Years ago when we started concepting Hilde, it was based on our roles as experts working inside of companies as well as with companies as external consultants.

We saw the other apps and websites who had great intentions in helping distill information for consumers around ingredient safety and sustainability.

But what quickly became clear was that consumers took the ratings very seriously, regardless of what they were based on.

And evaluating companies is an imperfect science given how complicated it is.

We believe that the nuanced and more helpful reviews of companies are what the market, business leaders, consumers, and families like ours need.

It is our intention to be independent, scientifically accurate, timely, and nuanced in any of our evaluations. That said, we are humans who may make mistakes on occasion and we have a few important steps in our process to try to minimize those mistakes.

If you believe we’ve made a mistake on a company evaluation, please contact us: evals@hilde.com

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

Hilde evaluations may not always be perfect based on our own limitations or outside influences like limitations in scientific knowledge or publicly available information.

After decades as sustainability professionals we seek to make our evaluations more informative and helpful than any other consumer website out there. Hilde is designed to arm consumers with information in this area. It is our belief that our evaluations do this well.  

As one of our sustainability heroes (Dana Meadows) said:

“A decision maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late.”

We strive to provide accessible information.

We think that the information we provide is more comprehensive than most.

And we know it helps people react in more timely ways and allows them to more effectively align their actions with their values.

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

• We rely exclusively on credible publicly available information to score our evaluation criteria
• We use a finite number of evaluation criteria that reflect the areas of impact that we think matter most and are generally applicable across industries
• We focus our evaluations on the parent company (i.e. we may not evaluate every single brand or subsidiary a company owns)
• We have limited time and resources

If you want to know more about these limitations you can find additional info here.

Hilde chooses to prioritize evaluations for companies that make and/or sell certain kinds of products.

More about how we prioritize here.

Our evaluations are done using an established set of criteria. More about our ingredient safety, sustainability, and accountability criteria here.

The evaluation process involves conducting research on companies to assess their performance against our criteria.

More about the steps in our evaluation process here.