The Economics of Everyday Things
00:01:15 · Zachary Crockett, Stefan Habif
[00:01:15] S2: Over 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 a 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 Habif. [00:01:40] S3: I would have to say I spent about 40 to 50% of my time thinking and dreaming about toothpaste. I'm even counting the time home and when I'm sleeping. [00:01:50] S2: 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 drugstore. Speed stick deodorant, Irish spring body wash, palm olive dish soap. But none is more significant for the company than its flagship toothpaste brand Colgate. [00:02:16] S3: 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 20,000,000,000 toothpaste tubes produced globally, and at Colgate we make a little less than half of all the stools.
00:02:16 · Stefan Habif, Zachary Crockett
[00:02:16] S3: 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 20,000,000,000 toothpaste tubes produced globally, and at Colgate we make a little less than half of all the stools. [00:02:37] S2: 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% of the $22,000,000,000 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. [00:03:07] S3: 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.
00:03:07 · Stefan Habif, Zachary Crockett, Peter Miskell
[00:03:07] S3: 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. [00:03:18] S2: 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 nine thousand 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 eighteen hundreds that modern toothpaste became a widely marketed product. [00:04:09] S4: What really changes in the nineteenth century is patterns of diet. [00:04:14] S2: Peter 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. [00:04:25] S4: 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.
00:04:25 · Peter Miskell, Zachary Crockett
[00:04:25] S4: 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. [00:04:41] S2: 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 buildup in plaque. That's a sticky film of bacteria that leads to decay. [00:04:56] S4: 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. [00:05:08] S2: One of the first to pounce on this trend was Colgate and Company, a 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. [00:05:25] S4: The family would share the jar. They'd each be dipping their brush into this, And you can just imagine the scenario.
00:05:25 · Peter Miskell, Zachary Crockett
[00:05:25] S4: The family would share the jar. They'd each be dipping their brush into this, And you can just imagine the scenario. [00:05:33] S2: In the eighteen nineties, 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% of American households. [00:06:08] S4: 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. [00:06:19] S2: 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 wanna interact with you. There wasn't any proven health benefit to toothpaste. That came from the act of brushing, not the paste itself. [00:06:37] S4: 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?
00:06:37 · Peter Miskell, Zachary Crockett
[00:06:37] S4: 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? [00:06:52] S2: The answer came in the nineteen fifties 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. [00:07:19] S4: Their sales rocketed, and they continued to dominate the market for several decades. [00:07:25] S2: Today, the market is still dominated by Colgate and Crest, the original titans of toothpaste. [00:07:32] S4: 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. [00:07:50] S2: 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.