Keeping You and Your Family Safe – Our Ingredient Safety Process

For more than 70 years, we’ve been committed to making everyday life a little better and brighter as a brand you can trust to clean and care for your clothes. Product safety is a top priority for us – Tide is not banned anywhere in the US or Canada. Every Tide product that we ship complies with all state and federal regulations, including the New York state 1,4 dioxane requirements. Because Tide is designed for everyday use, we go beyond regulatory compliance to ensure continued monitoring of every ingredient, in every product. Before any of our brands are on shelves or online, they are rigorously tested to ensure they are safe for use. Each ingredient is carefully selected and if an ingredient has not been proven safe for its intended use, we don’t put it in our products. We hold ourselves to the highest standard of safety, and as such, our brand meet or exceed every product safety standard in North America.

Tide’s Safety Process

At Tide, safety guides the ingredient choices we make so your family (and ours) can confidently use our products every day. We use the same safety process as regulatory agencies like the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the European Union (EU), the World Health Organization (WHO), and others. But, before we market any new product, we go well beyond complying with laws and regulations to ensure every ingredient goes through a four-step, science-based process.

1. Question

Before we use any ingredient, our scientists start by asking questions, just like you. If an ingredient doesn’t answer our questions and meet our safety standards, we don’t use it.

2. Define

We define the ingredient’s safe range. If an ingredient passes the first step, we then define the ingredient’s safe range, which tells us the amount of an ingredient that is safe to use. Almost everything in the world has a safe range and an unsafe range, including life-sustaining basics like sunlight, oxygen, and water. Using the same science-based standards as major regulatory agencies around the world, we define the safe range for every ingredient we use.

3. Determine

We review the collective ingredient safety of each product. This means that we evaluate all Tide ingredients in every product to ensure they’re safe when used as directed – both for you, your family, and the environment. If we can’t confirm that, we go back to the drawing board.

4. Diligence

We care deeply about the families that use our brands, so we keep innovating to create products that are better for people and for the environment. On this journey, we will continually collaborate with regulatory agencies and scientists around the world. We will also listen to you to make sure our products meet your safety and performance expectations. We will continue to share information about our products, because we’re committed to being safe in the choices we make so families can trust our brands for years to come. You can learn more about our safety process here:

Ingredient Choices and How We Make Them

You might have been told that natural ingredients are safer to use than man-made, synthetic ones. In reality, though, it’s not that simple, because both natural and synthetic ingredients have a safe range and an unsafe range. Even basics like sunlight, oxygen, and water have safety limits. So, what goes into choosing our product ingredients?

  1. Safety.  As outlined above, every ingredient’s safety is assessed through a four-step, science-based process.

  2. Performance.  Every ingredient has a role in delivering the cleaning performance you expect from Tide. We seek to use the best ingredients for our products so that you can use them with confidence.

  3. Sustainable sourcing.  Synthetic ingredients can oftentimes be more sustainable than natural ingredients, because they require fewer resources. The sustainable features of a product ingredient depend on the resources used in creating it, harvesting it, making the product, and then ultimately using the product. We’re working hard to try and use the most sustainable and earth-friendly solutions in all of our products.

Ingredients Tide Will Never Use

We know feeling safe is important, so we’re committed to providing you with clear, accessible, and reliable ingredient information. You have many reasons to be interested in what ingredients are – and are not – in the products you use, and there are some ingredients we’ll never use. Period. You can learn more about these ingredients that we’ve restricted for Tide and all P&G products.

Have more questions on New York’s 1,4-Dioxane legislation? More information from the American Cleaning Institute can be found here.