Hilde includes four categories of criteria in our company evaluation including Ingredient Safety, Environmental Impact Mitigation, Worker Fairness, and Corporate Accountability. How a company performs on the criteria in these categories determines a category rating. Collective performance on these evaluation categories determines the company’s overall rating status. More details about our evaluation mythology is available on our Methods page.

Hilde believes that business entities have ethical and legal responsibilities to respect human rights. Our research and analysis on the policies and practices of hundreds of companies and the brands they own shows that this is an area of sustainability where there are significant opportunities for improvement. Reporting from numerous media outlets and independent journalists continue to highlight the challenges that workers face in the context of our current political, legal, and technological environments.

Respect human rights

Human rights include many areas that define the ways that businesses relate to employees, customers, and supply chains. Our human rights include but are not limited to things like equality between men and women, freedom of children from economic exploitation, forming trade unions, freedom of expression and participation in public affairs, and an adequate standard of living. Read more about the International Bill of Human Rights.

Promote economic fairness

Wages for many kinds of workers across our economy are no longer sufficient for their families to afford basic necessities like food, childcare, healthcare, and housing. At the same time, income for top earners has grown dramatically over the last 30 years. The pay gap between the top earners and the rest of us is contributing to greater inequality and an affordability crisis for workers. Despite increases in productivity, most workers have not reaped the rewards of their hard work. Businesses have an ethical obligation to share the financial rewards with their workers in much fairer ways than most currently do. Read more about income and wage inequality.

Hilde’s criteria for our Worker Fairness category include indicators of how the company being evaluated treats their employees, or the people they employ or contract with directly, as well as people who work for organizations in their supply chains. Our criteria focus on indicators that we believe reflect how a company respects human rights promotes economic fairness in a variety of contexts including sourcing, policies, transparency, and external verification. For example, Hilde criteria may include but are not limited to the following kinds of indicators:

• Commitment to fair wages for employees across their value chain
• Providing paid parental leave when not mandated by state law
• Responsible sourcing policies and practices
• Respecting the lawful rights of employees to organize and unionize
• Successfully obtaining and maintaining approved social impact-relevant certifications

How a company treats people (inside and outside their organization) is an important part of their sustainability efforts. Hilde’s worker fairness criteria will continue to evolve over time as the science changes and our understanding grows. We believe there is an important difference between the impacts that companies can have on communities where they operate and where businesses in their supply chain operate, and our focus on impacts on workers. While we think that companies are ethically obligated to mitigate their broader social impacts and the impacts they have on communities, these topics are not included in our evaluation for a variety of reasons. Read more about other limitations associated with Hilde’s evaluations.

Hilde has a database with detailed information about company performance related to benefits for people topics. Our analysis shows that the overwhelming majority of companies that we’ve evaluated have major gaps in their approach. And while it’s possible that their measured performance is inaccurate due to a lack of publicly available information about their efforts, the trend appears to be consistent across industries.  

Our 2025 Impact Insights report shows that very few of the companies get credit for more than 3 of the criteria out of 8 possible for the Worker Fairness category:

Score Range = 0-7

Average Score = 2.7

Median Score = 3

Max Possible = 8

As you might expect from this score distribution, very few companies have received our highest category rating (“Strong Performance”) category rating for Worker Fairness and over half received our lowest rating (“Foundational Gaps”):

# Companies Strong Performance rating: 3.2% (11/344)

# Companies Solid Baseline rating: 48% (166/344)

# Companies Foundational Gaps rating: 51% (177/344)

We believe that the distribution of companies receiving our middle category rating (“Solid Baseline”) is somewhat larger than what we would expect due to the larger proportion of corporations that own numerous brands in the makeup of our current evaluation database. We expect this proportion to become smaller as the number of companies evaluated increases and the bias created by these larger corporations shrinks.

In our experience, philanthropy, corporate giving, in-kind donations, etc. are almost never relevant to how your company treats the people it employs or the people who work for companies in their supply chains. While corporate giving can make people feel good, in our experience these kinds of programs frequently lack any evidence that they are making a difference. They are often disconnected from the kinds of impacts that a given company may have on workers or communities, and may not be tied to people living in the specific regions where their impacts occur.

More often these limited initiatives seem to be deployed by companies under the impression that they somehow offset their lack of investment on issues that actually matter to their employees like paid maternity leave, living wages, and accountability. They feel like greenwashing but for impacts on people rather than the planet. As a result, we don’t include it in our evaluations and have no criteria related to them.