I just got off of a meeting with a green construction company that is having me come and talk to their staff, and share about toxin-free living and why it's important. It's one of their wellness events that they do for their staff. I am just so honored to be able to chat with them and teach them. 

As a green building and construction company, they are very aware of green building practices, but they might not be that aware of how to reduce the amount of toxins in your home in the products that you bring into your home. 

So this topic of today came out of really thinking about how do I pick brands that I use in my home? Where do I start and how do I analyze those brands? 

4 Simple Steps for Analyzing Brands to Ensure You're Making Informed Product Choices 

How do I decide if I trust a brand and if I really want to support the company by buying from them? It's not that difficult, really. You just have to set your own personal standards of what you choose to spend your money on. I just follow these 4 simple steps.

1.  Find out if there is a parent company. Do a general Google search - “who owns Mrs. Meyers”, for example, or “who owns Method” or “who owns Seventh Generation”. The reason why I think it's important to know who the parent company is, is because you might be getting tricked by thinking that the brand that you are buying is from a small maker that is US based that has really good practices for their employees, for their manufacturing and for the packaging. But they're actually owned by a super large mega corporation. You may not have the same beliefs as that mega corporation, or the kinds of choices that that company makes in their production, or their treatment of employees, or their production practices. So that is the number one thing I do is really try and find out if I am buying from a small brand, not a brand owned by a large corporation. Once I know that the brand is independently owned, I move on to the next step.

2. Look into who the founders are. If it's a super small company, often you'll just find it on their website, and you can read a little bit more about their story. Understand why they created the company and what their mission is. And again, a lot of the time when you do this, you're going to find and learn something new. And maybe you'll feel even more confident that you're supporting a company that you really think is truly doing the right thing and that they have similar values as you and that you want to be supporting them as owners of this company. You can often come up with different information just by Googling the brand and trying to figure out just a little bit about the brand, where it's made and how it's made and that sort of thing. 

3. Investigate the kind of packaging that they're using. The kind of packaging and how things are shipped is really important to me, because waste is a huge problem. I always want to look into how much plastic the company is using. Plastic is really hard to eliminate 100%. But if the predominant packaging is something other than plastic that comes from a source that can be recycled and it is not going to be in our environment till the end of time, something like plant based packaging or paperboard packaging, those are the kinds of things that I like to check out. I will prioritize a company that uses better packaging over a company that just puts everything in plastic because it's cheaper, and it's easier for them. A lot of companies are becoming more aware of the plastics problem and they're trying to do a better job. Sometimes they'll say that they package in recycled plastic, which is better for sure, but it doesn't mean that we can recycle it after it's been used. Often, that plastic can't actually be recycled again. I like to support companies that are using packaging other than plastic, something that is recyclable, new and different, and is minimizing the use of plastics as much as possible. 

4. Read the ingredients. You might think that I do that first. Well, yes, I do often scan the ingredient label first. And if it doesn't even pass that first scan, I don't even go into the rest of the steps. But sometimes I might pick something up, look at it and think, Oh, this looks pretty good. Then I'll go through the other steps. Making sure that the company’s not a very small part of a large corporation. Making sure that the owners are truly independent owners and that they have values similar to mine, that their packaging is up to snuff, that they're doing the best they can when it comes to packaging. Then I will dive deeper into the ingredients and make sure that it truly is as toxin-free as I originally thought it was.