Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Dr. Lars Börger, nova-Institut · August 2026
Here is the map. Two of the things you sell run on different buyers: the assessment a company needs because a regulation or a customer demands it, and the strategy work a company buys because it has decided to move first. This page covers where both sit across Europe, who signs, and roughly how many of them there are. It describes the market rather than your institute, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Chemical producers across Europe
The center of the defossilization question and the segment where the work is already funded. Worth being straight about the shape: the overwhelming majority of these companies are small or mid-sized, so the reachable layer is the several thousand specialty and mid-cap producers alongside the majors, not the headline number.
Who signs: chief sustainability officer, VP of renewable feedstocks, head of research and development, head of raw material procurement, corporate strategy.
29,000 to 32,000
companies in the European chemical sector; industry bodies put small and mid-sized firms at well over nine in ten of them
Plastics converters and packaging producers
Where a materials decision turns into a physical product, and the segment under the most direct customer pressure, because the brand owner above them asks the question and the converter has to answer it. Mostly mid-sized, mostly without an in-house sustainability function, which is the exact condition that creates an external mandate.
Who signs: managing director or owner, technical director, head of sustainability where one exists, and the key account lead who owns the brand relationship.
46,000 to 52,000
converting companies across Europe, the large majority small and mid-sized
Brand owners in food, drink, cosmetics and household goods
The layer that sets the requirement and pays for the answer. They are not enumerated as a group anywhere, because a brand owner is defined by a commitment it published rather than by a code it files under. The food and drink manufacturing base alone runs into the hundreds of thousands across the EU, and the reachable slice is the few thousand large enough to carry a named packaging or sustainability lead.
Who signs: chief sustainability officer, head of packaging, director of procurement, head of corporate affairs.
280,000 to 300,000 food and drink manufacturers
EU wide and overwhelmingly small; the reachable layer is the few thousand carrying a named sustainability or packaging role
Technology developers in recycling, bio-based materials and carbon utilization
Small by count, high in intent, and the group most likely to need an independent read they can put in front of an investor or a first customer. They surface through funding rounds, plant announcements and public project records rather than through any industry list, which is why they are usually reached late by everyone.
Who signs: founder or chief executive, chief technology officer, head of business development, and the investor sitting on the board.
Hundreds, not thousands
across Europe; no single register exists, so they are found through funding and project announcements one at a time
Investors, funders and the public policy layer
Two small groups that behave the same way. Both commission work to support a decision they cannot make alone, and both pay for independence rather than for volume. Neither is listed anywhere useful, and both are reached by name. Narrow by count and unusually valuable, because one relationship can shape a whole program.
Who signs: investment director, head of sustainable finance, fund principal, and on the public side the head of unit or the program officer.
No public register
identified by mandate and by name; deliberately a narrow, high-value list rather than a volume segment

Where the openings are

1
A conference and a report both reach the people already in the conversation. They are strong channels for the converted and weak ones for the companies that need the work most, because the company that has not started is the least likely to attend, subscribe or join. That is a distribution problem, not a credibility one.
2
The buyer is a seat that is new in most companies. Head of sustainability, head of renewable feedstocks, packaging lead. These roles are young, they turn over, and a new appointment reopens the question of who advises. A channel built on named roles catches that inside weeks. An event channel hears about it a year later, if at all.
3
The mid-tier is the underworked band and it is by far the largest. The majors already carry internal teams and internal opinions. The mid-sized producer and the mid-sized converter carry the same regulatory obligation with no internal capability and no advisor, and they are the tens of thousands counted above. They also rarely appear at conferences, which is precisely why they stay unreached.
4
Two reasons to buy, one list. Regulation forces the assessment. Ambition buys the strategy. Different opening sentences, the same named accounts. A single channel tends to keep making one of those two arguments to the same room, and the other argument never gets made to anybody.
Built from public market data and published European industry counts, counts banded deliberately. Company counts are self-reported by industry bodies and describe registered companies rather than buying units, so they indicate scale rather than an exact addressable list. Brand owners, technology developers, investors and public bodies are not covered by any single register and are described rather than counted.
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