How HELLAGRO Won an EcoVadis Silver Medal on Its First Attempt

Most companies treat their first EcoVadis assessment as a rehearsal. Submit what you have, read the scorecard, fix the gaps, come back next year. It works, but it costs a year, and it means the first rating your customers see is the weak one. HELLAGRO S.A., a Greek company, chose not to do that. Their first submission, prepared with Enable Good over 2025 and 2026, earned an EcoVadis Silver Medal. This is what that took.

The starting point

HELLAGRO had never been through an EcoVadis assessment. The pressure was commercial, not regulatory: corporate customers increasingly expected a rating from their suppliers, and a missing or weak rating was becoming a question in every procurement conversation. The brief to Enable Good was simple and demanding at the same time. Get it right the first time.

That brief changes how you work. A rehearsal submission can be assembled from whatever exists. A first submission that has to score well has to be built, and built against what EcoVadis will actually ask of a company of that size, in that sector.

Step one: know exactly what will be asked

EcoVadis does not use one questionnaire. It adapts the questions and the weighting to the company's industry, size and countries of operation. So the first piece of work was to map what EcoVadis expects from a company of HELLAGRO's size and sector: which of the four themes would carry the most weight, which criteria would apply, and what kind of evidence would count for each. Without that map, a company answers the questionnaire in the order it appears and finds out afterwards where the points were.

Step two: build the evidence base, theme by theme

EcoVadis scores four themes: environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. For each one it looks for three layers: a policy, evidence of action, and evidence of results. A well-written policy with nothing behind it scores as a promise. The work on the HELLAGRO submission was therefore not writing; it was building the evidence base across all four themes so that every policy had implementation behind it and every claim could be shown.

This is the stage most first-time companies underestimate. It is where certificates get located, procedures get formalised, data gets pulled together into something an analyst can verify, and gaps get closed rather than papered over. It is also where a submission stops being a questionnaire and becomes a record of how the company actually runs.

Step three: a submission where every claim has a document behind it

The final principle was the simplest and the strictest. Nothing went into the submission unless there was a document to support it. EcoVadis analysts check; an answer without evidence is not neutral, it is marked down. So the submission was constructed claim by claim, with the supporting document attached to each, rather than answered and then decorated with whatever files were to hand.

The result

On its very first assessment, HELLAGRO S.A. was awarded the EcoVadis Silver Medal. Under the medal system in force since 2025, Silver places a company among the top 15 percent of all companies rated globally in the previous twelve months. No warm-up round, no learning from a first failure. First attempt, Silver.

What the medal changed

EcoVadis exists because large buyers now screen suppliers on sustainability. In HELLAGRO's own words, the medal acts as an independent validation for partners selecting suppliers. In practice, the Silver Medal protected the customer relationships the company already had and strengthened its hand in winning new ones. Sustainability stopped being a questionnaire to survive and became a commercial credential.

What another company can take from this

1. Decide up front whether the first submission is a rehearsal or the real one. The answer changes the amount of preparation, and it should be a decision, not an accident.
2. Map the questionnaire for your size and sector before you write anything. The points are not evenly spread, and you cannot prioritise what you have not seen.
3. Treat every policy as a claim that needs evidence of action and results behind it. That is where the score is.
4. Do not answer "yes" to anything you cannot attach a document to. Unsupported answers cost more than honest gaps.
5. Leave sustainable procurement in. It is the theme first-time companies most often leave thin, and it drags the overall score down.

If you want to know how far your own company is from a submission like this, the free EcoVadis Readiness Scorecard takes twelve questions and shows the evidence gaps to close first. The full explanation of how the assessment works, including the 2025 medal system, is in our EcoVadis certification guide. And if you would rather have someone build the evidence base with you, that is the work Enable Good did for HELLAGRO, and does for companies across Europe.