Tensie Whelan, Distinguished Professor of Practice Emerita, was the Founding Director of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. She now serves as Senior Advisor to CSB, where she is bringing her 35 years of experience working on local, national and international sustainability issues to engage businesses and investors in proactive and innovative mainstreaming of sustainability.
As President of the Rainforest Alliance, she built the organization from a $4.5 million to $50 million budget, transforming the engagement of business with sustainability, recruiting 5,000 companies in more than 60 countries to work with Rainforest Alliance. Her previous work included serving as Executive Director of the New York League of Conservation Voters, Vice President of the National Audubon Society, Managing Editor of Ambio, a journal of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a journalist in Latin America.
Tensie has served on numerous nonprofit boards and currently serves on the advisory boards of Domtar, Edelman, Giant Ventures, and Nespresso, and is an Advisor to MIT Sloan Management Review. Tensie holds a B.A. from New York University, an M.A. from American University, and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Owner President Management (OPM) Program. She was awarded the Stern Faculty Excellence Award in 2020 and made Distinguished Professor of Practice in 2023 in recognition of her contributions to Stern.
Tensie joined The WIE Suite for a Masterclass on how to make the business case for sustainability from the inside out, and why the companies not moving in this direction are leaving significant money on the table.
Tensie opened with the reframe that anchors all of her research: sustainability is not a nice-to-have, and it is not primarily a compliance exercise. It is a set of material business risks and opportunities that every company is already exposed to, whether they are tracking them or not.
"Very few people were seeing sustainability as competitive advantage. They were seeing it as a nice to have versus a must have. That is exactly what the research at the Center for Sustainable Business is about."
The risk landscape she mapped spans sourcing and supply chain volatility, toxic materials and regulatory pressure, water and energy costs, waste generation, and employee turnover and safety. Each category carries both downside risk and upside opportunity. A company that ignores the risk is not avoiding it. It is simply not managing it.
The centerpiece of Tensie's session was the Return on Sustainability Investment model, known as ROSI™, developed at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. The model identifies nine value drivers that result in better financial performance when sustainability is embedded in business strategy, including customer loyalty, operational efficiency, innovation, risk reduction, and employee productivity.
The logic is precise: you cannot monetize a strategy. You can monetize a specific practice. A company that commits to reducing waste has a strategy. A company that implements a specific program to recycle paint and solvent back into production has a practice, and that practice generates measurable benefits in reduced input costs, reduced waste disposal costs, and incremental revenue from recycled material sales.
"The unlock is that once you identify the practice and define the benefits, you can translate them into a financial number. That is the logic flow we apply."
One of the most striking findings from her automotive sector research was that a single company's waste management initiatives generated a net EBIT impact of $235 million. The company did not know. Corporate finance had not tracked the avoided costs. The sustainability team had not connected its results to the investment. Both failures are common. Both are fixable.
For the founders and brand leaders in the room, Tensie's consumer purchasing data was among the session's most compelling material. Partnering with Circana, which tracks every CPG product bought and sold in the United States, the Center has been monitoring sustainable product purchasing since 2013. The findings are unambiguous.
Sustainably marketed products are growing nearly five times faster than conventional alternatives, carry an average premium of 27%, and now represent 25% of all CPG products sold in the U.S., up from roughly 13% in 2013. In the UK, sustainable products hold 37% market share. In Germany, 42%.
"Red state moms buy just as much sustainable product for their kids as blue state moms do. People with lower incomes are buying at just as high numbers as high income people. This is becoming mainstream."
She also pushed back directly on the narrative that consumers are retreating from sustainable products. The evidence cited in those headlines, she noted, is almost always survey-based, asking people what they intend to buy rather than tracking what they actually purchase. The purchasing data tells a different story. The categories that were once stuck below 5% market share are now, a decade later, clustered above 20%, with products like yogurt and milk reaching 60 to 70% sustainable market share.
One of the frameworks Tensie returned to most pointedly was circularity, the practice of recovering and reusing materials, components, or products at the end of their life. She described it as a financial superpower that most companies have not yet learned to use.
"Circularity gives you a second bite at the apple. You are selling the product twice. You have reduced supply chain risk. You have reduced your virgin input costs. You have potential new customers at a lower price point. And you can make sustainability claims."
Her examples were concrete. Eileen Fisher's take-back program, which offers customers a coupon for returning gently used clothing, generated profit from resale, incremental sales from coupon redemption, and measurable customer acquisition among a younger demographic the brand had struggled to reach through conventional marketing. The net benefit was approximately $1.8 million when last analyzed. Renault is recovering 40% of end-of-life vehicle components for use in new cars, a strategy that simultaneously reduces supply chain risk, lowers input costs, and decreases tariff exposure. A healthcare system's medical device refurbishment program cost $500,000 to implement and returned an average of $3.5 million annually.
Tensie closed with findings from joint research conducted with Edelman across 16 iconic brands, spanning apparel, food, electronics, and financial services. The research tested which sustainability messages actually moved consumer purchase intent, and the results carried clear implications for anyone communicating about sustainability.
"Environmental and social sustainability messages combined with the right core attribute messages can drive purchase intent from roughly 30% to more than 70%."
The messages that work are specific, grounded, and ladder up from the product's core attributes. Health claims outperform abstract environmental claims. Local sourcing, animal welfare, and sustainable ingredients resonate across demographics. The messages that do not work include biodegradability, carbon neutrality, traceability, and anything that sounds technical or scientific, even among educated consumers who ostensibly care about those issues.
On the social side, the most effective messages are those that align with a brand's established ethos and support access to basic needs. Chobani's messaging around nutrition for disadvantaged communities moved purchasing more than its core product attributes. Demographic-specific social claims, such as messaging focused on women or people of color, worked well when the product was specifically for that demographic but did not travel broadly.
The practical conclusion: certifications provide authenticity, but putting a seal on packaging is not enough. The message needs to be built around what the product delivers and why it matters to the person buying it, not around the framework used to verify it.
