From replenishment programmes to ecosystem restoration projects, major corporations in the beverage industry are making ambitious commitments for 2030 and beyond. But how much progress are they actually making? And what can the rest of us learn from their actions?
Understanding water stewardship across industries is crucial for helping territories become more resilient to water shortages. That's why our team analysed the 2025 Valuing Water Finance Initiative Benchmark, a comprehensive assessment of 17 major beverage companies, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Heineken, and Diageo.
What we found offers valuable insights not just for the beverage sector, but for anyone managing buildings, working with utilities, or navigating the complex landscape of corporate water management.
In this article, we'll break down the key findings, explore what they mean for water stewardship broadly, and identify the opportunities these insights create for more effective water management across all types of buildings and operations.
The Valuing Water Finance Initiative assessed companies against six Corporate Expectations for Valuing Water:
Each company could score up to 90 points across these categories. The results provide a detailed snapshot of where corporate water stewardship stands in 2025 and how it has evolved since the 2023 baseline.
The average industry score reached 36.8 out of 90 points in 2025, up from 33 in 2023. This represents meaningful progress, but it also reveals that even leading companies are operating at roughly 41% of the benchmark's full ambition for water stewardship.
PepsiCo leads with 56.5 points, followed closely by Diageo (54 points) and Heineken (52 points). At the other end, several companies scored below 25 points, indicating significant variation in how seriously different organisations approach water management.
One of the most encouraging trends is the shift towards context-based thinking. Twelve out of 17 companies now set time-bound, context-based water quantity targets, up from 10 in 2023. These targets recognise that water use in a water-stressed region carries different risks than equivalent consumption in a water-abundant area.
Sixteen out of 17 companies now disclose water withdrawal and consumption volumes across their entire direct operations, up from 13 in 2023. This growing transparency is foundational for accountability and allows stakeholders to track progress over time.More companies are also publicly stating their water stewardship commitments and reporting on initiatives and progress.
Access to water, sanitation, and hygiene saw significant improvements. The number of companies with WASH targets doubled from four to eight between 2023 and 2025. Additionally, 16 out of 17 companies now dedicate resources to address WASH among employees, suppliers, or communities (up from 14 in 2023).
Twelve companies include collective action initiatives in their strategies to achieve water availability targets. Water challenges often can't be solved in isolation. They require partnerships with water efficiency companies, NGOs, local communities, governments, and other stakeholders.
Fourteen companies engage in ecosystem restoration or protection projects to support freshwater ecosystems or aquatic biodiversity, an increase from 12 in 2023. These projects focus on nature-based solutions such as reforestation, waterway rehabilitation, wetland restoration, and forest management to support groundwater recharge.
Understanding where even well-resourced companies struggle helps identify areas where innovation and new approaches are most needed.
Perhaps the most striking finding: not a single beverage company reports water withdrawal and consumption data for their supply chains. Zero out of seventeen.
When it comes to the full picture of their water footprint across the value chain, the data simply doesn't exist in a comprehensive way.
This isn't a reflection of lack of effort. Many companies are working to address this through supplier engagement, risk assessments, and modelling using databases like ecoinvent or the Water Footprint Network. But comprehensive, verified supply chain water data remains elusive.
Why does this matter?
If major corporations with dedicated sustainability teams and substantial budgets struggle with supply chain water visibility, it suggests this is a systemic challenge requiring new approaches to data collection and monitoring infrastructure.
Few companies disclose the current and potential water impacts their activities have or explain how these impacts are monitored within local catchments. In 2025, only Suntory disclosed information on impacts and monitoring processes for water availability, whilst only Diageo provided this for water quality.
This limited disclosure makes it difficult to understand not just how much water companies use, but what effect that use has on local water systems and communities.
Water quality remains the lowest-performing expectation, with a median score of just 3.5 out of 15 points. While nine companies now have water quality targets (up from four in 2023), none of these targets apply to the entire value chain.
Most targets focus narrowly on wastewater treatment and regulatory compliance at manufacturing sites. Only one company, AB InBev, has set a context-based target related to measurably improving water quality in 100% of communities in high-stress sites. Diageo, discloses both potential and actual impacts of its wastewater discharges on local water quality and the methods used to monitor these impacts.
Every one of these beverage companies operates buildings beyond their core production facilities. Corporate offices, distribution centres, research facilities, warehouses, visitor centres, and more.
The benchmark focuses primarily on manufacturing operations, which makes sense given that's where beverage companies use the most water. But this creates an interesting question: are these companies applying the same water stewardship rigour to their broader building portfolios?
The available evidence suggests this is an area with substantial room for improvement. If companies struggle to get comprehensive data from their primary production facilities and supply chains, their wider building operations likely represent an even larger blind spot.
This isn't unique to the beverage industry. Across sectors, organisations often focus water management efforts on the most obvious use cases whilst overlooking the cumulative impact of their full real estate footprint.
Whether you manage buildings, work with utilities, advise on sustainability strategy, or develop water policy, several insights from this benchmark are worth considering:
The shift towards context-based, risk-differentiated targets represents real sophistication. Water saved in a stressed basin has more impact than water saved in an abundant region. This geographical nuance should inform how we think about water efficiency across all sectors.
The persistent gaps in supply chain data and impact monitoring aren't failures of effort. They're infrastructure challenges. You can't report what you can't measure, and you can't measure without comprehensive monitoring systems.
The beverage industry's struggle with water quality management suggests this requires different approaches than consumption reduction. Quality monitoring is more complex, more localised, and less standardised. Innovation here is particularly needed.
Whilst supply chain water data may be years away from comprehensive coverage, buildings offer a more immediate opportunity. They're directly controllable, more accessible for monitoring infrastructure, and collectively represent significant water use.
Just as beverage companies are learning they can't solve water challenges alone, building operators will increasingly engage with utilities, local authorities, and other stakeholders on shared water issues.
The trend towards public disclosure will extend beyond large corporations to buildings of all types as stakeholders, regulators, and tenants demand visibility.
The 2025 Valuing Water Finance Initiative Benchmark assessed 17 major beverage companies on their water stewardship practices, revealing both progress and persistent challenges. The industry average score reached 36.8 out of 90 points (up from 33 in 2023), with companies showing great improvement in many areas. However, significant gaps remain: not a single company reports water data for their supply chains, water quality remains the lowest-performing category, and most companies focus monitoring efforts on manufacturing whilst potentially overlooking their broader building portfolios.
The benchmark reveals that even well-resourced corporations struggle to manage what they can't continuously measure, highlighting the critical need for comprehensive water monitoring infrastructure across all operations.
Want to discuss water intelligence for your buildings in your industry?
Contact us and we can explore what's possible for your operations.