The cost of a low EcoVadis score — and how to boost it
Supplier sustainability ratings are influencing B2B relationships. Here’s what companies on both sides of the equation need to know.
The pressure is coming from both directions
If you're an enterprise company with sustainability commitments, your biggest source of emissions almost certainly isn't your own operations. Scope 3 emissions — those generated across your value chain, including suppliers — represent, on average, 26 times a company's direct operational footprint. Which means that hitting your own climate targets increasingly depends on what your suppliers are doing.
At the same time, if you're a supplier, you've likely already felt this pressure arriving in your inbox. A questionnaire. A minimum EcoVadis score requirement. A customer asking you to demonstrate that your sustainability practices meet their standards.
EcoVadis has become the primary platform through which this pressure flows. Over 150,000 companies across 185 countries have been rated on it, and more than 1,500 multinational companies use the platform to assess, select, and manage their suppliers. It is the lingua franca of supply chain sustainability.
Understanding how EcoVadis works is increasingly becoming a business imperative, whether you’re the one requesting a score or the one earning it.
companies have been rated on the Ecovadis platform across 185 countries
EcoVadis awards medals at the 45th, 65th, and 85th percentile thresholds
What EcoVadis measures
EcoVadis’s general questionnaire evaluates companies across four themes: Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement. Within each area, your submission is assessed across seven “management indicators”: policies, endorsements, measures, certifications, coverage, reporting, and 360° watch findings.
Each indicator feeds into a theme score, which contributes to your overall score — a number between 0 and 100. EcoVadis awards medals at the 45th, 65th, and 85th percentile thresholds.
EcoVadis also recently introduced a Carbon Scorecard, which evaluates a company’s carbon management systems, emissions reporting, and performance, but most enterprise corporations remain primarily focused on suppliers’ general scores.
No ratings system is perfect, and EcoVadis is no exception. When clients tell us their EcoVadis score doesn’t fully reflect their efforts, we take that seriously — because often, it doesn’t. The platform has real constraints. Understanding those constraints is a prerequisite for working within them effectively. EcoVadis is the dominant platform in this space, and companies that learn to work within its logic consistently outperform those that don't.
What to know before you start your submission
The submission requires significant cross-department coordination. Designate an owner early — the assessment spans environmental practices, labor, ethics, and procurement, and the supporting documentation is rarely all in one place.
The right documentation matters more than you'd expect. EcoVadis is explicit about what it will accept for each question, and the requirements vary significantly.
Formatting details matter more than they should. If your documentation doesn't use the terminology analysts are looking for, you may not get credit for work you've already done.
A sustainability report is one of the most efficient tools for improving your score. EcoVadis limits companies to 55 uploaded documents — a limitation that becomes challenging fast.
Why supplier engagement is now a strategic priority
If you've started receiving EcoVadis requests from customers, expect more of them. The regulatory environment, investor pressure, and science-based climate commitments mean your customers are navigating complex waters, and suppliers are increasingly caught in the current.
California's SB 253 requires large companies to disclose Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions annually, which means they need data from their supply chain. The EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive extends similar requirements to companies with significant European operations. And the Science Based Targets initiative — with over 10,000 committed companies globally — requires Scope 3 targets for any company where supply chain emissions represent 40% or more of its total footprint. For most companies, that threshold is easily crossed.
For suppliers, getting ahead is a competitive opportunity. A strong EcoVadis score signals to customers that you can be a reliable partner in their own sustainability journey, and increasingly, it's a factor in whether you win or retain enterprise contracts. A weak score, or no score at all, is becoming a liability, particularly with enterprise customers who have their own disclosure obligations to meet.
CASE STUDY
Doubling a score through better documentation
A national restaurant chain — one of thinkPARALLAX's clients — had been pushing their primary meat supplier to improve their EcoVadis score. The supplier maintained they had real sustainability initiatives underway and weren’t getting credit for them. The restaurant chain wasn’t sure what to believe. That’s when they brought us in.
The supplier had implemented genuinely impressive initiatives and had metrics to show for it. What they didn't have was the internal bandwidth to coordinate a submission that demands significant time and cross-functional effort, and the EcoVadis-specific knowledge to translate their work into a submission that would score well. Some of their existing documentation didn’t meet EcoVadis’s criteria to be considered in the first place; the rest hadn’t been structured to maximize its scoring potential.
Our gap assessment surfaced two clear priorities. First, the supplier had several sustainability practices in place that had never been formally documented as policies, so we helped them develop and formalize those. Second, they had accumulated too many standalone documents and were bumping against EcoVadis's document upload cap, leaving criteria unaddressed.
The solution was their first-ever sustainability report. The document consolidated policies, metrics, and performance data across dozens of EcoVadis criteria at once. We also stepped in as project managers, coordinating across departments to gather inputs so their internal team could stay focused on work that actually moves the needle.
The supplier's EcoVadis score doubled. Beyond the number, they came away with something more versatile: a suite of formalized policies and their first sustainability report — assets they can leverage in every future submission and share proactively with any customer who asks. For the restaurant chain, the improved score resolved a longstanding point of friction in the relationship. For the supplier, it sharpened their positioning with other enterprise customers and established a foundation that makes each subsequent assessment cycle more manageable than the last.
A phased approach to EcoVadis improvement
Our team includes sustainability professionals who have managed supplier engagement programs at enterprise companies and professionals who have sat on the supplier side, fielding those same requests under pressure from customers. thinkPARALLAX’s approach to EcoVadis score improvement reflects the support we always wished we'd had, structured into two phases designed to minimize disruption while maximizing impact.
PHASE 1
Discovery and gap assessment
We begin by reviewing your current EcoVadis results, or, for first-time submitters, conducting a pre-assessment against EcoVadis criteria. We identify gaps between existing practices and documentation, prioritize the highest-impact improvement opportunities, and develop a roadmap for both the immediate submission and longer-term program development.
PHASE 2
Implementation and submission
We develop or strengthen the policies and documentation EcoVadis requires, build or refine a sustainability report that consolidates your efforts into a single, high-value submission asset, and manage the submission process to ensure nothing is missed.
Why thinkPARALLAX
EcoVadis improvement is a cross-functional coordination challenge with real business stakes. Getting it right requires people who understand how the platform scores, how sustainability programs are built, and how enterprise procurement actually works.
Our team has sat on both sides of this. We've managed supplier engagement programs at enterprise companies — the ones sending the EcoVadis requests — and we've supported the suppliers on the receiving end. That dual perspective shapes how we approach every engagement: We know what customers are actually looking for, and we know where submissions typically fall short.
We also bring broader sustainability infrastructure. For most suppliers, EcoVadis is the beginning of a larger journey, one that will involve more disclosure requests, more stakeholder scrutiny, and eventually more formal reporting requirements. The policies and sustainability report we help you build are the foundation for whatever comes next.
