Hilde researches and evaluates hundreds of companies and their brands every year. We use publicly available information from company websites and trusted third party sources as the basis for our evaluations and ratings. Our Impact Insights report is designed to give you an overview of the company evaluations we performed during the previous year. The data is drawn from our evaluation database which includes over 40 performance indicators across ingredient safety, environmental impact, people benefits, and corporate accountability categories. We use this comprehensive collection of sustainability performance to generate key takeaways that you can apply to your role and company. These actionable insights are organized into the following sections:

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Notable Impact Trends

Case study-style looks at innovations in ingredient safety, sustainability, and accountability as well as common pitfalls to avoid drawn from notable company evaluations.

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Company Evaluations & Ratings Analysis

A data-driven summary and analysis of the company evaluations performed during the previous year including a breakdown by product category (e.g. Furniture, Personal Care, etc.)

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Impact Category Insights

An in-depth assessment of how companies performed in each evaluation category (e.g. ingredient safety, environmental impact, etc.).

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Our Methods

An overview of Hilde and a summary description of the methods we use for company evaluations and this report.

Researching and analyzing the ingredient safety, sustainability, and accountability efforts of hundreds of companies across 7 different product categories provides ample insight into what innovative action on these issues by a company can look like. It also reveals common or recurring pitfalls that appear to be holding companies back from credible or authentic action to the detriment of their business as well as people and the planet.  

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Examples of Standout Innovation by Companies

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Company: Sabai Designs

Product category: Furniture

Impact Areas: Producer responsibility & product circularity

The nature of the problem: Furniture like sofas, sections, chairs, mattresses, and other types of products that use foam, textiles, and leather are notoriously difficult to recycle for consumers. Even though a handful of states have recovery programs for mattresses, many still end up in the landfill. The use of raw materials that include recycled content or are produced using lower impact production practices is quite limited. Additionally, furniture is often difficult to repair or refresh which limits your ability to extend the usable life of products. Very few companies acknowledge these issues.

Why their approach is innovative: The company’s Sabai Revive furniture buyback initiative is focused on addressing end-of-life waste issues and extending the useful life of their furniture which can help decrease the total impacts over the lifecycle of their products. Facilitating the reuse of products by directly facilitating recovery and The company also has a Repair Don’t Replace program designed to help extend the usable lifespan of their products by providing individual components that can be used for repair. Repairing a product instead of purchasing a new one can reduce environmental impacts across the lifecycle.

How the company could go further: While the company markets their buyback program as being an important strategy for increasing the circularity of their products, it is unclear the extent to which it plays a role accomplishing that objective. For example, if the program helps create sources of recovered or recycled materials that can displace virgin materials being used for their products then it would appear to help increase circularity.  

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Company: Prose Beauty

Product category: Personal care

Impact Areas: Packaging waste

The nature of the problem: Packaging waste from personal care products is a persistent problem for the industry. This is particularly true for some types of packaging components because they are not currently curbside recyclable, and plastic recycling rates in the U.S. appear to be stubbornly low. While refillable formats and recovery programs for hard to recycle packaging containers and components are gaining some traction, the industry still has plenty of room to innovate in ways that are preventative.

Why their approach is innovative: Prose Beauty has adopted a smart solution for preventing packaging waste from a notoriously difficult component to recycle: pumps. On web pages for products that may require the use of a pump component to dispense product, the company has deployed an opt-out feature for that particular component. If you don’t want a new pump after ordering your first product you can simply select a no-new-pump option when checking out.  

How the company could go further: Prevention is a top-tier strategy when it comes to addressing pollution. But we also need to look at options for reducing the impacts associated with the materials we do end up using in our products. Currently it doesn’t appear that the company is using post-consumer recycled content in any of their packaging systems. Using recycling glass, plastic, paper, or metal in place of virgin materials can significantly reduce the environmental impacts of those packaging systems.

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Common Pitfalls Holding Companies Back

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Misleading & unsubstantiated claims

The nature of the problem

Greenwashing isn’t new. But it’s becoming increasingly uncommon to see blatant examples of it anymore. We try to give companies the benefit of the doubt and assume positive intentions in lots of ways. And we recognize that sometimes a company makes misleading claims about their ingredient safety or sustainability efforts out of ignorance and not necessarily with malicious intent. In our opinion, sometimes it’s clear that a company is attempting to build their credibility on these issues without really walking the talk.

How the problem shows up at companies

Lots of companies use certifications to help create perceptions of credible action on impacts to people and planet. For example, while researching the furniture company Saatva as part of our evaluation process we noticed that the company claims to have Cradle to Cradle certification, OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification, and several others. As part of our evaluation process we often attempt to verify that a given company actually holds the certifications they claim to have by checking with the organization that administers it. In this case we were unable to verify that any products or materials used by Saatva actually carry these particular certifications.

What the company can do to address it

The obvious solution is to ensure that any certification your company claims to have, at the product, material, ingredient or organizational level can be easily verified. Check to make sure that your company name shows up when someone searches for it before you feature that certification logo in your marketing or content. Additionally, when companies feature certifications with little credible information to further substantiate their efforts related to the kind of impact being certified it looks suspicious. Make sure you feature some context about how a given certification is representative of a larger effort at the company to credibly address the area of impact.  

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Lack of credible ingredient safety efforts

The nature of the problem

Babies and younger children are particularly vulnerable to health impacts associated with toxic chemicals that may be present in products designed for them. That includes products like toys, games, crafts and others. Weak ingredient and chemical safety laws at the federal level have led a number of states to pass laws focused on reducing the use of chemicals of concern in children’s products. Despite solid scientific evidence linking some classes of chemicals to health impacts in kids and laws requiring disclosure of their use by manufacturers of kids products, laboratory testing continues to show they are being used.

How the problem shows up at companies

Many companies claim that the products they make and sell for children “follow all applicable requirements and regulations” related to ingredient safety. Others refer to product safety & quality programs that do not appear to include any meaningful provisions related to chemicals management or material toxicity. For example, when researching the company Spin Master, a company that owns numerous popular toy and craft brands we noted reference a product safety & quality program. However, the company offers no specific information about the role, if any, ingredient safety plays in it. Additionally, a review of state-level chemical disclosure databases show that the company currently or recently used numerous chemicals of concern in products designed for children across multiple brands.

What the company can do to address it

Unfortunately the regulatory environment related to chemicals in products in the U.S. offers only limited protection for our families. As a result, companies need to demonstrate that their approach to ingredient safety and chemicals management goes beyond regulatory requirements. That should include a clear statement of policy related to ingredient safety, details about the process by which they choose and use chemicals and materials in their products, as well as information about how they ensure their standards are being followed across their supply chain. See our blog for specific information about building a credible restricted substances list (RSL).

Company Status Summary

Total number of companies & brands evaluated: 344

Proportion of companies assigned a “Avoid” status: 77.9% (268)

Proportion of companies assigned a “Consider” status: 18.6% (64)

Proportion of companies assigned an “Recommended” status: 3.5% (12)

One feature of our company evaluation and ratings approach that immediately stands out is the relatively low proportion of companies that are assigned our highest status of Recommended. In short: We want it to be challenging for a company to receive a Recommended or even a Consider status. While it’s tough, we believe our approach is fair and balanced. The market needs to move beyond simply banning a few ingredients and calling their brand “clean” or “safe”, true safety and sustainability programs need to be established in this next wave of corporate sustainability. So while this outcome is baked into our methods and criteria, we believe there are several other factors at play this year:

• Limited to publicly available information
• Disproportionate number of large companies with numerous owned-brands

Large public companies account for a disproportionate number of brands. This skews the distribution of our company status ratings significantly as Kenvue, Proctor & Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive alone account for approximately 27% of the number of companies and their owned brands. Notably, all three of these companies and their brands received “Avoid” status, driven primarily by their poor performance in the ingredient safety category of our evaluation. Read more about the assumptions and limitations of this report in the Our Methods section below.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Leverage your company’s status rating

For starters, if your company has a Consider or Recommended status ratings congratulations. You are probably doing a lot of things right when it comes to your sustainability efforts. Use your strong performance as evidence that the company’s investment in the sustainability function and efforts is being recognized and has value. If your company is currently rated as Avoid, then use that to reinforce the need to increase investment and prioritize your sustainability efforts.

Strengthen your company’s public disclosures & reporting

Because our evaluations are based exclusively on publicly available information it’s critical that your company features relevant content on the website. If you’re not sharing that kind of information then it’s impossible to get credit for the work when we go to score our criteria. The three places on your website you should prioritize for this content: 1) A dedicated sustainability or impact page, 2) an annual report, and 3) the FAQ page. Hilde has a dedicated series on how to develop and share credible sustainability content on our Advice for Companies blog.  

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Product Category Summary

Number of Baby companies & brands evaluated: 18

% of all companies evaluated: 5.2%

Number of Cleaning & Laundry companies & brands evaluated: 56

% of all companies evaluated: 16.3%

Number of Furniture companies & brands evaluated: 52

% of all companies evaluated: 15.1%

Number of Home Improvement companies & brands evaluated: 15

% of all companies evaluated: 4.4%

Number of Kids products companies & brands evaluated: 66

% of all companies evaluated: 19.2%

Number of Kitchen companies & brands evaluated: 32

% of all companies evaluated: 9.3%

Number of Personal Care companies & brands evaluated: 105

% of all companies evaluated: 30.5%

We evaluate company performance across four categories including ingredient safety, environmental impact reduction, benefits for people, and corporate accountability. Each of those categories includes between 8-12 criteria that serve as indicators of credible efforts to address relevant impacts. Here’s our breakdown of performance by evaluation category for companies evaluated in 2025.

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Ingredient Safety Category Summary

Category scoring statistics

• Range = 0-7
• Average = 1.6
• Median = 1
• Possible = 8

Evaluation category leaders: Naturepedic

Most common Hilde Approved certification: OEKO-Tex Standard 100

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Ingredient safety is a key unlock for a better Hilde rating

One of the nuances of the way we calculate our company status ratings relates to how we prioritize performance on the ingredient safety category. In short, if a company does not perform well (i.e. receives a “Foundational Gaps” rating) on the ingredient safety category of our evaluation, it is impossible to receive anything beyond an Avoid company status rating. Do better on the ingredient safety and you’ll unlock our higher company status ratings of Consider and Recommended.

Prioritize ingredient safety at your company

Beyond what it means for Hilde, ingredient safety continues to emerge as a critical factor in consumer decision-making related to products. If you’re trying to differentiate based on sustainability or by being a “clean” brand, you have to have a credible foundation in place when it comes to ingredient safety to be perceived as authentic. From an ethical perspective, don’t be a company that risks poisoning people by failing to properly consider the safety of the ingredients and materials your company uses in the products it makes and sells to our families.

There is LOTS of white space for companies on ingredient safety

As the data shows, few companies have a robust approach to ingredient safety based on our evaluation criteria. That means that your company can quickly become a leader in this space by adopting some relatively simple foundational elements into your approach. What should those elements include? Take a look at the company insights section for any given company rating page [LINK] and you’ll see the types of things you should be adopting.

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Environmental Impact Mitigation Category Summary

Category criteria scoring statistics

• Range = 0-12
• Average = 4.6
• Median = 6
• Possible = 12

Evaluation category leaders: IKEA, Avocado Green Brands

Most common Hilde Approved certification: Forest Stewardship Council

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Use of pollution offset certifications growing but lack credibility

Our research indicates that certification programs focused on offsetting pollution emitted by a company, their products, and their supply chain continue to grow in popularity. Offsets for greenhouse gas emissions and plastic waste appear to be the two most common certifications. We believe that these kinds of certifications, while potentially having some positive benefits, are problematic for several reasons which is why we do not include any of them in our list of Hilde Approved certifications. However, to avoid perceptions of greenwashing when deploying these certifications companies must provide additional information about their climate protection efforts. Relying exclusively on these kinds of certifications without providing details about how the company plans to actually reduce emissions and their pollution, rather than simply trying to offset it, is critical.

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Benefits for People Category Summary

Category criteria scoring statistics

• Range = 0-7
• Average = 2.7
• Median = 3
• Possible = 8

Evaluation category leaders: Dr. Bronner’s, Shaw Industries

Most common Hilde Approved certification: Fair Trade

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Many companies appear to neglect social impacts

Our research and analysis indicates that efforts to address impacts to people including human rights, labor issues, and other issues are lacking for many companies. This represents a major sustainability-related omission for ethically-minded companies despite the fact that how they treat their employees and people in their supply chain is important to many consumers. To credibly address these kinds of issues companies need to look internally and externally, speak to specific issues like living wages and paid maternity leave, and publicly disclose their policies and performance measures.  

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Accountability Category Summary

Category criteria scoring statistics

• Range = 0-5
• Average = 1.2
• Median = 1
• Possible = 8

Evaluation Category Leaders: Grove Collaborative, Avocado Green Brands

Most common Hilde Approved certification: B-Corp

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Public reporting absent for many ethically-marketed companies

An annual sustainability, CSR, or impact report is an excellent way to share detailed content about your company’s efforts. When done properly, the report can serve as source material for a variety of other kinds of evergreen or campaign-specific content for emails, social media, or other channels. And while a common refrain from companies is “nobody reads them”, we’re proof that some people do. We go through every page. So while these reports can represent an important source of credible information that may unlock stronger performance on Hilde ratings, they are also necessary for building credibility with key stakeholders like employees, customers, and investors. Even being able to point to an annual report, regardless of the content, can be a signal of authenticity for some people. Like any kind of information, it should be tailored to your audience and purpose. Detailed guidance on credible sustainability content and for annual reports specifically is available on our blog.

We built Hilde for two reasons: To help families shop their values and to help sustainability professionals successfully drive change. The part of our platform that we’re building for sustainability professionals provides actionable insights and access to a community of practice that enables them to navigate the complexities of our field across dynamic organizations. Hilde is self-funded and run by two sustainability professionals with decades of experience across different industries.

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Company Evaluation Methods Summary

The information included in this report is based on the results of our company evaluations. Importantly, Hilde company evaluations are based exclusively on publicly available information. Here’s a summary of how we conduct our company evaluations:

1. Perform Initial Evaluation

A sustainability expert conducts research using publicly available information provided by the company on their website or from another reliable public source (i.e. universities, NGOs, or governments) to evaluate company policies and practices against our safety and sustainability criteria using our digital tool.

2. Review Evaluation

The evaluation is reviewed by another sustainability expert. If a discrepancy between the initial score and reviewer score arises, additional research and review is conducted until there is consensus.

‍3. Draft Summary

A summary of the evaluation is completed by the original evaluator to highlight the Company’s efforts we “like” and “opportunities for improvement” based on our research, criteria scoring, and professional expertise.

‍4. Review Summary‍

The summary is reviewed by someone other than the original reviewer. Sometimes we may choose to engage a company directly during our review to help provide an additional layer of verification.

5. Revise Summary (if necessary)

We may revise our initial evaluation summary in cases where additional publicly available information is found. Read more about why & how we engage with companies during our evaluation process.

6. Publish Evaluation

We publicly share the evaluation summary on our website.

Read more about our methods including some of the limitations.

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Report Methods & Limitations Discussion

The data included in this report is drawn from our database of company evaluations that were conducted during the 2025 calendar year. As noted above, the basis for our evaluations is publicly available information including but not limited to content a company may provide on their website(s) as well as information provided by third-party sources that we believe are trustworthy including NGOs and government agencies. Learn more about the sources of information we use. Some of the limitations associated with this report include but are not limited to the following:

Scoring for owned-brands

Hilde evaluates parent companies rather than individual brands those companies own and control. That means that brands receive the exact same criteria score, category ratings, and overall company status as the company that owns them. While this approach has trade-offs, we ultimately believe that it is more helpful to families and consumers who are trying to understand how well a company aligns with their values. More on that topic here. As a result, large companies who own lots of brands may have a disproportionate impact on the data for any given product category.  

Changes in company efforts since evaluation date

It is our intention to reevaluate companies and products at least every three years or sooner if deemed appropriate. Because our company evaluations are based on whatever information is publicly available from the company and other sources at the time we conduct research, our ratings and status may not reflect changes in company efforts since the date the evaluation was completed.

Product category evaluation distribution

The number of companies currently evaluated is not evenly distributed across the 7 product categories that we prioritize. For example, companies included in the personal care product category account for nearly a third of all companies evaluated while about 5% of our evaluations are for companies included in the baby product category. While the types of impacts we include in our evaluation criteria are broadly applicable across all of our product categories, companies from some product categories may tend to prioritize action on specific kinds of impacts more than others. As a result, performance on certain evaluation categories (i.e. ingredient safety) may be more heavily influenced by the performance of companies from specific product categories (i.e. personal care).

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Disclaimers

This report is not intended for public distribution and is the exclusive property of Hilde. Nothing contained in this report is intended to be legal or investment advice. The content contained in this report should be considered the opinion of the authors and is for informational purposes. Hilde reserves the right to update or revise the content of this report as we deem necessary.  

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