It is Hilde’s intention to be independent, scientifically sound, timely, and nuanced when evaluating companies and products.

We aren’t perfect and we may make unintentional mistakes on occasion.

We have a few important steps in our process to try to minimize those mistakes.

We believe it is our responsibility to acknowledge our inherent limitations and attempt to continuously improve in a transparent and honest manner.

Here are some of the limitations we think are worth bringing up because they may impact our evaluations in a variety of ways:

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Reliance on publicly available information‍

Our evaluations are based on information that is available to anyone with access to the internet.

We believe that using only credible, publicly available sources for our company evaluations and ratings is the best way to help consumers make informed decisions.

But we know that sometimes companies may intentionally limit what they share publicly about their ingredient safety & sustainability efforts.

This scenario can happen for a variety of reasons. But we feel strongly that transparency is a critical part of accountability and trust.  

Which is why Hilde does not use confidential information in our evaluation process.

Find out more about the Hilde evaluation process here.

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‍Finite number of evaluation criteria‍

We are not attempting to evaluate every single ingredient safety and sustainability topic that may be relevant to a company or product.

We have chosen to focus on the ones that we believe are, or should be, the biggest priorities related to the health and wellbeing of people and our planet, for the majority of companies making the kinds of products we are focusing on.

This is helpful for consumers, to help you learn which topic may actually be an issue that you should prioritize in your decision making.

For example, Hilde places a special emphasis on ingredient safety in our evaluations for a variety of reasons.

These include the growing scientific consensus that even low-level exposures to harmful chemicals can impact our health, the gap between the science and consumer protection laws, and the availability of safer options.

You can learn more about the info sources that we use to inform Hilde's evaluation criteria here.

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Evaluating parent companies rather than brands

In cases where a company owns multiple companies or subsidiaries, sometimes called "brands", Hilde's standard operating procedure is to seek to perform our evaluation on the parent company.

We believe this is a fair and reasonable approach for a variety of reasons.

For example: In our experience, the policies and practices of a parent company more often determine the overarching operations or ultimate decision-making in the subsidiary companies they control rather than vice versa.

But this approach can mean that subsidiary companies covered by the evaluation of the parent company may not receive credit for meeting the requirements of one or more criteria. We're okay with that trade-off.

Under certain circumstances, Hilde may perform an evaluation on subsidiary companies at our discretion. When that happens, we will identify the parent company on the evaluation page to the extent information on the parent company is publicly available.

You can find out more about why we evaluate parent companies and some special exceptions here.

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‍Limited time and resources

We devote significant time to conducting research and completing our evaluations but are self-funded and also parents sooo…you get it.

There may be times where a company may not get credit for some ingredient safety and sustainability practices if they do not have it on their website at the time of our evaluation.

If we miss something in an evaluation and the company lets us know, we're happy to make updates as appropriate but at our discretion.

Since we plan on re-evaluating companies at least every 3 years, we'll be able to make updates during the next cycle as well.

We choose to prioritize certain kinds of products and the companies that make and sell them. More about how we prioritize here.

Our evaluations are done using an established set of criteria. More about our evaluation criteria here.

The evaluation process involves researching the ingredient safety, sustainability (environmental impacts and benefits for people), and accountability practices (sometimes called "Governance") at companies to assess their performance against our criteria.

More about the steps in our evaluation process here.