2023
Sustainability Communication Strategy, Sokos Hotels
Services
Service Design, Sustainability Strategy Support, Research & Insights, Persona & Scenario Design, Systems Thinking, Stakeholder Alignment
Team
SOK Sustainability & Strategy Leadership, Miltton Sustainability Consultants, Retail Operations & Brand Stakeholders
Designing Sustainability into Everyday Retail at National Scale
Sustainable Retail Systems
Human-Centered Sustainability
Climate & Food Systems Transformation
Cooperative Business Model
Strategy-to-Experience Alignment
Overview
SOK Mara leads retail operations for S Group, Finland’s largest cooperative retailer, serving nearly 80% of Finnish households through brands such as Prisma, S-market, and Sale. In 2023, SOK updated its sustainability strategy to translate ambitious climate and responsibility commitments into concrete actions across stores, supply chains, and customer experiences. As Lead Service Designer, I supported the strategy by grounding sustainability ambitions in real human behavior. My work focused on research, insights, personas, and scenarios connecting customer expectations, employee realities, and operational constraints so the final strategy could move beyond targets and reports into everyday decision-making at scale.
Context & Challenge
From Ambitious Targets to Everyday Retail Reality
By 2023, S Group had already made bold sustainability commitments: carbon negativity by 2025, a 90% emissions reduction by 2030, and a fundamental shift toward sustainable food systems. The challenge was no longer ambition; it was execution across nearly 2,000 outlets, thousands of employees, and millions of customers with diverse needs and price sensitivities. Retail sustainability sits at the intersection of operations, customer choice, and supply chains. Energy crises, inflation, and evolving EU regulation (CSRD, ESRS) added pressure to ensure that sustainability decisions remained commercially viable, credible, and understandable to customers. The strategy update needed to align climate goals, food systems, circular economy initiatives, and biodiversity into a coherent direction while making sustainability feel natural, affordable, and trustworthy in everyday shopping moments.
Design Approach
Translating Sustainability Ambition into Human-Centered Strategy
My role was to bring a service design lens into the sustainability strategy process. I led and supported qualitative research, synthesizing insights from customers, store-level realities, and internal stakeholders to understand expectations, tensions, and decision drivers around sustainable consumption. I developed personas and future-facing scenarios that reflected real customer mindsets from price-conscious families to sustainability-driven consumers and operational perspectives from retail staff. These artifacts helped align stakeholders on who the strategy was really for and how sustainability choices would play out in practice. The insights and scenarios were then handed over to sustainability consultants to shape the strategic narrative. This ensured the final strategy was not only scientifically robust and policy-aligned, but also grounded in lived experience and behavioral realism.
Strategy Integration
Embedding Sustainability into Retail Systems and Experiences
The resulting strategy embedded sustainability directly into S Group’s retail operating model. Climate action focused on renewable energy leadership, energy efficiency, and value chain emissions reduction, while food systems strategy centered on nudging customers toward plant-based, affordable, and locally produced choices. Rather than restricting choice, the strategy emphasized visibility, affordability, and convenience, making sustainable options easier to choose without moralizing or excluding customers. Loyalty data, in-store communication, pricing campaigns, and merchandising all became tools for behavior change. From a systems perspective, sustainability was aligned across governance, procurement standards, store design, and brand communication, allowing local cooperatives to adapt initiatives while maintaining a shared national direction.
Impact
From Strategy to Measurable Change in Retail and Consumption
The 2023 sustainability strategy supported S Group in achieving and accelerating several targets ahead of schedule, while strengthening customer trust and brand leadership in responsible retail. Sustainability became a core driver of operational decisions, customer experience design, and long-term value creation. By grounding the strategy in human-centered insights, SOK Mara ensured sustainability was not treated as a reporting exercise, but as a lived part of everyday retail, from energy use and packaging to food choices and loyalty engagement.
90%
Emissions Reduction Achieved Early
Reduction target five years ahead of schedule through renewable energy, efficiency upgrades, and systemic operational change.
60%
Plant-Based Food Sales
Of total food sales by 2024
31%
Food Waste Reduction
Compared to the 2014 baseline, supported by real-time tracking and dynamic pricing models.
49,000 kg
Packaging Material Avoided Annually
Packaging redesign initiatives saved approximately 47,000 kg of glass and 2,000 kg of aluminum per year.
// Pictures are representing some of the executed concepts in the strategy //
Reflection
This project reinforced my belief that sustainability only scales when it is designed around real human behavior. Working with SOK Mara showed how powerful service design can be in bridging climate science, business strategy, and everyday choices—especially in environments as complex and visible as national retail. As Lead Service Designer, my contribution was not to write the strategy, but to make it believable and usable: aligning expectations through research, personas, and scenarios, and ensuring sustainability narratives reflected real life. This experience continues to shape how I approach sustainability, strategy, and systems design focusing on frictionless adoption, trust, and long-term impact rather than ambition alone.
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