Survey stresses role of product claims

Consumers buying home goods and apparels in the USA may be looking more closely at product origins, and could demand more transparency. Thirty percent of Americans said that they would completely stop purchasing a brand if they made a false product claim about a bedding/clothing product being 100 per cent organic, 100 per cent Pima cotton, or other claim of this type, while roughly three in five Americans (61 per cent) say if they found a brand made their bedding/clothing products from raw cotton that was picked by child laborers /forced laborers, they would no longer purchase the brand.

These statistics are part of a recent survey of over 2,000 US adults 18 and over, conducted online in December 2016 by Harris Poll on behalf of Applied DNA Sciences, that develops DNA-based technology to help justify product claims, ensure authenticity and provide an additional level of transparency across global supply chains.

"This survey reaffirms what we have known all along," said Dr James A Hayward, CEO of Applied DNA Sciences. "Consumers want authentic products and want to trust in what they are buying. They have no interest in bringing a product into their home that has been born of any kind of forced labor. Our primary aim is to cleanse the cotton supply chain and by that, I mean eliminating any diversion, any mislabeling, any counterfeiting that can take place throughout the cotton supply chain. An ideal way to ascertain the true identity of a natural commodity is to use the DNA that nature gave that commodity or to mark it with a manufactured DNA. This enables the cotton to be traced to where it was picked before it went into the ginning process that cleans away seed and other debris for packaging into bails to ship around the world for spinning, dyeing and to make into clothes."