'GoodGuide' Picks Out Grocery Store 'Good Guys'

When shopping at the supermarket, my main concern is health and nutrition except, of course, when buying paper goods and household cleaners. In these latter two categories, I'll go for the "green" label if the product works the way I want it to. 

As for vitamins, face creams, toothpaste, shampoo and similar "health and beauty" products, I'll pick them up at the supermarket if the price is right.

It rarely occurs to me to be concerned about whether the manufacturer—whether of food, cleaners, paper goods or shampoo—operates in an environmentally friendly manner or is socially responsible when it comes to company hiring practices.

It's nice to buy the good guys' products, but who has the time to research each and every company making the 48,000 items the average supermarket carries? But now I've discovered a Web site, GoodGuide, that is trying to do it for us. And I've become addicted.

It measures products three ways—on health, environment and the manufacturer's social responsibility.

A year or so ago, I tried a "green" toilet bowl cleaner, but I didn't think it did the job, and I went back to good old Clorox With Bleach. GoodGuide gives it an overall rating of 6.1 on its 10-point scale, but it scored only 4.0 on the health index, one of the three GoodGuide uses to arrive at the rating. Clorox With Bleach has "one or more ingredients that raise a low level of health concern," the GoodGuide said.  No kidding.

Clorox did well on the environment, cited for good water management, and on the society index, where it was cited for the diversity of its workforce. Those two pushed the entire product above average on the scale.

Seventh Generation did the best, scoring an overall 8.9, but Green Works, which is actually made by Clorox, was not far behind at 8.1. It got a perfect 10 on the health score so now, of course, I will have to try it.

But the site is not foolproof–some algorithms need to be fine-tuned. The site gave me 16 alternatives to Clorox With Bleach, beginning with Seventh Generation. The third one down on the list, however, was Miessence Buzz Free Zone Personal Spray with an overall score of 8.7. The thing is, that's a mosquito repellent, not a toilet bowl cleaner.

GoodGuide, which says it now has 65,000 product listings, was founded in 2007 by Dara O'Rouke, a professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California at Berkeley. He formerly taught at MIT and writes a blog for GoodGuide with titles such as "Innovative Business Models to Incentivize Customers."

In its "About Us" section, the site says, "GoodGuide provides the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social impact of consumer products."

Perhaps it is, but consider poor B&G Sweet Relish. The company got respectable ratings on the environment and social responsibility but the relish got a 0 for the health index with the notation: "This product has a low nutrition score."

I don't think many people rely on relish for nutrition, and perhaps a little common sense ought to be applied when categorizing different products. The relish was listed under canned foods rather than condiments where, in my view, it belonged.

Another product I looked up out of curiosity was my toothpaste (Colgate) which did OK but was ranked far behind something called Tom's of Maine. I'd never heard of it but there it was at Stop & Shop, albeit on a bottom shelf. 

There are, however, quite a selection of flavors and pastes or gels with and without fluoride. Maybe I'll get around to trying Tom's of Maine, but I've also been asked to investigate meals designed for the toddler and pre-school set.

I'll need to do some more homework before I do a column on toddler foods, but as far as GoodGuide is concerned, the top-ranked toddler meal is Earth's Best Organic "Elmo" (as in Sesame Street)—pasta with carrots and broccoli. That you can find in the freezer case at Whole Foods.

I could spend hours playing on the GoodGuide site, checking out brands or individual products, fine-tuning searches by asking for fragrance-free products, products not tested on animals and other categories. Or test my brain by trying to understand the science of informatics which is used to analyze data.

But at some point, I have to stop and go grocery shopping. There is a GoodGuide phone app coming, but I think I'll bypass that one. I'd be tempted to look up everything I put in the cart and never get out of the store.