Brushing up on business

E: The Environmental Magazine, August, 1995 by Elissa Wolfson

In the 50s, kids could brush their teeth with Crest or ... Crest. Or maybe Colgate. The ads for these products extolled their cavity-fighting abilities -- and skipped over the fact that they were full of saccharine and artificial coloring. By 1975, the toothpaste market was ripe for change. Enter Tom Chappell -- Tom of Maine himself -- and his wife Kate, pioneers of natural toothpaste. Brushing hasn't been the same since.

The Chappells' simple ads, questioning the use of saccharine, preservatives and dyes in most commercial toothpastes, have obviously struck a nerve. Market share has climbed to four percent in some regions, and annual sales to $16 million -- enough to outgrow the old headquarters more than a year ago. Tom's moved to the third floor of a renovated shoe plant, near their factory and warehouse. Tom's own factory outlet, The Natural Living Store, featuring discounted seconds and other earthy products, is on the first floor.

The offices are spacious and naturally lit, and the predominant feeling is one of small-town friendliness. We are, after all, in Kennebunk, Maine, and Tom's offices reflect that. Perhaps it's the colorful paper mache totem poles, or the bowls filled with fresh fruit gracing the reception area.

Tom Chappell is tall and lanky, with properly distinguished grey hair. Though he looks the part, Chappell is no ordinary CEO. He's a recently published author (The Soul of a Business: Managing for Profit and the Common Good, Bantam Books) who went back to school parttime in the 80s -- Harvard Divinity School -- and earned a master's degree in theology. Neither is his an ordinary company. In 1992, Tom's received a Corporate Conscience Award from the Council on Economic Priorities, and an honor roll listing in its guide, Shopping for a Better World.

Despite its expansion, Tom's is still very much a family business. Kate, manager of the R&D department, brings into Tom's corner office a package of small figurines made from re-melted and re-formed crayons collected by school children. "People just sent us this stuff," she tells me. "They know we're interested." Their son Matt, 25, one of five children and 67 employees, has been working here for nine months. With a professional familiarity apparently born of toothpaste in the blood, he conducts our factory tour.

"Our moss-filtration system removes 80 percent of the bio-burden from our waste water," says Matt. By this he means the water is filtered through a tank filled with layers of peat moss, stone, sand and gravel, then emptied into a leaching bed. Tom's aluminum toothpaste tubes are recyclable, and outgoing product is packed into 95 percent post-consumer-waste cardboard boxes.

Bags of calcium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate (i.e., chalk and baking soda) await their turn to be mixed up in huge vats with natural oils like spearmint, peppermint, fennel and cinnamon for the toothpaste that remains the company's clear breadwinner, among other products like floss, mouthwash, shampoo, shaving cream and deodorant. Today's flavor is peppermint, and the place smells great.

E: Where did your environmental sensitivity come from? TOM CHAPPELL: Growing up in rural Western Massachussetts, surrounded by farmers, and vacationing in Maine every summer -- that kind of impact just graduates on your being a little bit every year. So to be anything other than environmentally sensitive becomes a violation of your own principles.

How did you get the idea for natural toothpaste? Kate and I started our business on the premise that you could make products that were good for the environment and also make a living at it. Back in the 60s, that seemed like an either/or proposition. Our first product was a non-polluting laundry detergent called Clearlake, packaged in a container that could be mailed back to us at our expense for refilling. It sold well in natural food stores. Actually it was Paul Hawken (formerly of Smith and Hawken) who said that, although Clearlake was a wonderful product, he saw more of a niche in natural body care products. He gave us the opportunity to start formulating them under the name of Tom's Natural Soap. Our first products back in 1973 were liquid soap, shampoo and skin lotion; then in 1975 we came out with toothpaste.

Do you have a chemistry background? How do you come up with the different product formulations? I was an English major in college. But it was our inherent love for the land that got us to re-think: What do you do about toothpaste or shampoo or deodorant to make it safer for your customers, safer for the environment, better for society as a whole? Our new director of research and development, Maurice Iwu, a Nigerian, is an ethnopharmacologist -- a pharmacist, but also an environmentalist who researches and knows the uses of plants. He's been instrumental in developing our new deodorant line.

Can your customers just throw their used Tom's toothpaste tubes in with other aluminum recyclables? Or would these impede recycling efforts because you can't really wash them out? You can wash them out by uncrimping the bottom, then rinsing them out. But no one is giving us a hard time about contaminating other recyclables, even if some toothpaste is still in there.