Job Purpose and Mission

Starbucks wants to become the sustainability leader within the Coffee Shop Industry. This critical role contributes to Starbucks’ success by creating, executing, and managing the regional sustainability and social impact strategy, with the objective of securing Starbucks’ brand position as a sectoral leader in EMEA. This role will require considerable experience in strategic planning across multiple sustainability workstreams, to secure buy-in and effectively exercise accountability for charting and maintaining a path to sectoral leadership position that secures but goes beyond compliance. It will also require significant technical proficiency in environmental audits and double materiality assessments, to effectively exercise responsibility for the coordination, conduct, measurement, and disclosure of annual carbon, waste, and water audits across the EMEA region, in pursuit of Starbucks’ global sustainability goals to halve its carbon, waste, and water footprints by 2030.

Reporting directly into the Director of Sustainability & Social Impact, this role will work extensively with a wide array of internal functions (legal, public affairs, PRO, SCO, marketing), licensees, and external agency partners, to successfully deliver, manage, and communicate the regional sustainability and social impact strategy, and the various initiatives sitting beneath it. It will exercise responsibility for ensuring a complete and effective integration of regional carbon, waste, water, and social impact workstreams with local in-market sustainability teams across EMEA, and global responsibility teams in Seattle. This role will also collaborate extensively with regional stakeholders, global counterparts, and licensee partners in the formulation of leadership brand positions on forest-risk commodities, social impact, and other ESG (environmental, social, governance) related topics in EMEA. In executing these responsibilities, this role will play a vital role in shepherding the business and its 
strategic partners to a leadership position in sustainability, through a complex, rapidly evolving communications landscape

Summary of Key Responsibilities    
            

1. Build, lead, and manage strategic sustainability vision for the EMEA region, developing a rolling 3-year strategic plan in conjunction with licensee counterparts and executing annual operating plans to deliver 2030 carbon, waste, water goals.
2. Diligently represent EMEA sustainability positions and critical strategic workstreams in global committees and working groups, advocating effectively and commercially for the interests of its senior leadership team, licensees, suppliers, and partners pulling in dedicated program support from EMEA finance, tech, supply chain, legal and other departments as and where necessary. Communicate workstream status and progress to EMEA LT whilst flagging and addressing risk.
3. Define, recommend and track KPIs for key strategic sustainability initiatives. Gather, analyse, and report data to: (a) share lessons learned and required programmatic shifts to improve performance; (b) monitor and report licensee progress against KPIs; (c) report regional progress to 2030 carbon, waste, water goals with associated legal disclosures.
4. Partner with commercial finance to build and socialise business cases in support of strategic sustainability and social impact initiatives, with defined KPIs and financial return through collaboration with cross-functional teams, key stakeholders (internal and external) and business partners to meet global and regional targets
5. Manage overall sustainability and social impact budgets and quarterly forecasts for defined areas of responsibility, from requesting funds from Global teams; to managing and reconciling EMEA annual budgets; to reconciliation of EMEA budgets on an on-going basis with finance ensuring that all initiatives stay on budget through duration of project timeline
6. Act as gatekeeper and champion of sustainability and social impact internally and externally, defining the limits of best practice across EMEA and advocating for sustainability principles across markets and within business functions
7. Lead regular generation of competitor benchmarking, consumer insights, and analysis of behaviours in sustainability and social impact while monitoring market trends to gauge progress and present opportunities for best practice solutions
8. Forge relationships with outsourced vendors, suppliers, and third-party consultants to identify brand-appropriate partnerships to execute sustainability and social impact initiatives; manage relationships as lead point of contact and leverage outside expertise to build stronger, more cohesive sustainability and social impact programmes for Starbucks
9. Work in conjunction with marketing, PA, ops and legal teams to develop “best in class”, high impact marketing and communications toolkits that deliver compliant sustainability programmes grounded in brand mission and values, distinguish Starbucks from its competitor set, resonate with customers, and drive partner engagement
10. Manage a direct report as part of a growing sustainability and ESG function to effectively deliver on role responsibilities, whilst building meaningful, productive relationships with global teams, licensees and functions across the region 

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Significant senior experience (8+ years) in the field of corporate sustainability, environmental policy, and/or ESG, with a demonstrable ability to address environmental challenges systemically, commercially, and creatively
• Significant and wide-ranging sustainability leadership experience, including the conduct of double materiality assessments, carbon audits across scopes 1-3, waste and water, ethical supply chains, and packaging innovation
• A pragmatic appreciation of communications and the power of brands, customer experience and leveraging partnerships to deliver desired behavioural change
• Significant experience managing multiple workstreams and stakeholders in service of ambitious shared goals, with a demonstrable understanding of how to drive and support cultural change in a large, multilateral matrix organisation
• An ability to work directly with, influence, and educate (where necessary) senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams on material sustainability topics
• Passion and desire to make sustainability and social impact a part of how we do business
• Proven experience in planning, project management and execution of projects with matrixed cross-functional team
• Strong analytical skills to set KPIs, identify data trends, draw lessons learned, report accurately and make recommendations grounded in facts and insights
• An excellent written and verbal communicator 

This job description is only a summary of the typical functions of the role and is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all possible responsibilities, tasks, and duties that may be required. Management reserves the right to amend the responsibilities, tasks, and duties of the jobholder as dictated by business requirements.