Lorraine Dallmeyer from Formula Botanica breaks down traceability in beauty: what it means, why it matters, and why most brands still won't tell you where their ingredients come from. She praises small companies like Macro Oceans that fully trace seaweed from Alaska, and questions a new industry consortium that keeps supply-chain data hidden from consumers. Clarins just bought 115 hectares of farmland to source a third of its own ingredients.
In April Clarins acquired 115 hectares of land in France, including 50 hectares of farmland, aiming to produce one third of the plants they use in formulations.
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When you buy a face serum, where have the ingredients inside it come from? Do you know? Have you ever thought about them? Have you ever asked? And the answer to those questions most likely is no. And of course you would not be alone in that. The truth is that we don't know the volume of ingredients used across the beauty industry. We don't know where they all come from. We don't know whether they're contributing to deforestation or biodiversity loss or pollution or human rights violations. We just don't know. And as part of the beauty industry's very recent giant awakening to the concept of sustainability, the word traceability is now starting to become part of the conversation. So after my interview last week with Matthew Perkins of Macro Oceans, I felt that it would be good to talk a bit more about this concept of traceability. Macro Oceans produces seaweed based extracts which they source from ocean farmers in Alaska. That seaweed is seeded on an annual basis and it grows exceptionally fast. It creates great marine habitats for other life in the oceans and then it's harvested with minimal impact. Matthew talked all about it last week, so go and listen to that episode. But Matthew also admitted that you can't infinitely scale production in one place, which is why they work with multiple ocean farms across Alaska. And they know exactly where those farms are, they know who operates them, and they know how they operate. They have complete transparency and traceability for their ingredients, which is something that I can see the beauty industry starting to need to address more as they need to be able to control the methods through which ingredients are grown and synthesized, harvested, processed. So in this short opinion piece, I'm going to explore what traceability truly means. And I'm also going to take a critical look at a big new beauty industry initiative which has been spearheaded by Chanel and is now being adopted by many of the big players. And I'm a little bit skeptical, so let's dive in. Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my green beauty opinions in which I challenge the beauty industry's terrible track record on sustainability and share my thoughts on how we can make the beauty sector a better and more sustainable place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast now. Traceability isn't a particularly sexy subject when it comes to sustainability, but I do think the two concepts definitely go hand in hand. After all, if you don't know what's happening in your supply chain, then you also can't clean it up if you need to. The accounting firm Ernst and Young recently found that 61% of consumers want more information on the products that they purchase so they can make more sustainable choices. So I think it stands to reason that companies are having to think more about how they obtain and share that information. In other words, traceability is only going to become more important for shoppers. And the beauty industry is clearly thinking about this too, because a consortium of the world's largest cosmetics companies recently founded the Traceability alliance for Sustainable Cosmetics Consortium, also known as T R A S C E trasc Traski. I'm not sure it's not the catchiest of acronyms. So companies taking part include Chanel, who initiated it, l', Oreal, l', Occitane, Shiseido, Estee Lauder, Clarins, Merck, you know, all the usual suspects, the ones who use most of the ingredients. So we should applaud them for wanting to be more transparent if that's what truly sits behind this initiative. And I do remain a little bit skeptical of that desire since the beauty industry has historically notoriously been extremely secretive. So they're using digital technology to map their supply chains across one big digital platform, which is called transparency 1. Bit like air Force One, perhaps. And apparently this platform is already in use with other industries and it was selected for its ability to guarantee each supplier. So each big cosmetic company using it, the ownership, the security, and get this, the confidentiality of the data they share. We'll come back to that word. I think that's fascinating. So to quote from the official press release that everyone seems to have shared everywhere, Traski, I'm going to call it Traski, aims to respond to three fundamental challenges facing the cosmetics industry. One, improve knowledge of supply chains. Two, assess their associated social and environmental risks, and three, determine the actions required to support supply chains in their transition. Transition to what? Presumably more transparency. It's a clever concept when you look at transparency1's website, where these huge multinationals can upload everything about their supply chain and the system presumably analyzes the paperwork and the data for them. Now, reading between the lines, data then also seems to be shared, I think, between users on the platform, which must be anonymized somehow so other companies can't get a competitive advantage. Now on the front end of the website when we're shopping, so when we go to one of these big cosmetics companies websites, so where we as shoppers land it will then supposedly tell you where the various components of your products have been sourced from. And from what I can tell, it looks like the amount of information you receive as a shopper is fairly limited though, because I get the impression that traceability is more for perhaps internal use than for external sharing. I'm also not 100% sure if when a company in one of these big cosmetic multinational supply chains is in non compliance with internal sustainability standards. And I do presume we're talking about the multinationals own internal standards here, because of course governments aren't regulating the sustainability of these big cosmetic companies to the level they should be. So I do wonder whether that non compliance would then be communicated with us as shoppers. And I also find it really interesting that the press Release mentioned that Transparency 1 was picked for the confidentiality of the data shared by its users. When this is of course a transparency platform. I mean, transparency is even in the name of the platform. Also, as we know, the reports you produce are only as good as the data that goes into them, right? So I would be really interested to know how the auditing and the third party verification on the ground actually goes. Still, let's face it, it's a start for a very secretive industry. Now, shortly after the start of Traski Traski I'm still going with Traski, Clarins announced in April that they acquired 115 hectares of land in France, including 50 hectares of farmland to produce and process plants for their beauty products. This is supposed to produce one third of the plants they use in their formulations. Now, I do wonder if they started to realize that the industry's growing transparency requirements wouldn't necessarily shine a very positive light on their current ingredient supply chain. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical here and I would welcome Clarins on the podcast to come and set the record straight. If that is the case, I would reach out to them myself. But they, much like the other big players, have no means for contacting their press office on their website. So much for transparency, right? Either way, I remain a bit skeptical about much of this transparency reporting until I see it in practice, because I suspect that we as shoppers will be given the absolute bare minimum of information about the beauty industry's traceability of ingredients and packaging. For that matter, I certainly understand why some of the big players are pushing heavily for biotechnology in their ingredient supply chain, as I think these growing demands for traceability may increasingly start to shine a light on some practices that some shoppers might not like very much once they become aware of them, including contributing to deforestation and biodiversity loss and not operating within planetary boundaries, as was recently highlighted in the Carbon Trust Report on the beauty industry, which I covered a few episodes back in episode number 204. So if you haven't listened to it yet, go and listen to that episode now. I hope that ultimately this is an initiative that actually does more than pay lip service. I hope that we actually start to see something come out of it. I hope the industry does more than just put out some bland press releases in which they share the absolute bare minimum of information. Traceability and the potential for using digital technologies, including blockchain, is really exciting for beauty, and I hope it's a topic that we start to see people talk about a lot more. In the meantime, it's companies like Macro Oceans who of course I interviewed on the podcast last week, who have no problem tracing their ingredients back to the exact ocean farms that they came from. Yet again, as we often so often see, it's the smaller players who are showing everyone else exactly how it should be done. So my challenge to you for this week is to keep talking to companies in beauty, but realistically in all consumer sectors about traceability. Ask them where their cosmetic ingredients are from, ask them where their packaging is from, and when you're met with blank stares or bland statements, keep asking. Eventually, the need for full traceability will hopefully eclipse the desire for secrecy, but that will only happen if we all keep asking. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast. Where have you been? Please make sure you do so now in your favorite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.
