Sustainability & ESG · Sustainable Business Strategy

Conscious Capital — Verano Alimentos & the Greenwashing Crisis

A four-round, advanced corporate-sustainability simulation set inside Verano Alimentos S.A., a fictional Brazilian food & beverage company (R$3,4 bilhões revenue, 7 plants, ~5.800 employees, ~2.300 smallholder suppliers).

4 rounds Executive English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, advanced corporate-sustainability simulation set inside Verano Alimentos S.A., a fictional Brazilian food & beverage company (R$3,4 bilhões revenue, 7 plants, ~5.800 employees, ~2.300 smallholder suppliers).

On 11 March 2026 a respected NGO accuses Verano of greenwashing and supply-chain labour problems; the hashtag trends, the internal brand-trust index has already fallen from 72 to 61/100, and two retail customers worth 22% of revenue (~R$750M) threaten to delist premium SKUs within 45 days unless they see a credible, verified remediation plan.

Playing the new Sustainability Manager with a hard R$28M annual budget (fully addressing everything would cost ~R$52M, forcing prioritisation), you (1) diagnose and prioritise stakeholders through a materiality lens — choosing the most material issue (water/effluent and deforestation-linked sourcing) over the loudest one (retail/consumer PR); (2) allocate the R$28M across candidate CSR initiatives — water-treatment retrofit, smallholder traceability & fair-sourcing, rider-welfare, and a cheap-but-photogenic community programme — concentrating on substantive, value-creating spend rather than thin philanthropy; (3) set the reporting scope, framework (glossy comms vs GRI), assurance level (none / limited / reasonable) and boundary (own operations vs full supply chain), trading credibility against exposure; and (4) integrate the plan into a board-and-retailer pitch, choosing calibrated, evidence-bounded claims over the overclaim that re-triggers the backlash.

The math encodes the five Common Errors — salience over materiality, thin photogenic spend, substance without assurance, selective disclosure, and overclaiming in recovery — so each wrong strategy measurably underperforms. Final KPIs track Stakeholder Value Index, Brand Trust recovery (toward 72), Reporting Credibility, and Budget committed against the R$28M cap.

Who it is for

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Through a materiality lens, which stakeholder priority leads your response?
  • What lens decides the priority?
  • How hard do you look for a priority that serves several stakeholders at once? (%)
  • Allocate the R$28M across CSR initiatives (totals must not exceed R$28M)
  • What discipline governs the portfolio?
  • What framework do you report against?
  • What level of third-party assurance?
  • What reporting boundary do you set?
  • How fully do you disclose the unflattering numbers (incl. the unverifiable effluent data)? (%)
  • How do you frame the claim to the board, retailers and the sceptical journalist?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Stakeholder Value, Brand Trust & Reporting Credibility

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Sustainable Business Strategy.

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