The Challenge
Retailer expectations don’t stand still. Walmart’s Project Gigaton recognition resets every year and must be re-earned — and its bar keeps rising, with growing weight on scope 3 emissions and credible action plans. Sauder Woodworking had earned Giga Guru status once before, but the submission was built on estimates and manual calculations the team couldn’t fully stand behind.
The Solution
With Tracera as its system of record for sustainability data, Sauder pulled its full climate footprint (including newly tracked scope 3 categories) directly from the platform and submitted with confidence.
The Result
Sauder Woodworking earned Walmart Giga Guru status for the second consecutive year. In the most recent assessment, just 967 of Walmart’s 6,863 suppliers participating in Project Gigaton (roughly 14 percent) earned the distinction.
Sauder Woodworking’s Sauder Supply division
‘The ask from the retailers just keeps ratcheting up’
As one of the largest ready-to-assemble furniture manufacturers in the U.S., Sauder Woodworking answers to some of the most demanding customers in retail. Walmart, Target and IKEA each come with their own sustainability surveys, their own reporting criteria and their own timelines.
“The ask from the retailers just keeps ratcheting up.“ — Tom Wise, Director of Product Safety and Compliance, Sauder Woodworking Co.
For years, that meant recalculating the same underlying data again and again to fit each customer’s format. Innovation and Sustainability Scientist Mike Zimmerman would send roughly 30 emails to colleagues and subsidiaries chasing utility bills, fuel records and mileage logs, then spend weeks compiling and reconciling the results — only to rework the numbers for the next survey.
That was the world Sauder left behind when it moved its reporting from spreadsheets to Tracera.
Chief among those asks: Walmart’s Project Gigaton, the retailer’s initiative to reduce, avoid or sequester 1 billion metric tons of CO₂e emissions across its global value chain. Suppliers who join, set goals and demonstrate results can earn Giga Guru status, Walmart’s highest tier of supplier recognition. It’s not a lifetime achievement. Recognition resets each year and must be re-earned through the annual sustainability survey.
From guesstimates to confidence
Sauder has now earned Giga Guru status two years running — and the difference between the two wins tells the story.
The first time, the team got there the hard way. “We did our best to guesstimate, and our data wasn’t as clean,” recalled Tom Wise, Director of Product Safety and Compliance. “When we did it this time, we were much more confident in the information we shared. That’s where Tracera came in.”
For the most recent recognition, based on Sauder’s 2024 reporting year, the submission drew on Tracera data across the survey’s scope, including the company’s climate footprint, people practices, private brand packaging and its pulp, paper and timber commodity reporting. It also included an action plan anchored in Sauder’s own goals around waste reduction and renewable energy.
“I was able to go in and just pull the data from Tracera for the 2024 climate footprint,” explained Shawn Najarian, Customer Compliance Lead, who drove the survey response. “Next year will be even better, because we’ll be able to add more of the categories we can report on.”
Scope 3 made the difference
What likely tipped Sauder into Giga Guru territory the second time was progress on the hardest problem in carbon accounting: scope 3.
Walmart put significant weight on suppliers advancing their full carbon footprint — not just scopes 1 and 2. With Tracera, Sauder was able to report on four scope 3 categories the team had never been able to quantify before: purchased goods and services, capital goods, business travel and employee commuting.
“We can start focusing on scope 3, which we never would have tackled without Tracera.” — Mike Zimmerman, Innovation and Sustainability Scientist
Before, a scope 3 question on a customer survey was a dead end. “We probably would have just not even answered the question,” Wise said. “We didn’t have any way of calculating it.”
Now the answers come from the platform.
Data the whole business can trust
The Giga Guru submission is one output of a system that now runs across the company. Sauder’s 20-plus sites and subsidiaries load their own data — utility bills, fuel, travel, purchase data — on a monthly basis, cutting the reporting cycle from weeks of email-chasing to minutes of pulling what’s needed. The team estimates it has cut the time it takes to compile the company’s carbon footprint by 70 percent.
The platform also acts as a safety net. As Sauder has right-sized operations and reduced energy use, Tracera automatically flags year-over-year changes for review. “It takes the errors out,” Najarian said. “We’re getting flags like, ‘This is not the same as what it was last year — are you sure this is correct?’ and I love that.”
The payoff reaches well beyond the compliance team. “It’s completely cross-functional,” Najarian said. “We have input from HR, input from finance. It comes from all across the company.” And the Walmart recognition is now working for Sauder commercially: the company’s sales team can point to its Giga Guru status as a differentiator with retail customers.
‘The sooner you get started, the better off you are’
For manufacturers watching customer sustainability requirements multiply, Zimmerman’s advice is simple: “The time’s coming when you’re just going to have to do it, even if you’re not required. Your customers will want it regardless. So the sooner you get started, the better off you are. It’s been night and day for me.”
Wise puts the partnership in plainer terms still: “You guys have done what you said you would do.”
