More For the Mouth

Open Wider, the Oral-Care Explosion Has Just Begun

Manufacturers seem to have decided that the fastest way to your wallet is through your oral cavity. They're out to invent a better mouth trap, and in drugstore after supermarket after convenience shop, shelves overflow with the results. The flood of new pastes, gels, sprays, strips, brushes, flosses, washes, pills, picks and you-name-it, each guaranteed to whiten, brighten, sweeten or protect, has now become a deluge. To walk down the toothpaste aisle at the drugstore today is to behold a marketing executive's dreams.

Take toothpaste. In a much simpler time, Americans made do with a handful of products, choosing from among Colgate's invisible shield, wonder-where-the-yellow-went Pepsodent and a small number of competitors -- when they weren't using tooth powder or plain baking soda and water. Then came fluoride and flavors and exotic gels and the occasional speckled paste. In 1999 alone, companies added 49 new toothpastes to the existing array of tubes.

If that was the flood, here's the deluge: So far this year, the number of new toothpastes -- meaning new brands, flavors, functions or packaging -- is a jaw-dropping 96. And that's just a microcosm of what's happening in the entire oral care category.

The mouth has become a gaping profit center that every consumer-goods giant is chasing.

"They realized people are willing to fork over $40 on a regular basis for products like these," said Tom Vierhile, executive editor of the new-products database Productscan Online. "I don't think anyone knew this was possible before -- they were used to selling tubes of stuff for $2, $3, $4. It was right under their noses."

Literally. The efforts of companies to push ever-fancier oral care solutions, from the lowly breath freshener to glamorous teeth whiteners, have sent sales in the category up 23 percent in the past five years and turned it into a $4.8 billion gold mine in 2003, according to market research firm Euromonitor International of Chicago.

And manufacturers are by no means letting up, even though sales of many oral care products have softened in the past year from the torrid pace of 2001 and 2002. In the past 18 months, the big players in the industry have been researching new technologies and moving into new product lines, often by acquiring smaller brands.

Oral-B, for example, bought the small but well-known whitening toothpaste brand Rembrandt. Oral-B, of course, is a maker of toothbrushes and other dental devices -- and that's exactly why the deal was attractive.

"It's an easy and quick way for us to get into that category," said Michele Szynal, a spokesman for Oral-B, a division of razor giant Gillette. "It's a category that we think has room for innovation, like interesting delivery methods. There's more than flavor that will come out of this acquisition."