You are Marina Dutra, Sustainability Manager at Verano Alimentos, a Brazilian food company based in Campinas, three months into the job. On 11 March 2026 an NGO accuses Verano of greenwashing, two retail chains give you 45 days to produce a verified plan, and before you split a single real of the budget you have to decide which concern leads the response.
The situation
Verano earns about R$3.4 billion a year from juices, dairy and snacks; it has seven plants, about 5,800 employees, and buys fruit and milk from some 2,300 smallholder farmers. Contracted delivery riders take its products to shops across the country. Since 1989 its founders have presented it as a company that serves "people and planet", and a brand that promises that is judged by a harsher standard than one that never did.
The NGO's report names three things: water stress and effluent readings at two plants in a drought-restricted region; pay and working-condition complaints from the delivery riders; and a risk, not yet proven, that part of the fruit comes from deforested land. None of them, alone, is catastrophic. Together, amplified by a viral post, they have cost Verano eleven points of its brand-trust index in two weeks: from 72 to 61 out of 100.
Two retail chains that account for 22% of sales, about R$750 million, hold ESG-compliance clauses and have given Verano 45 days to present a credible, independently verified remediation plan; otherwise they will delist its premium lines. The NGO has already announced a follow-up report for day 60.
Your annual sustainability budget is R$28 million, fixed, with no top-up available. An internal costing puts a full answer to everything the NGO names at about R$52 million. Approving it, the chief executive told you to make it count: to prove that "people and planet" is a measurable strategy and not marketing copy. You will be judged on whether trust recovers because of what Verano does, not because of a louder message.