How it works
How Conscious works
Conscious rates companies so you can decide where your money goes. Every verdict and score on this site is our editorial opinion, formed from publicly available records and cited on the company's page. We show our work so you can check it.
The three questions we ask
Who actually owns this business? We look at whether a company has taken private equity investment, venture capital, or gone public, and what that means for who it answers to. A founder-owned business with no outside investors scores highest. A PE-owned company with institutional investors at the table scores lowest.
Does this company expand in ways that squeeze independent competitors? We look at site-selection patterns, pricing strategies, and documented cases of independent businesses closing after a chain moves nearby. A single-location indie with no expansion agenda scores highest. A chain with a documented pattern of entering dense independent neighborhoods scores lowest.
Are the original founders still running the business? Founder-led companies tend to make decisions based on mission, not just quarterly returns. We look at whether founders are still in operational roles, not just on the board or listed as advisors.
What the verdicts are (and aren't)
A verdict like “Mixed Picture” or “Significant Concerns” is a judgment, not a fact. It's our conclusion after weighing what the public record shows about a company's ownership, founders, worker treatment, environmental practices, and sourcing. The facts underneath each verdict are cited on the page. You may look at the same facts and reach a different conclusion: that's the point of showing them.
We report legal and regulatory matters at their actual stage. An allegation is not a finding. A settlement is not an admission. An open investigation is not a conclusion. When we say a company “faces a lawsuit alleging” something, that is exactly what we mean, no more.
Where the information comes from
Every claim on Conscious traces to a publicly verifiable source: official filings (SEC, state incorporation records, international registries), government enforcement databases (federal and state labor, safety, discrimination, and environmental agencies), court records, certification databases, company disclosures, and credible press, national and local to each market a company operates in. We cite our sources on every page so you can read them yourself, and we archive every cited page so the record we relied on is preserved even if the original moves or changes.
We deliberately don't rest published claims on paywalled databases you can't check. Subscription research tools are sometimes used internally to cross-check a finding, but nothing appears on the site unless a public source supports it. If we can't verify something, we say what we know and flag the gap with a date rather than guessing.
When a page says no records were found in a database, that is a statement about our search on that date, not a certification of the company. Records can exist that searches miss, and new ones can appear tomorrow.
How the scores work
Each company is scored 1–10 on five dimensions: local ownership, founder involvement, worker pay & benefits, environmental impact, and sourcing & labor. The rationale under each score explains exactly what drove it.
Is the company locally or independently owned? Does revenue stay in the community or flow to outside investors?
Are the original founders still running day-to-day operations, or have they been replaced by professional management?
How does the company treat its workers? We look at wage rates, union activity, benefit packages, and any documented labor disputes.
What is the company's carbon footprint relative to its size? We look for published emissions data, third-party certifications, and documented reduction targets. Vague sustainability language without supporting data does not improve a score.
Where do products and ingredients come from, and under what conditions? We look for named suppliers, third-party audits, and direct trade relationships. Fashion and food companies have longer, more visible supply chains than gyms or fitness studios, and scoring reflects that structural difference.
A few defaults worth knowing:
- When a company is too small or too new to have a public labor record, worker pay defaults to 5 (a neutral score, not a good or bad one), and the rationale says so.
- Single-location small businesses default to 5 on environmental impact unless they've done something notable in either direction.
- Anonymous employee reviews (Glassdoor, Indeed) can inform a score but never solely justify a low one. Low scores on worker treatment require documented evidence.
- Recent evidence counts most: matters from the past seven years drive scores; older, resolved matters are noted as history, not held against a company forever.
How scores become verdicts
The verdict isn't a vibe: it follows the scores by a fixed rule. A company earns a green verdict when no dimension falls below 4 and the average is 6.5 or higher. “Significant Concerns” means a conduct dimension (worker treatment, environmental impact, or sourcing) sits at the bottom of the scale with documented findings behind it, or the overall record averages below 4.5. Ownership structure alone never makes a company red: being publicly traded or investor-owned can hold a company out of the green tier, but a red verdict requires documented conduct, not just capital structure. “Mixed Picture” is everything in between. “Permanently Closed” is just a fact, not a judgment. When a company sits within a rounding margin of a line, we keep the more favorable verdict rather than flip a color over decimals. And on the rare occasion a company's story doesn't fit the formula, we can deviate; when we do, the explanation appears right on the company's page, under the verdict.
Founder-run, independently owned, no outside investors, and no documented pattern of displacing competitors. This verdict is uncommon.
Founder-owned or founder-run, with no PE or VC backing. May have grown beyond a single location but has not compromised independence.
Publicly traded or investor-backed, but with strong founder involvement, genuine sustainability commitments, or unusually good labor practices.
Some meaningful concerns, usually investor backing or rapid expansion, offset by genuine positives like founder involvement or mission credibility.
PE-owned or publicly traded with no meaningful founder involvement, documented displacement patterns, or serious labor and supply chain issues.
The business has closed. We keep these pages up as a record, and often as a case study in what gets lost.
How this is made
Our whole thing is transparency, so we should hold ourselves to it. There's no way a single person could build this site, run it, and research and write every profile alone. So how do we do it? We'll tell you.
Research and writing are done with AI assistance following a fixed protocol: a defined list of sources checked for every company, conflicts flagged rather than silently resolved, gaps stated rather than filled. Nothing publishes automatically: every profile is reviewed, edited, and approved by a human before it goes live, and a human answers every correction.
We think this makes the research more consistent and more thorough than we could manage alone, and we'd rather tell you how the site is made than have you wonder.
Conscious is built and run by Emily, in New York City.
Freshness
Company facts change: founders leave, cases resolve, businesses close. Every profile shows when it was last updated. A claim that was true at publication can go stale, so every entry is regularly re-checked (enforcement databases re-searched, facts refreshed) with yellow and red verdicts prioritized and reader-flagged claims re-researched ahead of schedule. If you see something outdated, tell us; see the corrections policy.
Independence
Conscious accepts no payment, sponsorship, or affiliate revenue from any company rated on the site. No company can pay for a better verdict or to remove a worse one. Paid subscribers to our newsletter can request which companies we research next: that buys research attention, never the outcome.
Something wrong? A fact to correct, a source to add, a company to request? See how corrections work.