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Clean Future is our strategy to tap into a vast segment of consumers who want easy and delightful experiences with products that are sustainable and, importantly, great value.
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Creating unmissably superior experiences with our brands
Unmissable superiority means superior experience with our brands, from the disappearance of difficult stains to well-designed packaging that enhances how people use and enjoy the products in their home.
To deliver on that, we’re constantly listening to consumers and changing the way we develop and test our products based on what they tell us. This goes beyond simply how well a product cleans. It’s about everything from how it feels to the touch and how convenient it is to use, to the swoosh sound of a trigger spray and the comfort of knowing the ingredients will biodegrade.
One example of how we’re tapping into people’s emotional connection with cleaning is through our partnership with CleanTok, TikTok’s cleaning community. Here, content creators show their followers how they’re using our products, with handy hacks and real-life reviews. This partnership gives us great insights that we can use to ensure we’re offering people exactly what they want now, as well as helping to deliver the next generation of cleaning products.
Delivering great value to our consumers
Product performance at the right price equals great value. And we know that’s exactly what shoppers are looking for.
To deliver great value, we develop clever formulations that have the same – or improved – cleaning power but with fewer, more innovative ingredients.
We also ensure that our business is as agile and efficient as possible, by investing in technology that accelerates the digitalisation of our operations.
Embedding sustainability
We want to lead the transition to net zero in our industry through ingredients that are low carbon, more renewable and biodegradable, as well as packaging that’s designed so there’s no plastic waste.
It’s not just about making our current formulations and packs sustainable. It’s also about coming up with totally new solutions right from the outset.
We are making good progress. We reached 25% PCR (post-consumer recycled) plastic in 2022, reduced the greenhouse gas intensity per consumer use of our products by 39% on average over the last decade, and pioneered the switch to cardboard packaging.
We’re using our scale to advocate for policies that drive industry-wide change.
“Our Clean Future strategy enables us to deliver superior products that are both more sustainable and affordable, meeting the diverse needs of consumers worldwide.”
Eduardo Campanella, Business Group President, Home Care
Industry-leading innovations inspired by our Clean Future strategy
Optimising capsules so they require less energy
Dirt Is Good capsules are optimised for use in cold, short laundry cycles. This helps people save up to 60% energy per use at home, without compromising on cleaning performance. It also reduces the greenhouse gas associated with the ingredients in our capsules by 16%. The capsules contain powerful biodegradable active ingredients, 65% of which are derived from plant sources. And they’re packaged in a plastic-free, fully recyclable cardboard box, which saves around 6,000 tonnes of plastic per year.
Comfort Ultimate Care keeps clothes looking newer for longer, reducing the need to buy more which, in turn, helps lower people’s environmental footprint. The product’s biodegradable pro-fibre technology reduces the friction that occurs during washing that can lead to colour and shape loss. It also protects clothes from bobbling and pilling, print cracking and textural damage. The 100% recycle-ready bottles and ultra-concentrated formulas require less plastic per product and fewer trucks for transport.
Shoppers want a toilet and bathroom cleaner that kills germs more effortlessly in hardest-to-reach places, so Domestos came up with Power Foam Spray. This specially engineered formulation delivers foam which expands and clings to surfaces, and a trigger head that works upside down. The brand’s biggest innovation for a decade is set to lead the growth of a category where consumers are increasingly looking for products that are both high-performance and convenient.
When it comes to washing up, people want maximum performance with minimum effort. To deliver that, our Sunlight brand has leveraged the power of bio-enzymes: tiny, naturally derived proteins that specialise in speeding up cleaning. These are already used in laundry and machine dishwashing products, but this is the first time we have used them in a hand dishwashing liquid where they have proved incredibly efficient at breaking down encrusted food, saving time and effort.
Three of our Home Care factories are part of the World Economic Forum’s network of ‘Advanced Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Lighthouses’. These sites adopt and deploy advanced technologies to maximise efficiency and competitiveness, and drive sustainable and responsible business growth. They stand as a benchmark and a replicable model for manufacturers of all sizes, across different geographies and industries.
Indaiatuba, in São Paulo, was the first of our factories in Latin America to earn this recognition. Dapada, in Mumbai, was the first FMCG factory in India to join the network. And Hefei, in China – which is our largest production facility in the world – joined the network in 2020.
Innovations like these are only possible by joining forces with partners who are at the forefront of their fields. This is how we develop the new technologies and solutions that will help us deliver superior, sustainable and great value products, and revolutionise the cleaning industry.
Developing new proteins and enzymes
We’re working with protein design company Arzeda to explore the potential of some of the most incredible ingredients in nature: enzymes. We’re using artificial intelligence and bioscience to create new proteins and enzymes that fight stains better, use less water and energy, and replace petrochemical-derived ingredients. This will help us cut the amount of ingredients in our formulas to reduce their impact on the environment, and create products that work superbly well in cold water. The partnership will also advance our commitment to reach net zero emissions from our products by 2039.
Alongside Genomatica, a leader in biotech and sustainability, we launched a venture to scale and commercialise alternatives to palm oil and fossil-fuel-derived cleansing ingredients. With growing demand for sustainably sourced palm oil, we aim to bring responsibly sourced alternatives to the market at a competitive cost. The innovation is particularly relevant to cleaning products that require ingredients to lather and lift dirt. At present, there are few viable and affordable alternatives to palm and fossil sources that can be produced at scale to make those ingredients.
In the UK, we’re working with 14 industry partners on the Flue2Chem programme – a cross-sector collaboration aiming to find ways of turning waste gases into sustainable chemicals for consumer products. This is the first initiative that has committed to finding solutions that could work at scale and provide the step change needed to ensure that the UK, and in time the world, reaches its net zero targets. We have already piloted products using captured carbon emissions such as OMO laundry detergent in China, Sunlight hand dishwash in South Africa and Coral+ laundry detergent in Germany.
We have been working with world-leading chemical specialist Evonik for several years now, looking to develop the use of rhamnolipids – a high-performance biosurfactant made using sugar as its main raw material. The biosurfactant has great potential to help reduce the cleaning industry’s carbon impact as it’s fully biodegradable with a low-impact lifecycle. When we started using this revolutionary sustainable foaming agent in our Quix hand dishwash liquid in 2019, it was a world first. Now, we’re taking it global.
