One of the ways we help ensure that our company evaluations and ratings are as unbiased as possible is to avoid potential conflicts of interest. That’s a big part of why we don’t charge companies for performing an evaluation and rating their ingredient safety, sustainability, and accountability efforts. Hilde also does not accept voluntary payments or donations from companies to offset the costs of performing our evaluations and ratings.

In some cases Hilde sustainability experts may choose to independently provide guidance to companies on the kinds of topics included in our evaluations. We do so because it’s an effective way to quickly drive real action on the issues that we all care about. We have policies and procedures in place to prevent conflicts of interest in these kinds of situations. And we are committed to always being transparent in cases where someone working with Hilde provides services to a company featured anywhere on our site.