Background: Since the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development establishment in 2015, the UN member nations have pressured organizations to improve their sustainability engagements in order to enable the nations to meet their agreed sustainable development goals. To ensure organizational transparency regarding an organization’s sustainability engagements, a regulation regarding non-financial reporting entered into force in 2016. However, the non-financial reporting is principally external-driven, and the communicated information is not received by the ones realizing these sustainability engagements, namely the internal stakeholders.

Problem: The fact that external communication of an organization’s sustainability engagements improves the consumption from consumers, together with the regulation of non-financial reporting, there is no coincidence that a lot of the sustainability communication from organizations is directed to external stakeholders rather than internal stakeholders. Furthermore, the internal communication of an organization’s sustainability engagements is an insufficiently researched topic, although it is of great importance to foster employee engagement.

Purpose: This study aims to discover how organizations within the food retail industry communicate their sustainability engagements internally throughout the levels of the organization, from top management down to all employee levels.  Method: The research is conducted through a qualitative research design with six semi-structured interviews. The interviewees represented three different levels of two different food retail organizations. Findings were analyzed and compared to previous research within the topic.

Conclusion: Findings show that the examined organizations do communicate their sustainability engagements to their internal stakeholders. However, this communication is done through communication channels where the actual information is not received by its intended receivers. This results in internal stakeholders being unaware of their organization’s sustainability engagements. Since awareness is a prerequisite for engagement, preferred communication channels from the receiver’s perspective and an organizational structure that enables top management to reach its intended receiver are identified as vital components to engage the internal stakeholders with its organization’s sustainability engagements.