“Startup Sustainability” at Scale: Embedding Impact Without a Rigid Strategy with Jamieson Saab

In this episode of our podcast, Maximilian, co-founder of The Sustainability Circle, sits down with Jamieson Saab, Global Head of Sustainability at Wolt, to explore how fast-growing tech companies can scale sustainability with minimal reliance on traditional, rigid strategies.

Jamieson shares his real-world approach to “startup sustainability”—emphasizing cultural change, pilot-driven innovation, and embedding sustainability across the organization, from couriers to executives.

Topics covered include:
• What “sustainability without a rigid strategy” really looks like
• How to balance speed, innovation, and accountability
• Building a culture of sustainability—not enforcing it from the top
• Incentivizing EV adoption through smart, business-aligned programs
• Why data and decentralization drive global impact
• The risk of turning sustainability into a compliance-only function

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Max: Hi people. Welcome to another episode of the Sustainability Circle podcast. I’m Max, co-founder of TSC, and I’m again your host today. We bring you insights, success stories, and practical advice from top sustainability leaders driving change in organizations worldwide. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jamieson Saab, Global Head of Sustainability at Wolt—a fast-growing tech company focused on quick commerce services. If you’ve lived in a city somewhere in Europe, you’ve probably used Wolt or at least heard of it. He’s been leading sustainability initiatives, making sure sustainability isn’t just a buzzword but a real driver of impact and growth at Wolt. I’ve known Jamieson for quite a while—he’s also a founding member of the Sustainability Circle—and when we spoke in the past about his role, I was really struck by how sustainability at Wolt operates in a very unique way. Something Jamieson described provocatively as “startup sustainability” or “sustainability without a strategy.” A framing I really liked because it resonated with my own experience working in scale-ups, where things move so fast that traditional strategies often fall short. So today we’ll explore together “startup sustainability”—a real-world approach to scaling impact at Wolt. Jamieson, welcome to the show. Pleasure to have you here.

Jamieson: So nice to be here, Max. Thanks for having me.

Max: As usual, we dive right into the episode. Tell us how you actually ended up in sustainability. Maybe share a bit about your career path. I also know you’ve lived in different countries around the world. Tell us more about your journey and how you ended up at Wolt.

Jamieson: Sure, Max. Well, as you know, I’m originally from Canada. I grew up right in the downtown core and did the standard thing—went to university, got a business degree. Sustainability was something that was just becoming interesting. It was 2004. Al Gore had just written his book An Inconvenient Truth, and the university I attended offered its first program in something called CSR. I thought, that sounds cool. I initially thought I wanted to be an investment banker, but I realized I’m not actually that good with numbers. So I tried something different. During my studies, I had the chance to live in Mexico and China. I got to do an exchange and see firsthand the impact big and small companies have—especially coming from a developed country and living in places where things were a little different. That’s what probably cemented my desire to go into sustainability full time.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent half my career in North America working for large retailers like Home Depot and OfficeMax, helping define and implement sustainability strategies that drive business growth—both on the consumer and B2B sides. In 2015, I moved to Copenhagen and became Head of Sustainability at UNOPS—the United Nations Office for Project Services. They operate as a consulting firm for other UN agencies, working more on implementation. I loved that job. I got to work on many different sustainable development projects, including the development of SDG 12, which focuses on sustainable public procurement.

I’ve always prided myself on being a shopper at heart. I love shopping—and I’ve turned that into a career path with a sustainability twist. Today, I’m Head of Sustainability at Wolt. It’s a very exciting and big role, and as we’ll talk about, scale-ups and startups—generally entrepreneurial companies—have to approach sustainability a little differently. I work at Wolt because I love food and the potential to have a big impact on how people live their everyday lives.

Max: Thank you so much. I think this is going to be a really exciting episode because usually our guests are from more traditional corporates. Today we really have a breath of fresh air—talking startup culture. I mean, Wolt might operate with a startup culture, but as a scale-up, it’s a major player with thousands of employees and operations in many countries. So just as a disclaimer, we’ll talk about startups, but Wolt is actually a proper corporate—just with a startup mindset. Can you tell us more about what that means in practice? How many employees and countries do you operate in? I imagine there’s a big fleet of drivers delivering all those services. Give us a sense of the scale.

Jamieson: You bet, Max. Wolt is a technology company, and I think that’s an important place to start. We don’t have a big physical footprint in the traditional sense. We have offices in every country we operate in—right now, 30 countries. We work with about 100,000 restaurant partners and 250,000 couriers—who are gig workers working with us, not for us. When I started at Wolt three years ago, we had about 2,300 people in offices. Today, that number is closer to 13,000. So in just three years, you can imagine the scale and speed. It’s been like holding onto your hat and seat because we’re on a rocket ship. Our mission is to deliver joy and earning opportunities in the cities we operate in. We support small restaurants and retailers to grow their businesses by connecting them with 42 million registered users via our app. Our core offering is convenience and variety—you want something, we get it to you in 30 minutes or less.

Our platform connects restaurants, merchants, retailers, and consumers with courier partners who deliver those products. Coming out of COVID, courier partners were frontline workers, delivering food when people couldn’t leave their homes. There was some discussion about whether this model would stick. But like working from home, people got used to it, and I don’t think it’s going away.

Max: It’s a very good term to call it a rocket ship because I can imagine that, as you described, the growth is so fast. And you also said that Wolt’s approach to sustainability is about operating without a rigid, traditional strategy. That’s fascinating, but at the same time, probably necessary in such a fast-changing environment. So can you explain what you mean by that? Why is it important to not have a rigid strategy in a company that’s growing so quickly? How do you actually operate with that approach?

Jamieson: Yeah, great question. And I don’t want people to think we don’t have a strategy—because that makes it sound like I don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s hopefully not the impression I want to give. But I think Peter Drucker said it best: culture eats strategy for breakfast. That’s especially true with the types of people who work at startup or tech companies. If you don’t have a culture that supports your strategy or your vision, then it doesn’t matter how great your strategy is—it’s just not going to happen.

Having worked for big, public companies, I’ve seen how we’d spend lots of money on consultants who develop strategies for us—and then those strategies go on a shelf and collect dust. At Wolt, having a rigid strategy—meaning a fixed plan with very clear targets—is hard, because the business is constantly evolving. We need to be flexible, or agile, to respond. A bank, for example, is a large institution with stable processes. It’s easier for them to have a rigid strategy. But Wolt is still building as we go. We have a North Star, but we build toward it iteratively.

When I joined Wolt, the first piece of advice the CFO gave me was, “This is not an organization where you tell people what to do.” At first I thought, oh, this will be easy—we’ll have policies, targets. I’ve done this before. But when he said that, it was kind of an “oh shit” moment, because I realized it was going to be a lot harder. That’s why we focus more on building a strong culture of sustainability—on embedding accountability across the organization. Then, once that foundation is there, the targets and strategies naturally follow and stick.

Companies need to reach a certain level of maturity—processes, culture—before a rigid strategy becomes truly relevant.

Max: That makes total sense. So in practice, how does that look at Wolt? How do you approach sustainability in a structured enough way without falling into that rigid strategy trap?

Jamieson: In practice, we use five key pillars as a framework. They’re based on a materiality assessment we did, which identified the most important sustainability topics for us. We use that to guide how we prioritize projects. A lot of our work is based on pilots. We test, tweak, and learn quickly. Sometimes we fail fast. And when things work, we embed them into how we operate. That’s where the magic happens.

Another challenge: we operate in 30 countries, each with different cultural contexts and languages. That adds a lot of complexity. For example, waste is one of our pillars—we want to reduce waste in our offices and help our merchants reduce food waste. But when we talked to our GM in Kazakhstan, she said, “Jamie, have you ever been to Kazakhstan? We don’t recycle here.” Recycling just isn’t part of the culture or infrastructure.

So if we had rigid waste targets across all countries, we’d fail in some markets simply due to lack of infrastructure. Instead, we adapt. Maybe recycling isn’t viable in Kazakhstan yet, but other initiatives might be. We focus on what can be done—and that flexibility makes the overall strategy stronger.

Max: Yeah, I totally echo that. Sustainability is about building a culture. An organization is just a sum of people. I also love the concept of the North Star. Instead of enforcing strategy from the top down, you tell people: here’s where we want to go—figure out the best path. That works really well in tech cultures, where people want autonomy and like to figure things out on their own. Now, how do you balance that flexibility with the need to show clear, measurable impact? Otherwise, you might struggle to get buy-in or budget. Is it possible to stay flexible and accountable?

Jamieson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think data plays a big role here. On one hand, the flexibility fuels innovation. If sustainability were easy, we wouldn’t need sustainability teams. But because of the complexity—especially across countries—we need to give people room to act. Innovation happens when there’s space.

Our North Star is to set a net zero target. We don’t yet know exactly how to get there, but we do know some of the major drivers. For example, 80% of our carbon emissions come from courier deliveries. But our couriers are gig workers—they’re not employees. They choose their own vehicles. That autonomy is core to the model, and we want to preserve it.

Still, we need to find ways to influence that system. So Wolt has invested heavily in building up our data capabilities. We're now able to track what’s happening in the markets, measure the real impact of our actions, and evaluate pilots against that.

When it comes to accountability, our leadership team is really strong. They believe in this. That support—from the CFO, from senior leaders—makes a big difference. And we also have a culture that accepts failure. We test pilots, and if they don’t work, we learn something. That’s just part of the process. We also try to anchor these pilots in the teams where they belong. We fund them centrally, but let local teams take ownership. If they work, we can scale them into global programs.

Max: Yeah, thanks for that insight. I think when you have the right culture, that can definitely work. Do you think this kind of flexible approach could also work outside of fast-growing, tech-driven companies?

Jamieson: Hmm. I think, as I said earlier, good ideas can come from anywhere. And there’s a role for everyone—employees, consumers, partners, suppliers—in sustainability. So yes, I do think elements of this approach can work in many types of companies. But it really depends on whether there’s a willingness to do it that way.

It’s especially relevant now with the new EU regulations coming in, which are very compliance-focused. I think things like CSRD are a huge opportunity for sustainability people. It’s forcing companies to get serious and be transparent about their impact. But the risk is that companies may lose their ability to innovate because they’re so focused on compliance. That’s dangerous.

Sustainability should be aligned with business objectives. It shouldn’t be something on the side. But sometimes, it has to start on the side in order to gain traction and get people excited about it. If you can’t build that excitement—at the grassroots or executive level—it won’t work. Again, it comes back to culture.

Max: Very true. Now that we’ve talked about the theory and your approach, let’s get more actionable. What are the key sustainability initiatives at Wolt that you believe are driving the most impact and business growth?

Jamieson: Love that question. Our mission for sustainability at Wolt is to make cities better places to live. That became our anchor point when we developed our approach. Everyone agreed that this was the broader purpose of the company—even if they weren’t exactly sure what it meant in practice.

We ended up defining our sustainability framework around that goal. The five pillars are: taking action on climate, minimizing waste, supporting our partners to grow and thrive, focusing on diversity and inclusion and community impact, and finally—enabling consumers to make better choices.

That last pillar is probably the hardest, but also the most interesting for me. We’re a delivery platform. People are buying things through us. They’re voting with their wallets every day. If we want to drive change, it has to start with consumers.

One of the most important areas for us right now is electrification. There’s a growing expectation from consumers that deliveries should be zero-emission. They want Wolt to do the right thing.

But it’s complicated. If we employed our courier partners, we could just give them electric vehicles. But we don’t—and they don’t want us to. They want to remain independent.

So the question becomes: how do we get people who work with Wolt into electric vehicles or bikes? Especially when they might only work on the platform a few hours a week?

We’ve resisted the idea of giving consumers the option to pay more for a “sustainable delivery.” We believe all deliveries should be sustainable—period. It shouldn’t be something extra that people have to pay for. We’ve all seen this with flight bookings—those carbon offset options nobody clicks. We don’t want to replicate that behavior.

Max: Makes total sense. Are there some grassroots initiatives you’ve launched that are helping solve this challenge?

Jamieson: Yes—one that I love is our EV Ads program. Here’s the problem: courier partners want to do the right thing for the environment. But there are barriers. EVs are more expensive. As independent workers, they don’t have employment records, so they struggle to get financing. There’s also the perception that EVs won’t help them earn more, or that the battery range isn’t enough. And of course, in places like Finland or Norway, bikes just aren’t practical in winter.

So we came up with a win-win-win solution. Some couriers already have electric vehicles. We invite them to have their cars branded with Wolt advertising. We then sell that ad space to our merchant partners.

The courier earns extra income, Wolt gains ad revenue, and merchants get great data on impressions and conversions. It’s a new revenue stream that doesn’t cost the consumer anything, and it rewards couriers who already made the shift.

Long term, this also creates an incentive. If couriers know they can earn more by switching to electric, they’re more likely to do it. We’re seeing exactly that now—couriers are asking how they can join the program. So while it doesn’t directly reduce our footprint yet, it builds momentum for change.

Max: That’s such a smart program. Are there other examples where sustainability is also driving business value?

Jamieson: Absolutely. Business value comes in many forms—monetary, operational, even retention.

Retention is big for us. Couriers can choose to work with Wolt or other platforms—or even multiple at once. So if we create a great experience, they’ll choose us more often.

One systemic issue is access to financing. Many couriers can’t get loans for EVs, even though they earn decent money, simply because they’re independent.

So we’ve started to scale a program called Better Cities. Through partnerships, we help couriers access vehicle leases. It’s partly a social impact program—giving people access to something they couldn’t get otherwise. But it also drives business value.

Electric vehicles can carry more, which means couriers can bundle deliveries and earn more. It also makes our logistics more efficient. We probably wouldn’t have realized this benefit if we hadn’t just gone out and tried it. That willingness to experiment is key.

In addition, different countries are now launching their own pilots—tailored to their markets. Some offer incentives to third-party logistics partners or individual couriers. These initiatives can then be scaled across the organization.

Max: How do you ensure that your sustainability efforts are aligned and effective across all of these countries, especially with such different regulatory environments?

Jamieson: Great question. That’s where data comes in. Getting solid data on sustainability programs has always been hard. How do you measure sustainability? That’s a tough one.

My solution was to hire someone really smart—someone technical—who could help us build proper dashboards and impact metrics. We brought this person into the analytics organization, not directly into the sustainability team. That’s part of our broader approach: embedding sustainability into the business.

We’ve created roles that sit within other teams. For example, we have someone embedded in our real estate team working on things like office energy use and renewable purchasing. Same in analytics. The sustainability team itself is small, but by embedding people elsewhere, we’re influencing from behind.

And it’s working. Because of this setup, we can now measure the impact of every pilot. We have hundreds of them happening at any time across 30 countries. This embedded approach creates ownership in the business. It builds accountability. And it prevents sustainability from becoming “just another team on the side.”

Max: Totally agree. In the end, sustainability has to be embedded into every department—and ideally into most job descriptions. That’s when real accountability happens. Then the head of sustainability becomes more of a change-maker—someone who influences culture and empowers others.

Now that we’ve heard how Wolt is scaling sustainability without a rigid strategy—and doing it across a complex, fast-growing business—what would you say are the main advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Let’s start with the advantages.

Jamieson: One example is regulation. There’s a time and place for everything in sustainability. Some topics are higher priority than others, depending on context.

Take waste, for example. We’re required to measure office waste to comply with some upcoming regulations. But the effort it takes to collect that data may not be justified if it’s a low-impact area for us. Instead, we might prioritize big, long-term programs that drive more change.

When I joined Wolt, one of the big issues was our office footprint. We had many offices, and most weren’t using renewable energy. The traditional approach would’ve been: fix everything immediately.

But we knew we’d be moving offices frequently as we grew. So instead, we focused on building a standard for future offices. That way, each new lease moves us closer to our goals—without wasting time on spaces we’re going to leave anyway. That’s one advantage of flexibility: you can think smarter, not just harder.

Max: What about disadvantages or pitfalls? Is there anything that a rigid strategy would have helped you avoid?

Jamieson: Oh, for sure. There are lots of disadvantages. This approach is harder. We’re constantly tracking many moving pieces. It’s harder to show short-term impact because we’re investing in the long term.

When I first joined, I thought it would be easy. Just set policies, roll out an environmental management system, and done. But then I realized: that’s not how this company works.

And honestly, there aren’t many playbooks for how to do sustainability without a rigid strategy. If anything, the field is becoming more formalized—more professionalized—which is great in many ways. But it also means we risk losing some of the creativity and innovation that makes sustainability powerful in the first place.

Max: So looking ahead, what’s your biggest challenge in scaling sustainability as Wolt continues to grow?

Jamieson: There are a lot. But first, let me tell you what’s not a challenge anymore: leadership commitment. That’s still super strong, which is amazing. I don’t feel like I have to “sell” sustainability internally. Our CFO asks smart questions and is very supportive. And we have a young, engaged workforce. There’s a lot of grassroots momentum.

The real challenge is the middle layer of the organization. Top leadership is on board. The teams doing the work are engaged. But the middle layer—managers and decision-makers—often don’t yet have their own vision for sustainability. They’re not always sure how it fits into their area.

That’s tough—especially in a company like Wolt, where we don’t like to tell people what to do. We hire smart people and give them autonomy. So we either need to bake sustainability into their roles from day one, or invest a lot of time helping them get there later.

And of course, the other thing that keeps me up at night is regulation. Particularly in the EU, there’s so much coming. The risk is that sustainability becomes a pure compliance function. That would be a loss.

CSRD, for example—it has so much potential to drive transparency and real change. But if companies only focus on the reporting side, they could lose the energy, the innovation, the grassroots engagement. If sustainability turns into a legal function, that would be pretty sad.

Max: I totally agree. With all the regulation, sustainability risks being seen as just a cost center. Successful leaders will tie sustainability to revenue protection—or even revenue generation. That’s the real business case.

And that’s where communities like the Sustainability Circle come in. By sharing insights with other sustainability leaders—people facing the same challenges—you can find the strategies that work, and take them back to your organization.

Jamie, we’ve already been talking for 50 minutes! I usually promise guests we’ll keep it to 30. One last question before we wrap: what’s one piece of advice you’d give to other sustainability leaders working in tech-driven companies?

Jamieson: Never give up. Be brave enough to try new things. That’s probably the best advice I can give.

Also, remember: good ideas come from anywhere. And we can’t do everything ourselves. So make sure you’re tapping into people at every level of the company—suppliers, employees, execs. Everyone can drive change.

One of my old bosses, Tyler M., VP of Sustainability at Canadian Tire, used to say: “There’s no silver bullet. We take a silver shotgun.” That idea has really stayed with me. You don’t know what’s going to work until you try.

Max: Perfect last words. Thanks so much, Jamie, for sharing your insights today.

Before we wrap—what’s next for sustainability at Wolt?

Jamieson: A lot! We’ve focused heavily on the environmental side—climate, emissions. Things are moving there. Pilots are scaling, and we’re having bigger conversations about acceleration.

What I’m most excited about now is the social side of sustainability. That’s an area where we haven’t done as much as I would’ve liked—so we’re going to work on that more this year. In fact, we just posted a new role on the team to help figure it out. So that’s probably the most exciting thing coming up.

Max: Amazing. Thanks so much. For anyone listening who wants to connect with Jamie, head over to LinkedIn—and maybe check out that open role!

And to everyone tuning in: see you next time on the Sustainability Leaders Show. Bye-bye.

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