Sodium Hydroxymethylglycinate is one of the safest preservatives available to us at present. We take care to use it at the lowest effective concentration to help prevent our plant-based products from going off.

This preservative achieves a higher than usual hazard rating from EWG because it releases a small amount of formaldehyde. Despite this, we believe it to be one of the safest alternative on the market at present. Formaldehyde is controversial, however, if you take into account that your body naturally produces a small amount of formaldehyde, and compare the amount of formaldehyde in your blood to the amount in our products, there is significantly less formaldehyde in our products.

Our process of continuous improvement means that we are keeping a watching brief on the development of new preservatives and will switch as soon as an even safer alternative becomes available. Our dish liquid is now preserved with benzyl alcohol and dehydroacetic acid, which is the first step in our transition away from sodium hydroxymethylglycinate.