The Economics of Everyday Things - 86. Toothpaste

0:04Over the course of your life, it's likely you'll brush your teeth more than 50,000 times. In the process, you'll go through 450 tubes, almost 170 pounds of toothpaste. Toothpaste is one of the first things you use every morning and one of the last things you use every night. But you might not give it much thought, unless you're someone like Stefan Habief. I would have to say I spend about 40 to 50% of my time thinking and dreaming about toothpaste. I'm even counting the time home and when I'm sleeping. Habith is one of the people responsible for creating the toothpaste in your bathroom cabinet. He's the chief technology officer at Colgate Palm Olive. It's a multinational corporation that makes many of the household products at the drugstore. Speedstick deodorant, Irish spring body wash, palm olive dish soap. But none is more significant for the company.

1:02than its flagship toothpaste brand, Colgate. Oral care is our number one category. More households purchase at least one Colgate product a year than any other brand in the world, including Coca-Cola. They are about 20 billion toothpaste tubes produced globally. And at Colgate, we make a little less than half of all the stoops. There's a good chance your toothpaste of choice is made by Colgate.

1:31or its leading competitor, Crest. Together, these two brands control around 75% of the $22 billion a year global toothpaste market. And staying at the top requires constantly thinking about everything from the precise level of mintiness in the formula to the speed at which the paste comes out of the tube. You want to make sure that there is easy evacuation. Also, you don't want it to come out too liquidy.

2:02And too much comes out, so it's a whole science, believe it or not. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the Economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, toothpaste. Humans have practiced oral care for at least 9,000 years. Ancient civilizations cleaned their teeth by chewing on sticks or using crude toothpicks. And they also understood that teeth could be cleaned by scrubbing them with some kind of paste.

2:34The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had their own formulations of dental powders made from natural ingredients like snail shells, crushed bones, ox hooves, and human urine. Over many centuries, these formulas evolved to include more palatable and aromatic ingredients. But it wasn't until the 1800s that modern toothpaste became a widely marketed product. What really changes in the 19th century is patterns of diet.

3:03Peter Miskell is a professor of international business history at the University of Reading in the UK. He's researched how toothpaste became a household staple. Sugar went from being a luxury in pre-industrial times to much more of a staple. New industrial food products created a problem of dental hygiene that hadn't existed in anything like the same way previously. In the wake of industrialization, there was a sharp rise in dental disease.

3:35And researchers came to understand that processed sugars and carbohydrates caused to build up in plaque. That's a sticky film of bacteria that leads to decay. Once that became established, the response really was to encourage the act of brushing. And a number of early toothpaste brands emerged as, you know, here's a product that will make the process of brushing your teeth a little bit more enjoyable. One of the first to pounce on this trend was Colgate & Company.

4:02a New York-based manufacturer of candles and soaps. In 1873, it started to sell an aromatic toothpaste. It tasted like detergent and was packaged in jars. The family would share the jar. They'd each be dipping their fresh into this, and you can just imagine the scenario. In the 1890s, the toothpaste tube was developed, giving consumers a more sanitary option. Colgate emerged as a market leader.

4:32by handing out millions of tubes at schools and spending heavily on marketing. At first, toothpaste was prohibitively expensive. It cost the equivalent of half a day's wages for a laborer. But as mass production ramped up, it became less of a luxury and more of an everyday necessity. By the 1930s, toothpaste could be found in 65% of American households.

4:57It went from being a product that most people had never heard of to a household staple that most people would have had in their bathrooms or in their cupboards. Initially, toothpaste was marketed as a cosmetic product with social benefits. It made your breath smell good, gave you a nice smile, and made people want to interact with you. There wasn't any proven health benefit to toothpaste. That came from the act of brushing, not the paste itself.

5:27It was more use this product. It'll make you feel better about yourself kind of a classic example of a product that you didn't really need So the question is how do you create that sense of a product being just more than a commodity? The answer came in the 1950s when Procter and Gamble released crest the first widely commercialized toothpaste to use fluoride Fluoride is a natural mineral that prevents tooth decay and for the first time toothpaste became not just a cosmetic product, but one with real health benefits. After gaining an endorsement from the American Dental Association, toothpaste achieved scientific credibility. Today, the market is still dominated by Colgate and Crest, the original titans of toothpaste.

6:26It's really the advertising spend that probably keeps a lot of others out of that space. It's the distribution infrastructure that sits behind that. It's being able to get shelf space with the big retailers in the prime locations. Toothpaste may seem like a simple product, but behind every ingredient, the abrasives, the foaming agents, the flavorings, there's a complex and precise scientific process. And it has to be pulled off at astronomical scale.

6:55Some of our most efficient factory, you see 1,000 tubes a minute going down the line being filled. Literally your eye cannot capture the moment it goes that fast. That's coming up. Walk down the oral cariol at a drugstore, and you'll find dozens of different toothpaste formulas. Some extol therapeutic advantages, like extra cavity protection. Others promise cosmetic benefits, like whitening.

7:30There are toothpaste in all different flavors, toothpaste for kids, toothpaste for people with sensitive teeth. There's Max Clean, Max Fresh, Double Fresh, Triple Action, Sparkling White, Optic White, Optic White Renewal, on and on and on. Many of these variations are sold by Colgate, and they all come across the desk of Sergio Leti.

7:56We have our flagship toothpaste, the red box of Colgate. Very good minty profile. Then we have our multi-benefit toothpaste. We have whitening. We have sensitivity toothpaste. We have one that is a young crowd favorite called MaxFresh. That's refreshing, bad breath type of toothpaste. So get you ready to enjoy life.

8:25he oversees a team that comes up with Colgate's toothpaste formulas. Regardless of all the fancy variations on the market, he says most toothpastes come down to a few key ingredients.

8:55like xanthan gum, carrageenan, so these are components that when they met the liquid, they form the gel you see, right? That's why a toothpaste has that jelly appearance, if you will, that kind of a semi-solid. And last but not least, you'll get the flavor and colors. There are other details, but these are the core things you need to make a toothpaste. There's a complex process behind each one of these components. For instance, the abrasive material might be calcium carbonate, a natural mineral that Colgate sources from mines in the US, Brazil and Italy. It's crushed up into a fine powder and shipped to Colgate's factories in giant bags. And it has to be just the right amount of graininess. You cannot go too abrasive, right? You don't want to sand in your mouth. So we measure RDA, radioactive dentine abrasion. With RDA testing,

9:50toothpaste companies examine the amount of tooth structure that's worn away by toothpaste. The abrasive has to be strong enough to provide a scrubbing effect, but not so intense that it destroys your teeth. There's also a science to producing a toothpaste with just the right amount of foaminess. Again, here's Stefan Habief, Colgate's Chief Technology Officer, who also works on these formulations. You could have a very compact foam like a lather.

10:19and it will give you a different experience than an open, airy form. So we adjust the level and the agent that we use to have very different experiences when you use the product. So we really have some expertise on the sensory, the slight differences that don't seem to be very big, but make a big difference in the consumer perception. One thing that consumers are very sensitive to is toothpaste flavoring.

10:48Colgate has a whole team of flavorists on staff who carefully select just the right amount of mintiness to add to a formula. The flavoring agents are often mixed with sensates, chemicals that produce a cooling or warming effect in the mouth. The freshness, obviously, is what people look for when they want to have the sense that their mouth is clean. It comes from the act of cleaning, but it comes also from these sensates that are present in the flavor.

11:19Many of the most popular toothpaste have a minty flavor, but that's not the case in other parts of the world. Flavors really link to the kind of food that you like in the different regions. In some cases, people want to feel similar taste in their toothpaste that they have in the flavor of their food. Let's say India where we have a big presence. The flavors are what we call more spicy. So imagine there is a little bit more clove oil.

11:48in the flavor, more unease. You still get that undertone of mint, but you have other notes which are much more critical. China, we have flavors that are more what we call more oral perfume. These feel more floral, more jasmine. Flavor also has to be adjusted for kids. Kids tend to resist. You cannot give a too spicy, too minty flavor.

12:16The kids want brush, so you have to tone down a little bit the flavor so the kids will be able to brush. Once all of the ingredients in a toothpaste are dialed in, they're mixed together in giant factories. Colgate has production facilities all over the world, in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India and China. In the production area, you will feel the nice minty smell of the toothpaste. You can imagine...

12:44large containers, large warehouses where the raw materials and packaging material are there. So you have liquid powders, the flavors, the colors. Those components are blended, go through pumps and pipes to our finishing lines, which are normally separated from the mixers by massive buildings. And that's where it's filled in the tubes that we receive at home. For a plain white toothpaste, The product is dispensed from a nozzle into an open tube, and the tube is sealed at the end. But multicolored toothpaste that comes out of the tube and stripes, that's a special feat of modern engineering. I worked many years on that with my life. That same nozzle, instead of carrying one color of toothpaste, it has multiple channels inside, separated by a wall. You run, let's say, green color. In other channels, the blue color.

13:41in other channels, the white color. And then the filling machine is able to fill at the same time those colors in the tube. We fill and immediately the toothpaste has to stand still. It cannot be runny, it cannot move around. So you close the tube, you get your stripes inside. Even the toothpaste tube itself is the result of years of tinkering. From a sanitation standpoint, it's much better than those jars from the 1800s.

14:11But consumers still gripe a lot about not being able to get the last dabs of product out. Colgate spends a lot of time trying to minimize consumer waste. It is designed to make sure that you can get the most product out of your tube. In our laboratory, we're using pressure gloves that enables us to measure the force it takes to get the paste out so we're able to design the right tube.

14:41with the right pace, with the right size orifice, to be able to maximize the experience for the consumer. It's really important to make sure that everybody can do it. You might have somebody who has arthritis. You might have somebody with a different strength, like a kid. Sergio Leti and Stefan Habief know that for most people, toothpaste is just another product in the bathroom cabinet, a commodity that could be easily replaced by their main competitor's product. But for them, It's also a marvel of engineering, science and modern health. I would hope that people have a bit more respect for that little product that's there. You just put it at the bottom of your drawer. You don't think twice about it. There are many people, brilliant people, scientists, passionate people, people in the factory that have made this product just for you. And this product is a great contributor to your health and your well-being. So please be nice to it.

15:46and use it with a bit of respect and love. For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson. And thanks to listeners Jeff Sawyer and Brian Minaji for suggesting this topic. I'm speaking to you from the UK, which I think we pride ourselves on being the home of bad teeth. We kind of invented a lot of these problems and exported them to the world.

16:33The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.