Our Safety and Care Commitment

From Susan Nettesheim, Vice President, Product Stewardship and Toxicology

Today we launched a new website, SafetyandCareCommitment.com, that lets people know all we do to be sure that the baby and beauty care products they use are as safe as can be. As head of Product Stewardship and Toxicology here at Johnson & Johnson’s Family of Consumer Companies, I know all the measures we take… we just didn’t have a forum to tell the rest of the world about it. Now we do.

Over the past few years, some interest groups have raised questions about the ingredients in personal care products used widely around the world, and they’ve put particular focus on our baby products. At first we were disappointed, because we know that all our products are safe by scientific standards and meet or exceed government regulations. Over time, though, we’ve come to realize that sometimes safety alone isn’t enough. There’s a vigorous public discussion going on around the world about what ingredients should or shouldn’t be in personal care products, and how they should be regulated. We have a point of view that we’ve expressed, based on our considered understanding of the science involved, and that’s always going to be our starting point. But what matters most isn’t what we think, it’s what the people who use our products think.

So we’ve been talking to them. Over the past year, we’ve talked to thousands of consumers in different countries to understand how they view these issues. What we’ve found is that even though people understand that the products they use are safe and meet government regulations, they want more. For one, they want to know why we consider something safe, and the steps we take to ensure safety. They also want us to be responsive to any questions and concerns they may have read about, or have themselves. Our answer is SafetyandCareCommitment.com.

On the site, we’ve opened a window onto all the steps we take to be certain our products are safe as can be.  We’re also for the first time talking in detail about some of the ingredients that have been in the public eye, and our future plans for those ingredients. We’ve decided to remove or reduce a number of ingredients that are safe by scientific standards and considered safe by key regulators around the world including the EU, the U.S. and China. But we’re changing them out because we’re listening to the people who rely on our products, and we want to be sure they have peace of mind bringing our products into their homes and caring for themselves and their families. Nothing is more important to us.