Toothpaste

Over the course of your life, it’s likely that 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 Stephan Habif.

HABIF: I would have to say I spend about 40 to 50 percent of my time thinking and dreaming about toothpaste. I’m even counting the time home and when I’m sleeping.

Habif is one of the people responsible for creating the toothpaste in your bathroom cabinet. He’s the chief technology officer at Colgate-Palmolive. It’s a multinational corporation that makes many of the household products at the drug store — Speed Stick deodorant, Irish Spring body wash, Palmolive dish soap. But none is more significant for the company than its flagship toothpaste brand, Colgate.

HABIF: 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. There are about 20 billion toothpaste tubes produced globally. And at Colgate we make a little bit less than half of all these tubes.

There’s a good chance your toothpaste of choice is made by Colgate or its leading competitor, Crest. Together, these two brands control around 75 percent of the $22 billion dollar 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.

HABIF: You want to make sure that there is easy evacuation. Also, you don’t want it to come out too liquidy and 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.

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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. The 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.

MISKELL: What really changes in the 19th century is patterns of diet.

Peter Miskell is a professor of international business history at the University of Reading in the U.K. He’s researched how toothpaste became a household staple.

MISKELL: 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. And researchers came to understand that processed sugars and carbohydrates caused a build-up in plaque — that’s a sticky film of bacteria that leads to decay.

MISKELL: 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, a New York-based manufacturer of candles and soap. In 1873, it started to sell an aromatic toothpaste. It tasted like detergent and was packaged in jars.

MISKELL: The family would share the jar. They’d each be dipping their brush 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 by 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 percent of American households.

MISKELL: It 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.

MISKELL: It 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 & 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.

MISKELL: Their sales rocketed and they continued to dominate the market for several decades.

Today, the market is still dominated by Colgate and Crest — the original titans of toothpaste.

MISKELL: The leading players, they’re the really big consumer goods giants. It’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.

HABIF: Some 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.

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Walk down the oral care aisle at a drug store, and you’ll find dozens of different toothpaste formulas. Some extol therapeutic advantages, like extra cavity protection. Others promise cosmetic benefits, like whitening. There are toothpastes in all different flavors, toothpastes for kids, toothpastes 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 Leite.

LEITE: We 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 Max Fresh — that’s a refreshing-bad-breath type of toothpaste, so will get you ready to enjoy life.

Leite is Colgate’s global head of research and development for oral care products. He 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.

LEITE: You have something to clean your teeth, an abrasive. You have your active ingredient, the fluoride. You also have surfactant — a detergent that helps you do the nice foaming in your mouth and reach hard areas. We have one thing that we call a binder like xanthan gum, carrageenan. So these are components that when they meet, the liquid, they form the gel you see, right? That’s why toothpaste has that gel-y 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 is 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 U.S., 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.

LEITE: You cannot go too abrasive, right? You don’t want sand in your mouth. So we measure RDA, radioactive dentin abrasion.

With RDA testing, toothpaste companies examine the amount of tooth structure that is 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 Stephan Habif, Colgate’s chief technology officer, who also works on these formulations.

HABIF: You could have a very compact foam, like a lather. And it will give you a different experience than open, airy foam. 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, 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. Colgate 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.

HABIF: 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 the sensates that are present in the flavor.

In America, many of the most popular toothpastes have a minty flavor. But that’s not the case in other parts of the world.

HABIF: Flavor is really linked 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.

LEITE: 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 in the flavor, more anise. 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. They feel more floral, more jasmine.

Flavor also has to be adjusted for kids.

LEITE: Kids tend to resist. You cannot give a too spicy, too minty flavor. The kids won’t 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 U.S., Mexico, Brazil, India, and China.

LEITE: In the production area, you will feel the nice minty smell of the toothpaste. You can imagine large 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 when it is 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 multi-colored toothpaste that comes out of the tube in stripes — that’s a special feat of modern engineering.

LEITE: I worked many years on that in 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;iIn other channels, the blue color; in 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 that 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. But 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.

HABIF: 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 enable us to measure the force it takes to get the paste out. So we are able to design the right tube with the right paste 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 Leite and Stephan Habif 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.

HABIF: 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, and use it with a bit of respect and love.

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

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This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. And thanks to listeners Jeff Sawyer and Brian Minaji for suggesting this topic. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to email us at everydaythings@freakonomics.com. Our inbox is always open. All right, until next week.

MISKELL: I’m speaking to you from the U.K., 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.