Formulation Easy Guide

The Formulation Easy Guide offers many different formulations for various applications telling manufacturers how “green” the whole formulation for a personal care, home care or industrial and institutional cleaning product might be.

Customers can now judge the “eco status” and naturalness of Care Chemicals ingredients as well as entire formulations at a glance and thereby assess the “greenness” of the recipe.

Furthermore, Care Chemicals has developed formulations, which meet the requirements of official bodies, for example the international renowned Ecocert or BDIH standards.

Classification of Formulations and Green Formulation Grid

A key challenge for several applications in the personal, home care and I & I markets is to increase the level of “green” ingredients in formulations without compromising their performance. Cognis’ focus is to provide ready-made formulations and concepts with different levels of “greenness” achieving the performance requirements of different market segments and consumers. This is reflected in the Green Formulation Grid. With the focus on consumer demands, formulations are differentiated into four categories describing their level of vegetable-based and renewable ingredients and focusing on different types of consumers. The consumer categories are visualized by a four-leaved clover with one to four of the leaves being colored green:

Classification of Formulations




Green Formulation Grid 

The Green Formulation Grid visualizes in a matrix the relationship between the naturalness of a product and its level of performance, considering certain claims which manufacturers want to make for best positioning in the market:

Superior Products target the most demanding consumers who seek specialized products which have an overall convincing product experience and which are the best performers in their category in terms of the claims made.

Advanced Products are considered to offer the targeted consumer performance that goes some way beyond these requirements.

Classic Products are aiming at traditional consumers demanding products suitable for the whole family and delivering what is generally regarded as well accepted, thus a basic level of performance in their category at a reasonable price.

Note: All calculations are based on the feedstock for the Cognis products; non Cognis raw material calculations are based on public information or best knowledge available. Calculations do not consider preservatives, perfume, color or enzymes.