"What Your Cart Really Carries"
Vol. I, No. 1
A single unbleached cotton boll leaves a Barmer field in October. By the time it arrives — washed, cut, stitched, and shrink-wrapped — it has passed through eleven pairs of hands across four countries. We followed every one of them.
Read the InvestigationVol. I, No. 2
Your £2.50 bar contains roughly 400 cacao beans. The family that harvested them earned approximately 6p per bar at farmgate prices. Between that farm and your supermarket shelf sits a supply chain that would take a novel to untangle.
Read the InvestigationVol. I, No. 3
When Priya Mehta replaced every cleaning product in her flat after her daughter's first asthma attack, she discovered that "natural" and "plant-based" mean exactly nothing on a label. We decode the fine print.
Read the InvestigationInvestigating ethical fashion
from field to fitting room
Gazipur Export Processing Zone, Bangladesh — November 2025
"The label says Made in Bangladesh. It should say Made by Fatema, age 29, on a Wednesday in November, for £0.43 per hour."
A single unbleached cotton boll leaves a Barmer field in October. By the time it arrives — washed, cut, stitched, and shrink-wrapped — it has passed through eleven pairs of hands across four countries. We followed every one of them, from the ginning mill in Rajasthan where Meena Devi earns ₹280 a day to the export warehouse in Chittagong where your t-shirt is folded, bagged, and loaded onto a container ship.
What we found is not a story of villains. It is a story of a system so optimised for cheapness that the people inside it cannot see the whole of what they are part of. The cotton farmer has never met the seamstress. The brand manager has never visited the field. And you, standing in the changing room, have never been told any of this.
In the four months between October and January, Fatema Begum will sew approximately 1,400 garment labels. None of them will say her name.
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The GOTS certification costs €4,000 to obtain and requires zero soil testing. A three-year investigation into what "certified organic" actually means at field level.
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Resale platforms generated $177 billion in 2024. The garments they couldn't sell were shipped to Kantamanto Market, Accra. We visited both ends.
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The estancia producing merino for a major outdoor brand sits on land whose title is disputed by three Mapuche communities. The brand's sustainability report does not mention this.
Read the InvestigationFarmgate to supermarket shelf —
the price journey of everyday food
"The supermarket paid €1.20 per kilo. The farm received €0.38. The difference is called logistics. We call it something else."
Your £2.50 bar contains roughly 400 cacao beans. The Asante family, who farm four acres in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana, harvested many of those beans in October. At farmgate prices, they earned approximately 6p per bar — before deducting the cost of fertiliser, the fee for the cooperative weighing station, and the informal payment to the local purchasing agent without whose goodwill the crop does not move.
Between that farm and the shelf in your supermarket sit a trading house in Amsterdam, a processing facility in Côte d'Ivoire, a flavouring laboratory in Switzerland, and a packaging plant in Poland. We spoke to someone at each stage. Only two of them knew the name of the country where the cacao was grown.
Brong-Ahafo Region, Ghana — October 2025
Kwame Asante's family has grown cacao for three generations. His son will not. We spent a month in the Brong-Ahafo region understanding why.
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Up to 70% of olive oil labelled "extra virgin" fails the chemical test for that designation. The Italian olive oil fraud is the most successful food crime in Europe.
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When global demand for quinoa tripled between 2006 and 2013, Bolivian smallholders could finally afford to send their children to school. They also couldn't afford to eat it anymore.
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The International Coffee Agreement set a minimum price in 1989. Inflation since then: 248%. The floor: unchanged. A brief history of a broken promise.
Read the InvestigationFrom bathroom cabinet to kitchen hob —
what's actually in the things you trust
Fine Print"Naturally derived surfactants" — legal in a product containing 60% petrochemicals
Household cleaning aisle, Tesco, London — January 2026
"Natural is not a regulated word. Plant-based is not a regulated word. The only word on that bottle the government defines is the weight."
When Priya Mehta's daughter Anika was diagnosed with mild asthma at the age of two, the first thing her GP suggested was replacing the cleaning products under the kitchen sink. Priya spent the following three weeks reading labels. What she found — or rather, what she could not find — forms the basis of this investigation.
"Plant-based," "natural," "eco-friendly," "green" — none of these terms are regulated in the UK, the EU, or the United States. A product containing 60% petroleum-derived solvents may legally describe itself as "naturally derived" if one of its secondary ingredients comes from a plant. We purchased forty-three cleaning products from seven supermarket chains and had them independently tested. The results were not what the labels suggested.
Priya Mehta read every label in her cleaning cabinet after her daughter's first asthma attack. What she found — and what "plant-based" legally means — should be on the label.
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Every mattress sold in the UK must pass a flame test. The chemicals used to pass it have been linked to thyroid disruption. The test has not changed since 1988.
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PFOA was banned in 2013. The replacement chemicals — PFAS — behave almost identically. The cookware industry calls them "next-generation." Scientists call them "regrettable substitutions."
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When James and Saoirse Brennan replaced their cleaning cabinet before their daughter arrived, they discovered that "baby-safe" is a marketing claim, not a regulatory category.
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