago.

Why the Nordics are sitting on an advantage

For Nordic readers, there is a quiet opportunity here. “Nordic companies have some of the highest EcoVadis scores in the world,” Thaler notes — a reflection of how deeply the region already lives these values. He points to record-level Nordic green and ESG bond issuance as another sign of momentum.

His advice is energetic, not anxious. Every RFP where sustainability counts is a chance for Nordic suppliers to win on points. The task now is simply to keep the lead — and not let a softer regulatory mood elsewhere hand the rewards of the green transition to other regions.

“The most exciting months of my career”

On AI, Thaler positively lights up. “I’ve been experiencing the most exciting months of my entire career,” he says. For a data company, the AI shift is both the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity.

The team now ships new features almost every week. A recent one uses AI to pre-fill a supplier’s assessment from a few key documents. He is clear-eyed about the other side of the coin — the energy footprint of AI itself — but his conclusion is firmly optimistic: “When it comes to sustainable supply chains, the benefits far outweigh the risks.”

From the sidelines to the centre

It would be easy to file all of this under aspiration. The numbers say otherwise. “Sustainability has moved from the sidelines to the centre of how companies operate,” Thaler says — and the evidence is in the platform’s own data. More than 1,400 procurement leaders now hold their suppliers to EcoVadis standards as a matter of course, and buyers are adopting AI fast to turn supplier data into decisions — deploying it for predictive analytics, risk screening, and data validation.

The network is compounding:

25,852 new companies began using EcoVadis ratings in 2025.
More than 55,000 now report at least one greenhouse-gas metric.
Worker-voice tools reached over 251,000 active users, and registrations for the company’s Vitals assessment grew fivefold.
Companies that return for repeat assessments improve their scores by an average of 15 points.

Carbon shows how far the plumbing has come. A decade ago, measuring supply-chain emissions was genuinely hard; today EcoVadis gives suppliers practical tools — a calculator that turns real operational data into Scope 1 and 2 figures, a Product Carbon Footprint calculator, and an Academy that teaches teams how to gather the data in the first place. Through its Carbon Data Network, verified primary data flows straight into buyers’ Scope 3 reports, with partners including Sweep, Normative, Watershed, and Carbmee. What used to be a burden has quietly become an asset.

The 2036 bet

Ask where all this is heading, and Thaler reaches past the next quarter to the next decade. His hope is that by 2036 we can look back and see real change in the world’s environmental and human-rights impact — and say that supply chains helped drive it.

His reasoning sounds almost like a philosophy: “Change takes a lot of time to materialize, but when it starts to accelerate, it can be faster than you think.” He suspects the compounding may already have quietly begun, somewhere in the middle of this decade.

For a region that treats sustainability as second nature, that is not a warning. It is an invitation.

About EcoVadis

EcoVadis is a purpose-driven company dedicated to embedding sustainability intelligence into every business decision worldwide. With global, trusted and actionable ratings, businesses of all sizes rely on EcoVadis’ detailed insights to comply with ESG regulations, reduce GHG emissions, and improve the sustainability performance of their business and value chain across 220 industries in 180 countries.

Sources

For editorial verification. Direct quotes are from the recorded interview with Pierre-François Thaler; network figures are corroborated in EcoVadis’ published reporting. The $15 trillion Global 500 figure, the “highest scores” point and the Nordic-bond reference are statements made by Thaler in the interview.

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