INTERNAL TRACKING

All American Cotton™ keeps an expansive, highly-detailed, and aggressively-enforced tracking system for all compliant intermediary producers. This “paper trail” begins at the moment the American cotton farmer harvests their crop and delivers it to their local cotton gin, where the cleaned cotton is assigned a Permanent Bale Identification (PBI) number. That PBI is tracked through the warehousing and exporting phases. When it arrives at an overseas spinning mill, the PBI is tracked through the yarn-making process, into the fabric production process, and finally through the garments production and export process.
Although All American Cotton™ receives factory-provided lot IDs and video evidence, we also perform our own unannounced auditing and offer whistleblower rewards for reporting noncompliance.

Additionally, all factory-provided inputs are moved to an external, third-party database, preventing any alteration of submitted data.

All American Cotton™ maintains a zero tolerance policy on all incorrect information. We firmly believe that any compromise in a specific incident is a compromise of the full system. Therefore, for any misreporting, whether intentional or not, results in immediate reporting to all involved parties, including the United States Customs and Border Patrol and relevant retailers. Factories that report incorrectly are blacklisted for all future business.

External Testing

All American Cotton™ is not content with a perfect paper trail; we submit to full scientific testing and verification. We do so through third-party laboratories based in the United States that are fully certified in ISO 9001:2015 and ISO/IEC 17025:2017.

These laboratories perform isotopic testing on finished garment pieces, chosen at random by All American Cotton™ auditors from lots at the moment that they are being exported to the United States. Isotopic testing examines the isotopic signature of an organic product — in this case, cotton, or a cotton blend — and extensively studies it. The growth of a cotton fiber exposes it to a wide range of influences, including:

• the chemical composition of its groundwater;
• the chemical composition of any surface water, including any irrigation;
• the chemical composition and frequency of precipitation;
• the varying temperatures it experienced in its lifetime;
• the varying humidity levels it experienced in its lifetime;
• any extraordinary weather event;
• the altitude of the soil it grew up on;
• the geographic latitude it grew up on;
• the amount of sunshine it received;
• the chemical makeup of the soil it grew up in, including the prevalence of various alkaline earth metals, and traces of elements such as lead, manganese, barium, sodium, and rubidium;
• what fertilizers were applied to it, and on what timeline.

All these influences result in a cotton fiber that, if tested and cross-referenced properly, can reveal its geographic origin with scientific certainty.

For proper comparison, All American Cotton™ has access to a verified third-party library of cotton samples from all cotton growing regions of the world, meaning any sample of cotton can be accurately compared and geolocated.

However, to strengthen verification, All American Cotton™ takes the unprecedented step of providing samples of raw cotton fibers to laboratories prior to that fiber ever leaving the United States, meaning the lab is able to test and retain data on all cotton that All American Cotton™ ever deals with or attempts to verify. It is, in essence, a proprietary cotton sample library, tested by reputable third-party laboratories, and then used to ensure that all products claiming to be made of American cotton in the All American Cotton™ pipeline are indeed made of all American cotton.