I was watching a commercial for Tom’s of Maine on Hulu. If you’re not familiar with Tom’s of Maine, they’re a “green” company that makes toothpaste and soap. (the company is now a subsidiary of Colgate-Palmolive.) The ad was talking about the company and it said something along the lines of “We may not always have made the best decisions. But we always had the best intentions.” And I said “huh?”
An acknowledgement that some decisions may have possibly been less-than-the-best is usually a corporate euphenism for “we screwed up so huge that we can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
Did Tom’s of Maine do something really dumb that I hadn’t heard about? Or maybe this is about something Colgate-Palmolive did. (They were involved in the Chinese tainted products scandal and some toxic waste spillage in New Jersey but in both cases their involvement was very indirect.)
My wife had an interesting experience at the dentist a month ago. When she told him that she’d used Tom’s of Maine (fluoride-containing) toothpastes for years, he said:
“I’m not surprised you’ve had tooth problems. They got in trouble for quality control and low fluoride levels in their fluoride-containing toothpaste. There’s a likely lawsuit coming, though they’ve gotten better since Colgate took over”.
Now this is a very good and intelligent/well-read dentist we’ve trusted for years, but I’m just not finding any info. online about this at all. (After looking at page after page of Google results that turn up nothing but praise from the anti-fluoride crowd for Tom’s non-fluoride brands, I got bored).
So is this the right rumor that’s true enough for a corporate apology? Or am I adding to the misinformation?
When I saw that ad, my first reaction was, “Whoa, what did they do that I haven’t heard of? Did they accidentally make their toothpaste out of dolphins?”
But on further reflection (I saw this commercial about 40 times when Hulu’s “watch this 2-minute ad and you’ll get no ads in the middle of the show” thing actually worked), I started thinking that maybe they were trying to make a general point–something like “We’re human, not some big faceless corporation, so we make mistakes, admit them, deal with them, and move on”–but the director and actress didn’t get it right.
You might think they’d never release an ad that was so far off the mark. But everything about the entire ad comes across as if it were designed to make anyone but aging hippies immediately stop using all Tom’s of Maine products, and I’m sure that wasn’t the intent, so I wouldn’t ascribe too much marketing genius to anyone involved.
I thought the purchase agreement required Colgate to continue all existing purchasing, manufacturing, etc. policies and processes forever? How have they managed to improve quality control without changing the manufacturing? Or is it just an HR-based improvement, like “Production line inspectors may no longer be stoned during work hours” or something?
Well, they might start by actually measuring the amount of fluoride in each batch of toothpaste, and either dumping or reworking the batches that fail; many small manufacturer’s just assume that if it’s in the recipe, everything will be fine. They might even have abandoned reworking, if that’s what Tom’s did before. Really, I find Tom’s a bit annoying – so devoted to “Natural” that they give short shrift to “works.”
Is Ethical Consumer actually a parody site? Because I’m having a hard time believing they’re serious.
They apparently have a point based system. Here’s some of the things that apparently cost you points:
*Boycotts - If anyone has announced a boycott. It doesn’t matter what the reason was.
*Selling to the wrong countries - They have a list of countries they consider repressive. Sell your products in those countries and you lose points.
*Selling to the armed forces - Not just weapons. Sell any product to the military and you lose points.
*Selling guns - Just plain evil.
*Pornography - Also evil.
*Doing business with the wrong businesses - They take points off if a company buys products from another independantly owned and operated company that’s on a list.
*Using chemicals - Chemicals are bad.
*Using nuclear power - Nuclears are bad too.
*Using gelatine - It’s cruel to animals.
*Using animals in its advertising - Also cruel to animals. Although most animals, if given a choice between appearing in a TV commerical or being made into Jello, would choose the former.
*Lobbying - Because only people like Ethical Consumer are supposed to try to influence other people.
I know it’s tangential to the topic, but I can’t help but point out the hilarity of downrating a drug company’s ethics for engaging in animal testing. I mean, imagine the ethical uproar if none of their drugs were tested on animals, and instead they were killing clinical trial participants or end-consumers.
And what always baffled me was that Tom’s subcontracted the actual manufacture of their toothpaste to a small factory in New London that made small batch /boutique toothpaste for lots of other companies. We had a roomie that works there, and at one point of time had a random grab bag of about 15 different brands of toothpaste from their overrun bin. Perhaps the shoddy manufacture was from a time when they processed their own, but the New London factory has been in business for over a hundred years, and the chemist who started the business is one that actually invented the paste form of toothpaste [previously it had been powder]
Yeah, that’s just weird though (the whole thing is weird) - I have a hard time imagining a the parent company allowing a subsidiary to bash the parent in a commercial. Although maybe CG is just as bewildered as to what the hell the commercial means as anyone else.
Perhaps not drug companies, but with other products we have the National Formulary that gives ingredient lists that have already been tested and are known safe, so if it includes those you dont have to test.
Of course, they were previously tested on animals, but it may have been 100 years ago [does that count as still being tested on animals or not in an ethical sense…]:smack:
They wrote that they downrated pet food companies for testing their products on animals.
That’s just bad marketing. The pet food company should rebut, “Animal testing? Us? No way. In fact, we love animals so much that we’ve set up a special center where we give homeless animals free food. We also provide veterinary staff to monitor any health problems the animals might experience.”
Yeah, I don’t think I’d buy from a pet food company that didn’t test on animals.
“Sorry, we don’t actually have any idea whether cat like the taste of our cat food, or whether it’s healthier than Friskies or poisonous to cats. Why, does that matter to you or something?”
For decades, Toms toothpaste contained SLS aka Sodium lauryl sulfate, which most “natural” toothpastes do not. It can cause canker sores aka aphthous ulcers and it has no real use except as a foaming agent, making you think the toothpaste is working better. So, it was more or less a “fake natural” label. They have now made many of their toothpastes SLS free.
Fluoride added to municipal water supplies resourced from questionable sources (such as scrubbers in smokestacks and nuclear waste contaminated pools-?!) is the sum basis of any errors… People began to dispute the adding of any fluoride to water and then also to any consumer goods. Tom’s developed a non-fluoride toothpaste we all liked the taste of. However, if a person uses non-fluoride toothpaste as well as having no fluoride in their water supply it is no big deal, unless their body has already achieved dependance on fluoride. That, is the big “Tom’s Mistake”. When they decided to put in any fluoride they had to put in the correct amount in their product to satisfy the fluoride dependency already created. Additionally, Tom’s has had a big problem getting reasonably priced resources for their products to be competitive, without being the huge company that actually can own vast tracts of land where the resources all come from… See, it’s a network of demand for supplies and company survival depends on such connections… Now, some of us might know how old Tom already was when he started the company, and this could be an interesting indication of how companies tend to take on lives of their own to supplant the need for an individual voting human being… Which is a different subject?