CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE
The diagnostic engine of the platform.
The Pouch
A baby-food pouch can say "no added sugar" and "healthy" and be telling the truth. The questions a parent is actually asking are ones the words were never built to answer.
The Permitted List
"Approved" tells you an additive passed a battery and earned its place on a list. It cannot tell you which of the additives in your trolley carries a question the science is still only starting to ask.
The High Street Exemption
A gel-polish ingredient the EU pulled from sale on 1 September 2025 is lawful on a British shelf until Valentine's Day 2027 — and nothing at the till tells you which side of the line you're on.
The Tap Question
The same 0.1 µg/L PFAS number is law in Glasgow and Dublin and only advice in Reading. What changes isn't the number — it's whose hand is on the clock.
The Untested Parcel
When a cheap toy arrives from an overseas seller, the law assumes someone in the UK checked it was safe. Often, no one did — and the checkout won't tell you which kind of seller you bought from.
Who Pays for the Bin
From 2026-27 a new packaging fee lands on your shopping. It is charging the producer mostly for the WEIGHT of the pack — so the recyclable jar you were told to choose can cost nine times more than the unrecyclable pouch, and no shelf cue tells you which you are holding.
The Words That Die
Some green words on the 2026 shelf just acquired legal weight; others stayed legal while meaning almost nothing — and nothing on the pack tells you which is which.
The Recycled-Plastic Catch
The best test we have for recycled plastic is, by design, looking at the wrong thing — and at ordinary shelf level, nothing tells you which lane your product came from.
What the box won't tell you about your teabag
A brand switched the plastic in its bags, the bags fell apart in people's mugs, and that is how the seal nobody mentions came to light.
The Bottle That Outlived Its Decade
Every bin you sort into answers an easier question than the one you're asking — and a 60-year-old bottle on a Scottish beach shows why.
The Cookware Material Clarity Report
The word on the box names a metal, a grade, or a coating's hardness — never the thing that comes off into your food.
The Detox Label
A 'free-of' badge reliably lowers a parent's anxiety. Whether it lowers anything else is the part no one at the shelf can check.
The Nonstick Inheritance
A two-word label on a nonstick pan answers a 2005 question with a 1970s test. The pan in your kitchen emits things the test does not measure.
The Disclosure Gap
The EU banned titanium dioxide from food. It did not ban titanium dioxide from the pan that puts it in food. The difference is one word in a regulation written in 2004.
The Coco Question
A 1973 trade-association vocabulary list decides what name appears on the wrapper of a shampoo bar in 2026 — and what does not.
The Hidden Half
What "organic," "natural," "compostable," and "carbon-neutral" all have in common. Voluntary certifications draw a perimeter; we read the word inside it as the whole product. The architecture is the same in cotton, in cookies, in carbon, in code.
Where the Logo Ends
GOTS wrote down the boundary of its job in plain language. The label cannot carry the sentence.
The Dye Beneath
A coloured GOTS-certified organic cotton towel is sold under a logo that means *no toxic dyes* and is read as *returns to soil*. What does the consumer's compost actually do with the dye?