About Us

With GoodGuide, you can:

• Find better products that are healthy, green and socially responsible
  
• Search or browse over 150,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to easily learn about the best and worst products in a category
  
• Rely on our scientific expertise and sophisticated rating system to simplify complex and confusing product information 
• Get mobile advice while shopping in a store by downloading our iPhone app
• Create and share personalized favorites lists of products that are right for you and your family

Who is GoodGuide?

GoodGuide is in business to provide authoritative information about the health, environmental and social performance of products and companies.  Our mission is to help consumers make purchasing decisions that reflect their preferences and values.  We believe that better information can transform the marketplace: as more consumers buy better products, retailers and manufacturers face compelling incentives to make products that are safe, environmentally sustainable and produced using ethical sourcing of raw materials and labor.  

GoodGuide was founded in 2007 by Dara O'Rourke, a professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Dara is one of the world's leading academic experts on global supply chains - tracking product life cycles from resource extraction into manufacturing, through consumer use to disposal. Products often have hidden and sometimes disturbing stories - stylish apparel made in Asian sweatshops, or baby care products containing cancer-causing chemicals. Dara realized how little we know about the products we bring into our homes every day.  Information was either unavailable, too complex to understand, or biased, as marketers make unsubstantiated claims that their products are natural or safe.

To address the consumer marketplace's need for better information, GoodGuide has assembled a team of scientific and technology experts to take on the challenge of organizing the world's product information.    Our Chief Scientist is Bill Pease, an expert in chemical risk assessment and creator of the web's top pollution information resource, scorecard.org.  His science team includes specialists in life cycle assessment, environmental engineering, chemistry, nutrition and sociology.  Together we are working to acquire and compile high quality data, which we then organize and transform into actionable information for consumers.  Learn more about our complete team.

GoodGuide is funded by several prominent venture capital funds, including New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Physic Ventures.  GoodGuide earns revenue from companies that purchase advertising and business intelligence products.  Neither our investors nor our paying business customers have the ability to influence GoodGuide ratings.  Our business customers want to communicate with the influential consumers who use GoodGuide for shopping advice, so GoodGuide offers ads that allow a company to promote its sustainability program (example) or to obtain priority placement for a product as a high scoring alternative on competing product pages (example).  Advertising content is always clearly marked as "sponsored."  Our clients also buy business intelligence reports that compare their performance with competitors across a comprehensive set of health, environmental and social metrics and provide data on what metrics matter most to consumers.

GoodGuide is a "For Benefit" Corporation

Rather than operate as a traditional commercial enterprise, GoodGuide is incorporated as a "for benefit" organization.  Our commitment to being socially, ethically, and environmentally responsible is written right into our "for benefit" charter.  We are also a B Corporation,™ which is a new kind of company which use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.  We understand that to become a trusted brand in the information marketplace it is critical that we are transparent about our ratings (learn about our ratings, methodology and data)  and accountable for our business behavior.  We rely on a third-party - B Corp - to certify that we live up to the standards required for B corporations.  This certification helps consumers tell the difference between 'good companies' and good marketing. Certified B corporations must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards by achieving a minimum score on the B Ratings System and by legally expanding the responsibilities of the corporation to include consideration of stakeholder interests. Learn more about B Corporations™ at www.bcorporation.net.