EcoVadis is one of the world's most trusted business sustainability rating platforms, used by over 130,000 companies across 175 countries. It evaluates businesses across four categories — Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement — and assigns a score from 0–100 based on your policies, actions, and results. Companies that score high enough earn a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Platinum badge, which they can share with customers, include in RFPs, and display as proof of sustainability performance.

Large enterprise companies — like Microsoft, Salesforce, Walmart, and Target — are required to report on the sustainability of their supply chains to investors, regulators, and their own customers. To fulfill those commitments, they ask their suppliers to complete EcoVadis (or similar) assessments. It's their way of verifying that the businesses they work with share their sustainability values. Suppliers who can't complete the assessment — or who score below acceptable thresholds — risk losing vendor status or being deprioritized in future business.

EcoVadis scores your company on a scale of 0–100 across four weighted categories: Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement. The weight of each category is determined by your industry and company size. For most small businesses, Environment carries the most weight. Scores are then benchmarked against all companies in your industry globally, and badge thresholds are set by percentile: Bronze (top 35%), Silver (top 15%), Gold (top 5%), and Platinum (top 1%).

When working with RyeStrategy, most clients complete their EcoVadis submission in as little as 45 days. The actual timeline depends on how quickly your team can provide documentation and how much policy development is needed upfront. If you have a customer-imposed deadline, let us know in your first call — we'll scope the project to fit your timeline.

The most common issue is a lack of documentation in the Environmental section — particularly around carbon emissions, energy use, and formal environmental policies. Small businesses are often doing the right things already, but without the data and documented evidence that EcoVadis rewards, those efforts don't translate into points. That's exactly the gap we specialize in closing. A basic GHG inventory and a few well-structured environmental policies can meaningfully move your score without requiring a major operational overhaul.

It's not technically required, but it helps significantly. Having a GHG inventory — even a basic one covering Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — gives you verifiable data to submit as evidence in the Environmental section. It also unlocks other sustainability actions (like setting reduction targets) that EcoVadis rewards. If you don't have a carbon footprint yet, RyeStrategy offers carbon accounting as part of our full-service offering, so we can build it alongside your assessment preparation.

Absolutely. EcoVadis assessments renew annually, and your score can improve each cycle as you strengthen policies, gather better data, and implement the actions EcoVadis rewards. After your initial submission, we provide a detailed improvement roadmap so you know exactly where to focus next. Many of our clients improve meaningfully year-over-year — One Workplace improved their EcoVadis score by 5 points in two years, with an 8-point jump in the Environmental category.

We are not an official EcoVadis partner, but we are a trusted EcoVadis consultant with deep hands-on experience helping small and midsized businesses complete assessments, improve their scores, and earn badges. We're also a CDP-accredited provider — which reflects the same evidence-based, rigorous approach we bring to every EcoVadis engagement. Our expertise is specialized: we focus on SMBs, not corporate sustainability teams at Fortune 500 companies.