A company policy is an essential tool that helps shape both internal and external decision-making about products and services. While it doesn’t carry the same legal implications as a public policy, regulation, or law, they should have important implications for how your company conducts business. Like public policies, company policies should evolve over time. They should change as our scientific understanding grows, we experience unintended consequences, and public expectations shift.

The process by which our companies establish, manage, and implement policies can be as or more important than the policy itself. Crafting an effective policy is both art and science. Critically, it should be clearly linked to the company’s mission, purpose, values, principles, or similarly authoritative documentation (more on this below).

For safety-related policies, it should explain why your company cares about the issue, how it’s relevant to your products and/or services, provide some insight about the ways the issue is embedded into your decision-making, and the principle(s) by which it will be implemented. Your company’s ingredient safety or material health policy is your primary mechanism for promoting accountability with your colleagues and securing trust with consumers.

Mistake to avoid:

Many companies, particularly high-growth companies in the consumer goods space are trying to differentiate themselves based on their approach to ingredient safety or material health. They launch with a “good enough” approach, and never really invest in building a credible foundation. As a result, they never truly go beyond what their competitors are doing. Because they don’t have an internal standard to guide their decision-making they end up making financially short-sighted decisions that compromise their positioning on the very topic they were hoping to use as a source of consumer trust and loyalty.

When we talk about building a credible foundation for ingredient safety we’re talking about the kinds of documentation designed to guide decision-making across the business. In our experience, a company policy or standard is at the heart of a credible foundation. Crafting an effective ingredient safety, material health, or chemicals management policy should be a cross-functional endeavor. Here are three key elements to inform your policy:

Connection to Authority

Your policy should be directly connected to the company mission, purpose, or values - the kinds of statements that carry meaning and authority across the organization and can be referenced when there are challenging choices or difficult decisions related to the topic.

Broad Applicability

The policy should be broad enough to be applicable across all product categories and relevant phases of product-lifecycles (i.e. design, production (raw materials, manufacturing processes, finished goods), use, and end-of-life).

Relevant & Meaningful

Your policy shouldn’t try and spell out every scenario, type of decision, or dynamic. But it needs to be specific enough to provide a framework by which decisions can be made across teams through the creation of function or process-specific guidance AND be the basis of public-facing content that conveys meaning to consumers.

See our process tips for crafting a safety policy if you’d like to avoid some of the headaches. Curious about what kinds of things should be included in a credible safety program based on your policy?

It’s pretty rare, but there are some companies that we think are doing a solid job when it comes to ingredient safety policies and programs. Like all of the other issues we evaluate, Hilde doesn’t expect perfection. But we do expect companies to take this issue seriously. Here are some companies that have Solid Performance ratings for the Ingredient Safety category:

Avocado Green Brands

Naturepedic

Dr. Bronners

Babo Botanicals

Looking for a chemicals policy template? Take a look at the BizNGO Corporate Chemicals Policy Template. It’s a helpful starting point.

This article is part of our series on the fundamentals of credible ingredient and material safety programs for consumer goods companies:

Part 1: Your policy is your safety promise

Part 2: Process tips for how to create a safety policy

Part 3: Company ingredient & material safety programs must have's

Part 4: Building & using a restricted substances list (RSL)

Part 5: Why you should invest in ingredient safety testing