Bringing Credibility to Sustainability Audits with Luiza Reguse

Here’s the full package for the Luiza Reguse interview:

Hello OmniTalk Fans!

Sustainability compliance doesn’t always get the spotlight it deserves. This conversation is a good reminder of why it should.

I sat down with Luiza Reguse, Senior Manager of Sustainable Supply Chain Initiatives at the Consumer Goods Forum, live from the CGF Leadership Studio at the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit 2026 in Vienna, Austria. Luiza came up as an auditor in the field, including a trip to riverside communities deep in the Amazon forest, and now helps shape the global frameworks that govern how sustainability programs get evaluated and recognized. The gap between those two experiences turns out to be the whole point.

Here are my biggest takeaways:

There Are More Than 300 Sustainability Programs Out There and Counting
The Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative, or SSCI, exists because the sustainability compliance landscape had become nearly impossible to navigate. More than 300 programs are currently on the market covering different topics, and new ones emerge every year because the space remains largely unregulated. Any company can create its own standard and sell it to the market. The SSCI’s job is to benchmark those programs against a common baseline so retailers and manufacturers know which ones can actually be trusted.

The Shift From Checkbox to Continuous Improvement
The traditional audit model, go to a facility, check boxes, report compliant or not, is giving way to something more nuanced. Luiza described a recent steering committee discussion where a missing worker contract in a processing plant system could be either a simple documentation gap or a sign of forced labor. The difference matters enormously, and a checkbox alone can’t tell you which one it is. The direction the industry is moving is toward continuous monitoring and understanding the real conditions behind the data.

Audit Fatigue Is a Real and Underappreciated Problem
Factories are routinely being audited by ten or twelve different programs simultaneously, each with its own requirements and checklists. Auditors are managing multiple frameworks at once in the field. The SSCI’s harmonization work addresses both sides of that burden. When programs are benchmarked against a common baseline, retailers can trust the coverage without requiring redundant audits, and the people doing the work on the ground get some relief.

Social and Environmental Sustainability Can No Longer Be Treated Separately
One of the clearer points Luiza made was that separating social and environmental compliance into silos no longer reflects how these issues actually work. Worker rights, water usage, pollution, and waste management are interconnected on the ground. The SSCI’s expansion of scope to include forestry and primary production followed directly from that reality.

Regenerative Agriculture Is Outcome Based and That Makes It Hard to Measure
Regenerative agriculture is everywhere as a concept and nowhere as a clear standard. Luiza’s team is not trying to define regenerative agriculture, they are trying to establish what sustainability programs should be covering when they assess it. The core challenge is that regenerative outcomes, things like soil health and biodiversity, take years or even decades to materialize. You can’t audit a ten year outcome today. What you can do is verify that the right practices and measurement systems are in place, and that is where the work is focused.

Field Experience Changes How You Write Standards
Luiza’s background as an auditor in the field, including traveling twelve hours by plane, then two buses, then a boat to reach riverside communities in the Amazon to ask açaí berry farmers about sustainability using a European organic commission framework, shapes how she approaches her current role in ways that are hard to replicate from an office. Writing requirements without understanding how they land on the ground produces standards that look clean on paper and fall apart in practice.

The Bottom Line
Supply chain sustainability is one of those topics that sounds straightforward until you start pulling on the threads. Hundreds of competing standards, audit burdens that cost real money, definitions that don’t yet exist for practices the industry is already supposed to be adopting. The SSCI’s work of creating common ground across all of it is unglamorous and essential, and the people doing it are bringing hard-won field experience to a problem that desperately needs it.

Special thanks to the CGF Leadership Studio, sponsored by Vusion, for supporting Omni Talk Retail’s live coverage all conference long.

Find the rest of the live interviews from The Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit 2026 here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhlbTg57CFdAihPNZ04kRKCE7HS6wDdF3

Be careful out there,

Chris and the Omni Talk Team

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