Annual Benefit Report

mission statement

To keep artisanal craft alive by creating products and experiences rooted in designing and making.

Since our founding in 1948, Heath has always been committed to making our products and running our business in ways that support people and the planet. Edith Heath designed her earliest ceramics to be fired at a lower temperature than the standard—an energy-saving practice we continue today. We also recycle clay and water from our manufacturing process back into the factory. We source our clay and manufacture our products in California, which keeps our carbon footprint light. In recent decades, we have developed leadership development opportunities and pay equity to support our entire staff. And all of these things are just the beginning of a long list of old and new practices we have integrated into our operations, many of which have contributed to our official designations as a California Green Business and Certified B Corp. Below is our Annual Benefit Report for the fiscal year 2025 (4/1/24-3/31/25).

Certifications

B Corp

In January 2023, Heath formalized our commitment to social and environmental responsibility by becoming a certified B Corp. Achieving this certification involved a holistic review of our operations and processes, including environmental management, equitable compensation practices, purchasing policies, and local economic development initiatives. We chose this certification because of its comprehensive and credible assessment process.

Through careful measurement of our practices across all areas of our business, we identified where improvements were needed and took concrete steps to address them. Our score was 84.5, with a minimum of 80 points to qualify. We are proud of this achievement, as most businesses score 50.9 points when attempting the assessment. One significant change we made was to our legal structure, transitioning to become a benefit corporation in the state of California. California Benefit Corporations are legally required to think beyond profit when making business decisions, factoring in the long-term health and well-being of people and the planet.

Heath continues to operate according to Edith Heath’s vision, established 75 years ago, of hand-crafted, well-designed, durable products made in California with regard to nature and the community. We see B Corp certification as a way to galvanize this vision for future generations.

California Green Business Certification

This certification ensures that our practices align with resource conservation and pollution prevention in our factories and retail operations. All our California locations are certified as California Green Businesses. This verifies that spaces comply with applicable laws, develop internal policies, and continue the journey with each new employee, purchase, and material. All certified locations exceeded the standards to be considered innovators, serving as stewards for what is possible as a business. In the coming year, we will work on obtaining the Green Business Certification for our newest showroom in Austin, Texas.

Social Responsibility

Employees

Heath is a small company with a workforce that spans many roles and skill sets. We are proud to have many employees who’ve been with us for decades—some for nearly half a century. One of our central values is supporting our employees to be fulfilled at work and secure in their lives.

All our full-time employees have retirement and healthcare benefits. We worked with ICA Fund in 2020 to analyze our pay equity, expand benefits, and increase hourly wages. The starting wage in the San Francisco Bay Area is $25 an hour, while in Los Angeles, it’s $22, above minimum wage requirements for those areas. In addition to a minimum of eleven paid time-off days and nine paid holidays, we offer a paid volunteer day for all employees to give back to their communities.

Heath understands that applying ergonomic principles at our worksites is fundamental to providing our employees with daily health and safety support at their workplaces. A part of this approach consists of weekly, in-person, onsite ergonomics training sessions. Employee feedback provided during the training sessions has created a collaborative space where employees and managers can work together to reduce potential workplace injuries at our sites. Additionally, Heath provides ergonomic assessments on an as-needed basis and provides ergonomic equipment where needed to support and sustain our injury prevention strategy.

Employees are reimbursed for boots, headphones, home office furniture, and other items necessary to perform their jobs. We support a diverse workforce by providing translation, meetings in Spanish, and human resources personnel who are fluent.

Community Engagement

With locations in Marin County, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, we are committed to being a positive presence in the communities where we manufacture and sell our products. We aim for our two factories, located in Sausalito and the Mission District, to be anchor institutions that provide a place for the community to connect, grow, and open opportunities for other businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive alongside us.

Heath aims to foster the spirit of human-scale manufacturing and traditional crafts. The San Francisco Tile Factory features the Heath Collective, a group of small businesses that rent space at below-market rates to continue operating within San Francisco. Our annual Make Good Market is a community event that showcases a unique convergence of modern makers, many of whom are local, to the broader community. Heath is a member and supporter of SFMade, which aims to promote local manufacturing in San Francisco.

Heath regularly gives funding and product to causes that support social equity and environmental protection. Third-quality dinnerware is available to employees for a dollar per piece, and this money supports non-profits of the staff’s choosing. Each sale of Chez Panisse dinnerware supports the work of The Edible Schoolyard Project and its mission. We regularly collect dinnerware donations at our Home Plate Dinnerware Exchange. In 2024, that event yielded over 3,400 pieces donated to Alexandria House and Urban Angels SF.

Environmental Responsibility

Waste

Heath has found ways to significantly reduce landfill waste with innovative end-uses for various waste streams. We go out of our way to sort our materials. This includes donating production overrun mixed tile boxes to arts non-profit organizations, recycling our nitrile plastic gloves into plastic furniture, recycling fired clay waste into raw material for concrete, and composting any unusable clay. In the fiscal year 2025, we recycled over 200,000 gloves.

Our break rooms have comprehensive recycling and composting, with plenty of Heath dinnerware as an alternative to disposable food service ware. We use reusable plastic bins and pallet covers to avoid packaging waste when moving products between locations. We also work with our vendors to return packaging materials, including the foam used to package kiln cones.

Our waste diversion from the landfill currently stands at 85% for the fiscal year 2025, up 5% from the fiscal year 2021. This increase is due to sorting a greater quantity of niche waste materials and improving our data collection. We plan to further increase our diversion rate to zero waste (90%) as we continue to enhance our education, sorting, and data collection.

Energy and Carbon Emissions

Heath uses 100% renewable electricity in our factories, sourced from a combination of solar and wind energy. In 2019, we completed the installation of LED light bulbs in both factories, converting over 350 fixtures. We are lucky that natural lightning is plentiful, and the factories require no heating or cooling. Our most significant utility consumption is natural gas used to heat our kilns. Edith Heath developed Heath’s clay body to meet performance durability and to be fired at a lower temperature than typical ceramic tableware and tile products.

Heath is constantly pursuing ways to reduce our carbon footprint. In 2024, we partnered with San Francisco State University’s Industrial Assessment Center to undertake a complete energy assessment of our San Francisco factory to enact more energy efficiency and conservation practices. As part of our carbon accounting for emissions, we keep track of our carbon emissions from scope 1 & 2 (utilities, owned-vehicle transportation) and scope 3 (employee commuting, shipping, third-party products, raw materials, supplies, and more). Like most companies, we have found that the scope 3 carbon accounting can add up. However, unlike most companies, these account for about half of our total carbon footprint, not the typical 95-99%, because we manufacture ceramic products from start to finish. Although we sell other goods as part of our Heath Home collection, our ceramic products remain the bulk of our sales.

Water

Located in a water-stressed area, Heath has installed infrastructure to minimize the use of fresh water and protect our watershed. To achieve this, we built water recycling systems at each of our Sausalito and San Francisco factories. These systems collect water from manufacturing for reuse and filter out particulates for proper disposal. As of the fiscal year 2025, 50.5% of our annual water intake is from internally recycled water.

At our San Francisco Tile Factory and Retail Showroom, we installed permeable pavers, planter beds, and planter benches made from recycled Heath Tile and Dinnerware, with bench seats crafted from salvaged wood from the building's renovation. The porous surfaces enable us to divert up to 42,000 gallons of water into the watershed, rather than into the drainage system. The plants are native to the region and rarely need watering. This project was completed in 2015.

Shipping

Dinnerware and Heath Home purchases are shipped using ExpandOS™, a paperboard pyramid that replaces foam packing peanuts to stabilize our products. They are biodegradable and recyclable, made of Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood or 100% recycled paper. Dinnerware and Heath Home shipments are sent to customers using UPS carbon-neutral shipping, which offsets 69 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in calendar year 2024. We use cardboard shipping boxes and gift boxes made from recycled content, as well as shredded recycled magazines for in-store gift packaging.

Purchasing

In addition to our commitment to local and independent vendors, Heath works hard to incorporate sustainability throughout our supply chain. Our manganese clay body is composed of a mixture of minerals, with nearly half of the minerals mined locally near Sacramento, CA. We have phased out white clay from our formula as of the fiscal year 2023, which reduced our clay material footprint by 54% due to the distance of the minerals from our factories. We use internal purchasing policies to be better stewards of the environment and create a healthy workplace for employees by using non-toxic cleaning products.