Over the years many corporations have grown quite large. One of the most common ways for them to grow is through purchasing other companies or merging with them. In some cases, a company will buy a portion of a company, enough to have decision-making control over how the company operates, but not the whole company.

As they purchase and grow, the companies that they have acquired get folded into their portfolio of brands. This process centralizes decision-making, aligns internal policies and practices, standardizes processes, and can create efficiencies.

For example: Colgate-Palmolive (publicly-traded) and Tom’s of Maine (previously privately-held) used to be two separate companies. But in 2006, Colgate spent around $100 million to buy 84% of Tom’s of Maine, giving it majority ownership and control over the company. In this situation, we consider Colgate to be the “parent” company and Tom’s of Maine is a “brand” or “subsidiary” of Colgate.

The terms "company" and "brand" are often used interchangeably. But for Hilde, we define them in specific ways to help avoid confusion when it comes to how and why we do our evaluations and ratings the way that we do.

We define these terms in the following way for purposes of our evaluations and ratings:

Company: A single business enterprise with oversight provided by one board of directors that may exercise control over one or more subsidiaries that we call "brands".

Brand: An organization that may have features that distinguish it from the company that owns it but typically does not have ultimate decision-making authority.

If you'd like to have Hilde evaluate and rate a company you can submit a request here.

Hilde's standard operating procedure is to seek to perform our evaluation on the parent company.

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. There is typically a single board of directors and executive team that is responsible for monitoring and managing the company itself and by extension oversees all the brands owned by that company.

We do post individual evaluations for each of the brands owned by a parent company. It makes it easier for people to search and find information.

The scores and ratings included on evaluation pages that are for brands are taken directly from the results of our evaluation for the parent company, which also has a dedicated evaluation page of its own.

So, using our previous example: Tom’s of Maine is a brand that is owned by the parent company Colgate-Palmolive. If you visit the evaluation page for Tom’s of Maine you’ll find the results of our evaluation on Colgate-Palmolive.  

In these cases we include some standard language at the top and bottom of the evaluation page for the brand to make sure that it’s clear.

For example, you will see something like this disclaimer on those evaluation pages:

This brand is owned by another company. The info shared for this brand is based on an evaluation of the parent company’s ingredient safety, sustainability, and corporate accountability policies and practices.

We know that our approach has some trade-offs.

For one, it 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.

It also complicates our ability to score certain criteria in our evaluations, make recommendations and provide the nuance that we prefer.

For example, sometimes a brand has products that have received a trustworthy certification related to ingredient safety, environmental impact reduction, or people benefits.

If the majority of other brands do not also have products that have received that same certification (when relevant), then the parent company would not get credit for using that certification in our evaluation. As a result, the brand would not get credit for that certification either.

That approach may be frustrating to a brand.

But it reflects our belief that consumers want to support companies that are consistent and committed, not just trying to profit from capturing part of the “clean” or “green” segment of consumers in the market.

You can read about some of the other limitations of our company evaluations & ratings here.

Generally we try to keep things as simple as possible, which can be difficult given how complex the issues Hilde works on can be. But sometimes we have to make exceptions to our standard practices. This is the case with how we evaluate companies.

There are a few instances where we may evaluate a brand in addition to, or rather than, evaluating the parent company.

1. Brands part of groups owned by a parent company: We sometimes encounter a company that owns one or more “groups” or collections of brands. Information about the topics we evaluate is sometimes provided for the group, rather than for the parent company or a brand in that group. In these cases we will evaluate the group because it has the most publicly available information even though the parent company still maintains decision-making authority.
2. Private equity-owned companies: When a company is owned by a private equity (PE) firm we base our evaluation on the publicly available information provided by that company. It’s not ideal from our perspective because PE firms can exert quite a bit of control over major decisions by a company they own. But given the growing prevalence of PE ownership in the consumer products space it’s the best way for us to provide you with information.
3. Direct brand requests: A brand that is owned by another company may request that Hilde evaluate them independently from their parent. For this to occur, Hilde requires substantiation that the brand has sufficient decision-making independence from the parent company on the issues we evaluate (among other things).

Ultimately we want Hilde to provide families with the best information available about companies.

We think this approach makes the most sense given the circumstances in the market as well as at Hilde.

Hilde reserves the right to revise, modify, or otherwise adapt our evaluation process as deemed appropriate.

You can read more about our company evaluation process here.