Brand transparency: the company behind the label
Ownership, disclosure and a dated record of what each brand has been caught doing.
You can buy a product that ticks every ethical box from a brand owned by a conglomerate whose practices you would never fund knowingly. Ownership is deliberately hard to see: acquisitions rarely change the packaging, and the original founding story usually stays on the label long after the founders have gone.
The brand section makes that layer visible. Each profile sets out who owns the brand, what it discloses, what it refuses to disclose, and every documented controversy with a date and a source.
What a brand ethics profile contains
Profiles are structured identically so brands can be compared, not just described.
- Ownership chain, from the brand up to the ultimate parent company.
- Certifications held at company level, distinct from product-level marks.
- Supply-chain disclosure: does the brand publish its factory list, audits and material sourcing?
- Controversy timeline with dates, summaries and links to primary reporting.
- Range at a glance — how the brand's products score across the catalogue, not just its flagship.
The transparency leaderboard
Transparency is scored separately from ethics. A brand can behave reasonably well and still refuse to publish anything verifiable, and a brand can publish a great deal and reveal genuine problems. The leaderboard rewards the second kind, because disclosure is what makes accountability possible at all.
Controversies, updated rather than archived
A controversy record is only useful if it stays current. Tracked brands are re-checked on a rolling schedule and new entries are appended to the timeline, so a profile reflects the present state rather than one bad year that a brand has since addressed.
Frequently asked questions
Can brands request changes to their profile?+
Brands can submit documentation, and verified corrections are applied with the change recorded. They cannot pay for edits or removals.
Does a parent company automatically lower a brand's score?+
Ownership is a weighted factor, not an automatic penalty. Documented parent-company practices affect the score; ownership alone does not erase a brand's own record.
Where does controversy information come from?+
Published reporting, regulatory filings, NGO investigations and company statements — each entry links to its source.
Keep reading
Comparisons: two brands, one table, no spin
The differences that marketing pages are careful not to put next to each other.
Methodology: how every score is calculated
Published in full, applied identically, open to challenge.
Browse: every product, scored on the things that matter
Filter by your values, not by advertising spend.
Reviewed and maintained by the EthiCompare editorial team.