Aveada Leads the Charge for Personal Care Standards

By Sarah Fister Gale


For Aveda, organic personal care products aren’t a consumer trend or niche market, they are the foundation of the company’s business philosophy. Aveda pioneered the organic personal care marketplace, with its plant-derived hair care, skin care, makeup and lifestyle products. It has been producing environmentally friendly products using organic ingredients whenever possible for more than 25 years, and it is at the forefront of the push for a recognized organic personal care standard.

Beyond striving for a more environmentally conscious marketplace, the thing that makes Aveda unique is that it is one of the few organic personal care companies that has mass consumer appeal, not just because the products are sustainably made, but because they perform as well or better than most of the top brands on the market today.

A Familiar Mission
From its beginning, Aveda has approached business with an eye toward sustainability. In fact, you might think the company swiped its mission statement from the organic industry. Aveda’s corporate goals—“to care for the world we live in, from the products we make to the ways in which we give back to society; and to strive to set an example for environmental leadership and responsibility”—could have been cribbed from the early mission statements of the group that defined the National Organic Program (NOP). The difference is that Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of Aveda, wrote that mission statement more than 20 years ago.

“Aveda’s mission is what organic is all about,” says Tim Kapsner, a scientist in the botanical research group for the company that Rechelbacher started. “Our goals are one in the same.”

Rechelbacher launched the company in 1978 with the premise that ecological goals and profitability could be mutually achievable, and that social responsibility was just the price of doing business. Born in Austria, the son of an herbalist and naturalist, Rechelbacher is an active environmentalist, innovative business leader, author and artist who specializes in analyzing the chemical constitution of plants while pioneering the practical use of flowers, plant-based flavor-aroma-therapy, functional foods and nutraceuticals for the benefit of personal health and well-being. In his years at Aveda, he collaborated with physicians, chemists and pharmacologists, as well as experts and traditional healers throughout the world—especially in India and Asia—and with tribes in the Brazilian rain forest and North America to identify and formulate great products made with earth-friendly ingredients.

Today, the company’s product lines boast a variety of shampoos, conditioners and styling products; skin cleansers and moisturizers for face and body; cosmetic products and tools; aromatherapy oils, teas and candles; and a complete men’s personal care product line. All of Aveda’s products feature fresh natural fragrances developed from essential oils that create soothing scent memories for consumers loyal to the products.

Aveda employs its own perfumer to create its signature blends, rather than buying the blends from a third party. “We hired a perfumer so we can control exactly what goes into our products,” Kapsner says of the company’s easily identifiable scents. “Creating unique aromas is all about maintaining control over the ingredients and how they are processed.”

Rechelbacher’s vision and success has made Aveda a benchmark for organic personal care, both because the products are made in earth-friendly ways and because they are extraordinarily successful in terms of sales well outside of the natural care market niche. Embraced by salons, stylists and consumers across all demographics, Aveda proves that organic ingredients and sustainable practices can be used to make products of the highest quality that win the devotion and dollars of consumers from all walks of life.

Fighting for Standards
When Kapsner started at Aveda in 1993 as a formulator, the company was already using some organic ingredients in many of its aroma products, including organic ylang ylang, and marshmallow, but access to organic ingredients 13 years ago was limited. “Back then you couldn’t even ask for ‘organic’,” he says. “We used the word ‘renewable’.”

Aveda found some organic ingredients through an independent private set of organic farmer co-ops that had established their own organic standards years prior to the implementation of the NOP. Otherwise, Aveda scientists sought ingredients that were produced without petroleum, and animal products that were produced using vegetarian feedstocks.

But finding the organic ingredients wasn’t his only obstacle in the early days. Kapsner discovered that incorporating organic ingredients into hair and body care products was not as easy as formulating for food. “You can use a few agricultural products for personal care, like vegetable oils, and proteins, but after that it gets complicated,” he says. “There is so much more chemistry involved in personal care that you just don’t deal with in food. You may start with an agricultural product, but once you put it through all the processing it’s not anything like what it was when you began.”

That has been a challenge Aveda formulators have struggled with since the company’s early days, as they work not only to integrate more organic ingredients into Aveda’s products but to work with other professionals to establish a recognized organic certification standard for the entire personal care industry.

Ironically, even though Aveda has endeavored to make organic products an integral part of its business model for decades, the company still has no recognized standard against which it can certify or measure its efforts.

In the mid-90s, in an attempt to clarify the differences between organic and conventional products, and to establish guidelines for organic personal care products, a group from Aveda along with a consulting team developed its own organic personal care standard. “We took a simple approach—start with sustainability and no petroleum chemicals. But we didn’t go into the chemistry,” Kapsner says. “It took us five years to get that far.”

The group took the standard to the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA), one of the oldest organic certifying agencies, and the group adopted it as the first-ever standard for personal care certification. Soon after, however, the USDA released the NOP and suggested that it was going to also develop standards for cosmetics and fiber products. “It wiped out all the work we had done with OCIA,” Kapsner says. “The standard didn’t mean anything anymore. We needed a consensus.”

So Aveda started working with a task force created and sponsored by the Organic Trade Association (OTA), which included manufacturers, suppliers, certifiers, growers and other industry members, including Kapsner, with the goal to create a voluntary standard for acceptable ingredients and manufacturing processes in personal care products labeled either “organic” or “made with organic ingredients.” This standard would go into much greater detail about the processing and chemistry behind personal care product development than the original standard approved by OCIA. The process for defining the standard was also far more complicated this time around.

“It’s very complex deciding what should be certified organic,” Kapsner says of the standard writing process. “We needed to figure out how to allow companies like Aveda to promote organic ingredients so they have the ability to create new markets for organic farmers. But we also need to find a way to make products for personal care that can be as organic as possible.”

The task force began by examining thousands of ingredients used for personal care, including synthetic colorants, fragrances and flavors. In some cases, whole categories of ingredients were prohibited, including all petroleum-derived ingredients, such as parabens, which are used for preserving products; and all formaldehyde donors. In their place, Kapsner expects to see more use of vegetable-based ingredients, such as glycerin, sugar, proteins and amino acids, to make the surfactants, emulsifiers and conditioners that are the base of so many products.

The group also researched every process used in the making of personal care ingredients and products to determine whether they could be acceptable in products labeled organic, based on what they did to the raw materials, how it changed them, and what impact the process had on the final product. “When you process food, there are a lot of chemical reactions but it’s still food when it’s done. In cosmetics, the processing is not that invisible,” Kapsner says.

The task force allowed many of these processes for products labeled “made with organic ingredients,” but only a handful for products labeled “organic.” Eventually, the task force created an industry consensus on organic ingredients and processes for personal care, and the first draft of a set of standards is now being created.

The task force is currently in the second phase of the project, and is working in collaboration with NSF International and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop a benchmark for organic personal care products. NSF’s decision to create an industry standard was prompted by directives the USDA issued last April, which declared that personal care products could no longer use the USDA organic label, even if they met all of the organic rule’s requirements for food labeling. Though USDA later rescinded the directives, it prompted the industry to take action. No standard has yet been completed, but Kapsner says the task force is close. Most of the major decisions with regard to processing techniques, and issues regarding water content, have been made. He hopes the group will have a standard written and submitted for approval to the USDA some time this spring.

“When we are done,” Kapsner says, “we will have the most comprehensive personal care standard in the world.”

Saving the Babassu
In the meantime, Aveda is undeterred in its mission to use as many ingredients as possible that are certified organic and/or produced in an environmentally sustainable way. In his current role in botanical research and development, Kapsner spends most of his time and effort working to find or create new ingredients to pass on to formulators. Through the work of Aveda’s Botanical Research Group, the company invests in efforts to help growers and handlers certify their ingredients as organic, and to find revolutionary new ingredients that not only benefit the earth and the people who grow them but also help Aveda create great new cutting-edge products.

Aveda currently has several programs to cultivate change and support biodiversity. The company focuses much of its environmental stewardship on programs to prevent or reduce six key issues – global climate change, water pollution, loss of species and habitats, air pollution, toxins in the environment, and waste generation. Through its efforts, Aveda has supported everything from campaigns to reduce CO2 emissions by replacing standard light bulbs with fluorescent ones, to creating business partnerships with indigenous communities throughout the world.

One of its best success stories is its partnership with the Mardu people of Kuktabubba in Western Australia for the harvesting of sandalwood without the use of petrochemicals. Through its relationship with the Mardu people, Aveda has invested in building a sustainable economic base for the community, and they in turn provide material that is sustainably and legally produced—unlike much sandalwood on the market, which is illegally obtained through poachers in India.

Through another project of which Kapsner is especially proud, Aveda has helped to support a co-op of Babassu nut growers in Brazil who are taking back land that was stolen and burned during a massacre in the 1970s. After years of fear, a group of Babassu harvesting women formed a collective grassroots organization, and joining with environmental groups, successfully lobbied for local and federal laws that would prohibit the clear-cutting of palm forests. As a result of their efforts, today the Free Nut Law protects the right of forest inhabitants to access the palms across properties, and to harvest and sell the nuts.

Awed by the integrity of the communities, the quality of their Babassu nuts and the sustainability of their craft, Aveda partnered with the traditional Babassu women’s communities in 1996, and has ongoing contracts with the co-op to purchase its Babassu nut oils. Aveda uses the Babassu nut oil as a conditioning ingredient for many of its products, including its new Be Curly curl enhancing lotion. The company is also making great strides in developing new derivative products from the oil, such as Babassu betaine as a foaming shampoo ingredient.

“The uses for pure vegetable oil are limited, so we are trying to create additional cosmetic ingredients from the Babassu oil that have other uses,” Kapsner says. “That’s a big part of what the organic personal care standards are all about, to encourage and promote the development and use of agricultural organic ingredients.”

As part of the partnership, Aveda helped finance the construction of a Babassu processing facility, a soap-making facility and a paper press, and with Aveda’s guidance, Babassu women have certified organic Babassu nuts.

“This is what we do,” Kapsner says. “It brings an added financial benefit to the Babassu growers while furthering Aveda’s mission to source certified organic ingredients.”

The company is not shy about discussing its many environmental success stories, like those of the Babassu and sandalwood growers. It’s part of Aveda’s marketing campaign to spread the word about its goals and efforts, and to create a value-add for customers. “We tell our consumers that we do this, and we explain that our products cost more because this is part of our mission,” Kapsner says. “That’s the way business should be done. And our consumers get it.”

Tricks for Formulation
The Botanical research team continues to look for new uses for the Babassu oil, sandalwood and other ingredients for future products. Having top-notch formulators to create those products is one of Aveda’s secret weapons. Kapsner admits that while part of Aveda’s popularity lies in its use of organic and sustainably grown ingredients and its decision not to use petroleum-based products, those parameters can also be limiting for formulators who are tasked with creating great quality products with long shelf lives.

“It requires us to be more creative and it forces us to think outside the box,” he says. For example, one of the biggest issues they face is finding ingredients based on starch, cellulose or other renewable materials for styling products that will perform as well as petroleum-based products, the common ingredient in most styling gels.

However, he sees it as more of an opportunity for formulators than a drawback. “If you put in the effort, and you are willing to spend the money, you can find ingredients that will meet your performance expectations.”

Because using organic ingredients and supporting sustainability are so core to the business model at Aveda, it is easier for his team to invest in finding or developing great ingredients, such as derivatives of the Babassu oil, than it may be for other companies. “We spend a lot of time and money to maximize the organic content in our products, without compromising quality,” he says. “It’s how we do business.”

To further support that goal, the research team is focusing much of its energy these days researching the functionality of plants with high antioxidants and other healthy properties. “It’s a continuation of our mission to find every functional ingredient from organic plants that we possibly can,” he says.

Goals for the Future
To further advance its mission, Aveda has established milestones to chart its progress in achieving the company’s goals. Kapsner believes many of the goals, such as its plan to purchase only organic essential oils within five years, will not only help Aveda, it will help further the efforts of the whole industry. “We are driving the market for organic essential oils, and in some cases, we currently buy the world’s supply,” he says. “A lot of companies have achieved their organic certification because we keep beating the bushes looking for these oils. It helps them see that there is a market, and creating markets for organic ingredients is what it’s all about.”