Johnson said there were risks both in removing PVDC from Saran Wrap and leaving the wrap alone. Putting out an inferior product would likely disappoint consumers.

But he said it was riskier to do nothing.

“Back in 1927 my great-grandfather said, ‘The goodwill of the people is the only enduring thing in any business. The rest is shadow.’ … For us, anything that risks the trust customers have in us is unacceptable.”

“Once we learned about the possible toxic chemicals PVDC emitted from landfills, we never really considered retaining the original formulation,” he said. “Doing the right thing for customers is always the right thing for us.”

Precedent

SCJ had previously removed product ingredients for reasons of health or environmental hazard. The first such decision to remove a major chemical was made by his father, the late Sam Johnson, in 1975 when research began implicating chlorofluorocarbons as damaging to the Earth’s ozone layer.

As CEO, he decided to remove CFCs from all of his company’s aerosol products worldwide. Fisk Johnson wrote in the article, “He did so several years before the government played catch-up and banned the use of CFCs from everyone’s products.”