Sedex named a Representative Vendor in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Sustainable Procurement Applications

We’ve been named a Representative Vendor in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Sustainable Procurement Applications. We believe this recognition comes at a moment when procurement and sustainability teams are being asked to prove that supplier engagement is not just well-intentioned, but verifiably effective.  

For more than 20 years, Sedex has helped companies and their procurement teams identify, manage, and resolve environmental and social risks in their supply chains. We truly feel that being included in this year’s Market Guide reflects continued demand for that work, even as the broader market navigates significant change.

These changes, including regulatory shifts, trade policy turbulence and tightening budgets, will be familiar to anyone running a sustainability, supply chain due diligence, risk management or responsible procurement programme.

The EU’s Omnibus I Package has narrowed the scope of organisations required to disclose under the CSRD, and amendments to the CSDDD have scaled back multi-tier supply chain requirements. In the United States, federal priorities continue to change. But ethical and environmental practices haven’t slipped off of the sourcing agenda.

The report notes that “sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) remains strategically important, with chief procurement officers (CPOs) ranking this as one of the top five themes they expect to become urgent during the next six to 18 months according to the 2026 Gartner Chief Procurement Office Role Agenda Poll.” Nearly half of procurement leaders now include sustainability in their strategic supplier scorecards, alongside cost, quality and delivery.

The question is no longer whether to invest in sustainable procurement, but how to invest wisely.

Get the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Sustainable Procurement Applications here.

Market direction: reducing supplier burden, deepening granularity

Two market shifts highlighted in this year’s Guide map closely to the work Sedex was built for.

The first is the move toward verified, more granular data that reflects individual facilities or products. Headquarter-level scores tell buyers something useful, but they can obscure the realities of a single factory: such as unpaid wages at a Tier 2 site, undocumented overtime, or a grievance left unaddressed since the previous audit. 

Sedex’s SMETA assessment – a globally recognised social audit methodology – is conducted in-person at the site level to capture these distinctions. Findings flow back into the Sedex Platform with corrective actions assigned, tracked, and closed out, completing the cycle from risk identification through to resolution. More than 250,000 site-level issues were resolved through Sedex in 2025 alone. 

The second is reducing the burden on suppliers. Suppliers responding to fragmented, repetitive data requests across multiple customers struggle to keep up – meaning either more time is spent on data requests than addressing gaps, or that data takes too long to reach buyer teams, inhibiting analysis and prioritisation efforts.  

Sedex was designed from the start as a shared environment: suppliers complete an assessment once, share their data with multiple customers, and provide their latest audit report across their buyer base. This results in higher response rates, faster and more reliable data, and less duplication on every side.

“We believe that the recognition in this year’s Gartner Market Guide reflects what our customers already understand: credible supply chain due diligence starts with robust, site-level insight that goes beyond Tier 1.

“Market conditions, stakeholder expectations and regulatory requirements will continue to evolve, but businesses are still expected to show how they identify, assess and address risks across complex supply chains.

“Sedex exists to make that process more practical, scalable and consistent – helping companies turn visibility into informed action.”

Jon Hancock, CEO, Sedex

Sustainable procurement solutions support high-stakes decisions

In our view, this year’s Market Guide signals that buying organisations are increasingly looking for platforms that can support high-stakes decisions: multi-tier due diligence, site-level claims and the integration of diverse data sources for triangulation.

This robustness is what Sedex is built to support – through our solutions delivering a combination of scale and depth, and multiple data sources with a range of collection methods to help refine and validate insights.

Learn more about our solutions for sustainable procurement programmes.

Gartner, Market Guide for Sustainable Procurement Applications, Miguel Cossio, Marta Muñoz, Kevin Lawrence, 20 April 2026

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