Hilde works to deploy a holistic approach on the kinds of issues we consider with our evaluation criteria.

We're trying to identify and evaluate evidence that a company is taking meaningful action on issues that matter to families.

But our criteria are not intended to be exhaustive of all potential sustainability or ESG topics that may be considered for companies in a specific industry.

Since our evaluations prioritize a diverse range of product categories and industries, we choose to cover the kinds of issues that trend towards being universally relevant across multiple industries.

You can read more about how we prioritize certain kinds of companies and types of products here.

We also focus our criteria on the issues that we consider to represent some of our most complex and urgent sustainability challenges.

That includes an informal assessment that is based on a combination of traditional frameworks that employ a double materiality principle and context-based frameworks that use a planetary boundaries approach.

You can read more about our perspective on sustainability here.

The organizations that create the frameworks, standards, and guidelines we may use to inform our evaluation topics may include but are not limited to:

• Global Reporting Initiative
• Clean Production Action
• European Union CSRD
• United Nations SDPI
• Science Based Targets Network
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Hilde reserves the right to modify or revise our criteria and information sources as we see fit.

With a solid understanding of the kinds of sustainability topics and issues we could cover in our evaluations, we develop specific criteria to help us understand if and how a brand is working to address impacts on people and the planet.

Hilde criteria are based on the best available public information from a variety of credible sources and our experience.

We determine sources for our criteria by considering various elements, including but not limited to independence, transparency, conflicts of interest, bias, verification practices, and standards development processes.

Some examples of information sources include but are not limited to peer-reviewed journal articles, white papers and reports from NGOs, governments, and international bodies like the United Nations.

Our criteria are also shaped by organizational and product-level certification standards and requirements.

Some examples of these certification standards and requirements that we may use to inform the criteria we use in our evaluations include but are not limited to:

• B-Corp
• Chemical Footprint Project
• US EPA Safer Choice
• ILFI Living Product Challenge
• EWG Verified

While we review fact-based criteria used by other organizations to help benchmark the criteria Hilde uses in our evaluation, we customize our criteria based on our professional expertise and to reflect the distinct methods and processes by which we conduct our evaluations.

Hilde applies and scores our criteria consistently across the companies that we evaluate.

Examples of how we apply our criteria include but are not limited to:

• Using the same criteria for companies of all sizes, regions, and structures.
• Relying exclusively on credible, publicly available information in our research.
• Documenting the information captured at a snapshot in time used to score criteria.
• Making evaluation updates based on credible requests from the company or feedback from other stakeholders.
• Using our expert perspective to help interpret information and score criteria.

While different reviewers may interpret information in their own unique way, we strive for consistency in our evaluations.

That’s why we have an internal quality assurance process for our evaluations that requires two sustainability experts to finalize an evaluation.

One expert conducts the initial evaluation and criteria scoring. Another expert reviews the initial evaluation and assesses the score for each criteria.

If a discrepancy between initial score and reviewer score arises, additional research and review is conducted until there is consensus.

You can learn more about our evaluation process here.

Find our how we use our evaluation results to assign company ratings here.

More information on limitations and assumptions for our evaluations and criteria is available here