Tupperware Releases Complete Plastics Information To Z Recommends

Over the past weeks we have had extensive email and telephone contact with Tupperware through their Worldwide Director of Quality Management and Research & Development, Jan Stevens, after their PR firm helped us set up a conference call. I had a great conversation with him, and found him to be not only knowledgeable and passionate but frank, sincere, and open to new information and perspectives. Based on the information we received from him, we can now confirm that all Tupperware children's items are BPA-free, and that Tupperware has a major customer relations problem on its hands.

My encounter with Mr. Stevens was the first I have ever had with an industry executive at a polycarbonate-using company in which they admitted some legitimate room for parental concern about BPA.

At the beginning of our conversation Jan spent about ten minutes in the firm, aggressive tone we have heard so frequently in our dealings with entrenched companies. When he had finished outlining Tupperware's position, I pointed out to him that the scientific studies of BPA examine targeted and isolated exposure and that while these levels might not reach those he or Tupperware would consider a concern, many parents are trying to limit the children's total exposure levels, which encompassed a vast array of plastic products their children interact with on a daily basis, and that these studies did not - and possibly could not - address these issues in a laboratory setting. He shocked me by agreeing that this was a "different matter," that "the research is not yet in" about how total environmental exposure to BPA might affect fetal and child development, and that parents might be legitimately concerned about reducing their children's overall exposure to BPA. He then agreed to send me a complete listing of Tupperware products and the exact materials they were all made of.

Compared with our previous dealings with Tupperware in attempting to collect basic materials information, it was like night and day.

And there's the rub. We spent a total of ten to fifteen hours seeking out, triple-checking, and carefully writing up and explaining the origins of our findings on Tupperware. We listened to opaque prepared statements and brash generalizations and submitted "trouble tickets" and requests to the Product Department seeking definitive information. We challenged explicit statements made by Tupperware-trained customer service reps and received consistently false responses to basic questions about their own company's products. Weeks after a response from the Product Department was promised, we were sent a detailed but apparently self-contradictory response to our request that was followed almost immediately by an official request to retract the entirety of the previous communication. That was when we stopped playing games and decided we needed to publish what we had, after which we dealt with numerous queries from concerned parents and even Tupperware sales reps.

Finally, after bringing in a PR firm as a mediator, we were granted privileged access to one of the brightest minds at the company, who provided the exact information we were looking for as well as his own insights about the company and the industry.

What's wrong with this picture?

I closed my conversation with Mr. Stevens with this question, and asked him what Tupperware could do better. He said that Tupperware sales reps were well-informed about the plastics used in Tupperware products, and I said this was not good enough. I asked why his company's customer service department didn't have access to the same information. He said the company would look into the matter.

I also asked him to publish detailed materials information on the Tupperware website, a move he said the company would consider. That conversation occurred on March 21, and we have spent the weeks since then in a back-and-forth exchange with the company's public relations manager to nail down exact product information. The company has not yet published any detailed plastics information about its products to its consumer website.

Given our open, pleasant conversation with Mr. Stevens, it almost feels like a cheap shot to invite Tupperware's customer service department to head to this post to find out what Tupperware products are made of. Almost. But the fact that such a development would be an improvement over the current situation at Tupperware reflects a world of their making, not of ours.

If it is foolish to treat consumer reporters as we have been treated, it is corporate suicide to treat customers that way, and the trouble with bloggers is that they are both. Any company that exhibits this kind of pattern of behavior needs to recast its relationship with consumers for the twenty-first century, and we can't think of many companies that would be more harmed by a failure to do so than Tupperware - the company's independent sales reps, who helped build and remain the lifeblood of that company, reap what the multinational sows, and rely on the brand's gold-standard status to sell the products that feed their families.

Until such reform comes to Tupperware, we hope the comprehensive list below will be of use to anyone who needs it, inside or outside of the company.

Tupperware Products BPA Status
Line items in pink include components containing Bisphenol-A.

For specific product statuses, check our updated Tupperware page in the Z Report on BPA. All children's products are listed item by item there so you can confirm their status.