A company policy is an essential tool that helps shape both internal and external decision-making about products and services. Your company’s ingredient safety or material health policy is your primary mechanism for promoting accountability with your colleagues and securing trust with consumers. More about the key elements necessary to craft an effective and compelling policy in this article.

The process by which our companies establish, manage, and implement policies can be as or more important than the policy itself. Crafting an effective policy is both art and science. Critically, it should be clearly linked to the company’s mission, purpose, values, principles, or similarly authoritative documentation. Because the process itself is so important to the success of your policy, read about our tips for planning and running an effective policy-making process.

A smart safety policy should clearly drive the work required to implement it across the company. The work involved in implementing the policy is the basis for a “program” or interconnected group of processes, projects, tools, and documentation that serves the company. These inform the budget, staff capacity, and expertise necessary for the program.

Implementing your safety policy will happen across many of the functions at your company. In our experience, there are slight differences in how this happens depending on the kinds of products or services your company provides. But you’ll probably be surprised how many teams this work ends up touching once you’re fully up and running. And don’t be surprised when other teams reference implementation of the safety program in requests for new budget, headcount, etc.

The process of creating your safety policy should surface a variety of needs across functions related to how they will implement it. Part of the benefit of a robust policy development process is that you can identify these needs early on, anticipate them as potential barriers for some people, and work proactively to build them into an implementation roadmap or similar kind of document that defines necessary guidance and tools. Generally speaking, here are the kinds of things that are commonly required when it comes to implementing a safety policy - think of these as elements of your program.

Chemicals Management

One of the first elements you’ll need is a way to effectively inform decision-making about what kinds of chemicals, ingredients, and materials your company will allow to be used in your products. This typically includes prohibitions, restrictions, use limitations, etc. for intentionally added ingredients and/or materials. Documents commonly include a Restricted Substances List and related supplier screening, contract provisions, and similar supply chain related language. Learn more about how to build and use your RSL.  

Contaminants Reduction

You’ve covered the stuff that you may intentionally choose to include (or not) in your products. Now you should think about scenarios where chemicals, ingredients, and materials that you have not intentionally used may make their way into your products. We call them contaminants, but some people use the term “unintentionally added ingredients”, “process chemistry”, “manufacturing byproducts”, or something similar depending on the industry and source. You’ll want to have a plan for how to deal with these that includes identifying their sources, adopting measures to reduce them, establishing limits, and disclosing them publicly.  

Purity Testing

With the first two elements you’ve identified what should and should not be in your products. To help ensure that you’re getting everything you want and nothing you don’t, or limited amounts of the stuff you don’t, you should be doing analytical testing with a reputable laboratory. More on why we think it’s worth it to invest in safety testing.

Certifications

While the process of getting a product certified under one of the higher quality safety certifications often forces companies to craft some of these programmatic elements, we believe it makes more sense to adopt them before pursuing certification. Read about the kinds of certifications we think companies should use.

Marketing & Content

Notice that we’re including this element AFTER we’ve talked about the other things that should be included in your safety program. That’s intentional because we frequently see it the other way around, where a company is talking about their safety program without a policy or any real safety program in place. Once you’re doing the real work of implementing a safety program you can talk about it to customers and other stakeholders with the kind of specificity and substance that conveys credibility and trust.

Customer Inquiries

Now that you’re walking the talk, and talking about your walk (i.e. marketing your safety efforts), you’ll inevitably get inbound inquiries from customers and the general public about your work. We’ve found that a comprehensive and vetted set of standard responses to questions is worth the time and effort. It will ultimately save you and other leaders time, reduce stress for your customer experience or frontline employees responsible for answering, and protect the company by providing clear and consistent information.

Building a comprehensive safety program with the kinds of elements we include in this blog is a major undertaking. We provide some solid initial guidance on the why, how, and what. After decades of working on safety programs, here’s some of the common mistakes we see and our tips for avoiding them.  

Expensive platforms

Mistake: Investing budget in an ingredient safety platform, software, or app without a robust use case and clear return on investment estimate.

Tip: Lots of people want to sell you a tool or subscription that will “completely transform” your products, is “powered by AI”, or “based on proprietary data”. Don’t fall for the hype. In our experience, only very large companies that make and sell a wide range of products actually need these.

Ignoring contaminants

Mistake: Failing to identify, disclose, and manage chemicals that may end up in finished products as “unintentionally added” ingredients can be a source of risk for your company.

Tip: Even if your company is adverse to publicly disclosing information on this topic, you will still want to take action on contaminants. When push comes to shove, you may need to defend your work on this issue during litigation or in the court of public opinion.

Inadequate testing

Mistake: Conducting no or infrequent analytical testing to assess compliance with your chemicals management and purity requirements.

Tip: Routine testing should occur at multiple points in the product lifecycle (i.e. raw materials, manufacturing, finished products) and include some random compliance tests not just recurring annual ones.

Weak certifications

Mistake: Obtaining a product certification that has weak safety requirements or lacks credibility in other ways.  

Tip: In our experience, the highest quality safety certifications are focused exclusively on the issue. They also have a variety of other hallmarks that indicate that they operate with integrity, including the kinds of things we cover in this article.

Unqualified claims or marketing  

Mistake: Communicating about your safety efforts without the ability to qualify them in ways that matter.

Tip: Your claims and marketing communications should be based on the work that is currently occurring in your safety program, not on aspiration ideas or vague terminology like “clean” that is used without providing a clear definition.

This article is part of our series on the fundamentals of credible ingredient and material safety programs for consumer goods companies:

Part 1: Your policy is your safety promise

Part 2: Process tips for how to create a safety policy

Part 3: Company ingredient & material safety programs must have's

Part 4: Building & using a restricted substances list (RSL)

Part 5: Why you should invest in ingredient safety testing