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 2026 (4/1/25-3/31/26).
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 areas for improvement and took concrete steps to address them. We recertified in 2026, and our B Corp score is 88.3, up from 84.5. We are proud of this achievement in raising our score, largely due to our expanded environmental policies and programs. 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 consider more than 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 over 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 required to be considered innovators, serving as stewards of what is possible for businesses.
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 am hour, both above the minimum wage in those areas. In addition to a minimum of sixteen paid time-off days and ten 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. Part of this approach consists of regular, in-person, on-site ergonomics training sessions. Employee feedback from training sessions has created a collaborative space where employees and managers can work together to reduce potential workplace injuries across 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 services, Spanish-language meetings, and human resources personnel who are fluent in Spanish.
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 promotes 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 the proceeds support non-profits of the staff’s choosing. Each sale of Chez Panisse dinnerware supports The Edible Schoolyard Project and its mission.
Environmental Responsibility
Waste
Heath has found ways to reduce landfill waste through innovative end-use applications 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 2026, 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 91% for fiscal year 2026, exceeding our baseline year 2022 by over 10%. This increase is due to sorting a larger quantity of niche waste materials and to improved data collection. We plan to increase our diversion rate further, but are proud of our accomplishment in achieving zero waste (over 90%) as we continue to enhance our education, sorting, and data collection. We are considering third-party zero waste certifications, but they are costly due to the square footage of our factories and the number of locations.
In 2025, we started a program to keep Heath Ceramics pieces in circulation called Pass the Plate. In the last fiscal year, thousands of items have found new homes online or in person at our curated Vintage Market, the Good Flea.
Energy and Carbon Emissions
Heath uses 100% renewable electricity at our factories, sourced from solar and wind. In 2019, we completed the installation of LED light bulbs in both factories, converting over 350 fixtures. We are lucky that natural lighting 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 conduct a comprehensive energy assessment of our San Francisco factory to implement energy-efficiency and conservation measures. Through this process, we were able to improve process scheduling and are taking additional measures to reduce energy consumption. Our baseline assessment was fiscal year 2022, and compared to this, our scope 1 & 2 carbon emissions were over 12% lower for the past fiscal year.
Water
Located in a water-stressed area, Heath has installed infrastructure to minimize fresh water use 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\u2122, 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 49 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in calendar year 2025. 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 phased out white clay from our formula as of fiscal year 2023, reducing our clay material footprint by 54% due to the minerals' distance 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.
