Under certain circumstances, Hilde may choose to engage with companies during our evaluation process.

It provides a variety of benefits including helping us strengthen the completeness and accuracy of our company evaluations.

Here are some of the other reasons why we engage with companies:

• Helps us go deeper: Provides the opportunity for a more nuanced and in-depth dialogue about the company’s ingredient safety & sustainability efforts
• Enhances our data: Allows us to do additional verification of the information we currently have and collect new information
• Gauge alignment between words action: Helps us get stronger sense of the extent to which the public information available reflects meaningful action by the company
• Increases transparency: We routinely advocate for greater transparency to help drive more accountability for action on the topics we evaluate

Because we’ve also been the people on the inside of companies in these roles, we know how helpful these kinds of discussions can be (or problematic when they don’t happen).

Hilde’s model for company engagement during our evaluation process is based on our first-hand experience.

If you’re curious to see where company engagement sits in our overall evaluation process check here.

We’ve been in these kinds of conversations with companies in a variety of different roles, trying to achieve a variety of different objectives.

Here are the general steps in how we engage with companies during our evaluations:

1. Initial outreach: Hilde attempts to connect with decision makers at the company being evaluated to schedule an evaluation review session
2. Direct dialogue & data collection: We then hold one or more video meetings to share our initial evaluation results and learn more about the company’s efforts
3. Evaluation revisions: If appropriate, we revise our scoring on relevant criteria and make any updates to category ratings & company status

You can find out more about how Hilde assigns ratings & company status here.

We should note that we don’t choose to engage with every company for every evaluation we complete.

Luckily, we’ve figured out what works best for Hilde - but we know we’ll always be working to refine and improve our approach over time.

Hilde reserves the right to modify or update our company engagement model at any time as more information becomes available.

As we noted, data collected during our company engagement process may influence the evaluation results.

When appropriate, we may revise scoring on individual criteria, which may influence category ratings, and could shift the company status.

For Hilde to consider making changes to the results of our initial evaluation prior to making it public, the information the company provides must be publicly available, it must be credible, and it must be relevant.

The criteria requirements themselves don't change.

If the information provided is not publicly available, we encourage the company to share it publicly. If they choose not to, the information will not be used to revise an evaluation.

In the end, Hilde reserves the right as the final decision maker about if and how a company evaluation is revised before or after being published.