Sustainability consolidates into fewer, bigger seats

Three appointments this month have the same shape: roles that used to sit side by side, or report down a specialist track, are being folded into one senior seat.

Ingka Group

Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, accounting for more than 85% of the chain's retail sales, named Erika Intiso Chief Sustainability Officer on 14 October. She succeeds Karen Pflug, who is stepping down after more than five years in the role and will stay on until the end of the year to support the handover.

Intiso's route in is notable: she joins from running IKEA Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia, where she already held the combined title of CEO and CSO. The CSO role at group level has effectively gone to someone who was already doing both jobs at once, one level down.

The Walt Disney Company

Disney folded two co-lead sustainability roles into one as part of a corporate reorganisation effective 17 October. Kelly Greenman becomes vice president of global sustainability. Her former co-lead, Yalmaz Siddiqui, who joined Disney in 2022 and led the company's B Corp certification overhaul, has left the company as a result of the restructuring.

Two people doing adjacent sustainability work is now one broader remit under one title.

The Wella Company

The Wella Company, owner of OPI and Nioxin, named Javier Huerta its first chief supply chain officer on 23 October, effective 1 December. The role brings sourcing, manufacturing, quality and logistics, a team of around 2,000 people, under a single leader for the first time. Huerta joins after about 30 years across Imperial Brands, where he built the company's first integrated end-to-end global supply chain, Unilever and Nestle. (Single source: Supply Chain Dive.)

One seat, not three

None of these three moves are a story about sustainability reporting to a different department. They are a story about fewer, more senior people being asked to hold functions that used to sit apart, whether that is sustainability and general management at IKEA, two sustainability leads at Disney, or sourcing, manufacturing and logistics at Wella.

For a buyer, that usually means one fewer relationship to maintain and one person who can see the whole supplier picture, which is also the argument for answering a supplier questionnaire once rather than for each separate function that asks.