Here’s a conundrum… given that dishwashers haven’t changed in the past couple of decades and fundamental detergent chemistry hasn’t changed substantially since 1946 (source), why wouldn’t all dishwasher detergents have converged to essentially the same formula? Or maybe there would be three formulae: soft water, medium water, hard water.
Perhaps detergents actually are all the same, but there is money to be made in fancy packaging and convincing advertising? If so, why does Consumer Reports rate detergents on a scale from 19 (Cascade Complete Gel with Dawn; looks like Procter and Gamble might need to spend more time in the lab and less time making toxic masculinity commercials for its Gillette division) to 85 (Costco’s Kirkland Signature Premium pacs, which might be Finish Powerballs in disguise? Finish rates 83).
Maybe it makes sense that the eco brands such as Seventh Generation and Ecover perform badly. Or the Trader Joe’s absurdly cheap (about 1/3rd the price of Costco!) pacs aren’t great (though nowhere near as bad as that Cascade gel product, above).
But why wouldn’t similarly priced pacs from the bigger vendors all be formulated essentially the same? How is it that the folks who make Finish know something that the chemical engineers behind Cascade don’t know, or vice versa? Even products with similar prices from the same company performed differently.
[Separately, if Consumer Reports is right, you should never ever buy dishwasher gel. A Palmolive eco+ was a mediocre performer and all the rest fell on a spectrum of bad to worse. The top-end Costco pacs were the best performers as well as about 1/3 the price of the top-end brand name pacs.]
It makes sense to me that a Tesla and an Audi electric car will be different. But why should dishwasher detergents be? Everyone wants the same thing (clean dishes).
I get a similar impression whenever I look at over-the-counter medicines at the pharmacy. Acetominophen is acetominophen, but there are twenty different brands of it, all with a unique marketing slant.
Totally unrelated to this post , but appropriate for this blog, I was watching a movie and there was a funny scene about landing a plane. The scene is an example of aeronautical physical comedy that is rare in cinema. My question for the experts is did the filmmakers succeed in making you laugh through the oafish behaviour of the pilot and his plane? Never mind the title of the video — the movie is an old one made by a Mexican and a Canadian lacking our modern American notions of common decency.
https://youtu.be/6jIBzrqE5Eo
I’m sure some work better than others but I’m bewildered by the fact that there are so many choices in something so basic. It kind of reminds me of the digital camera market circa 2003-4, when niche-marketed products of every conceivable specification flooded the marketplace and discerning whether tiny differences between cameras mattered required a Ph.D. level of patience to read about them and use to make an informed purchase decision. Given this seems to be the status quo, kudos at least to Consumer Reports for doing the leg work to sort it all out. (The article is behind an iron paywall, BTW you can’t see it with any kind of free membership nor do CS offer a limited number of monthly reads. That’s a shame.)
I’d like it if there three or four kinds of detergent, nice, simple. Why does this happen? There’s a division of people employed at Procter and Gamble to go to work each day because they fight like dogs to chisel away a few percent of some other vendor’s market share whether it’s through pure packaging, advertising and promotional hocus pocus or through actual improvements to any of their products. Procter and Gamble is probably a little like Johnson & Johnson. I’ve worked as a vendor for J&J and I can tell you (only!) this: they are very, very, very difficult companies to work for. Everything is treated as though it is the most important secret in the UNIVERSE, and everything takes MONTHS to get done.
Also in one sense laundry detergent reminds me of alkaline batteries: if batteries had improved as much as the marketing departments would have you believe, you’d be able to pop a pack of AA Duracells into your Tesla and drive from New York to Los Angeles by now. One drop of laundry detergent would be able to clean a week’s worth of close and you could then use the grey water to powerwash your house.
Addendum – I would imagine that at this point the pressure to diversify the product line for products like this is very very high, because they have the best data they’ve ever had. The more product lines they have, the more data points they have and the more items they’re filling the shelves with to counter their dirty, dirty adversaries. P&G and all the others must know exactly, and I mean down to the last bottle/pack/tube/bag exactly what they are shipping and selling. The detergent game has got to be lost and won in a manner similar to what traders do with penny stocks. They see they’ve lost a little one month on this particular niche product they make a lot of profit on? Time to goose the distribution and slap a new slogan on the packaging. Everyone knows there are people who live their lives doing this, and it’s not dishonorable work, it’s a career.
Recommendation:
The phosphates in detergents have been removed by most brands in most states, here is a way to put them back in:
https://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?58006
https://www.amazon.com/Sodium-Tripolyphosphate-5Lb-Pack-standard/dp/B00IEAIFIM
I previously had used TSP, but somebody who knows more chemistry than me recommended STPP!
The hypocrisy of the phosphate ban is that institutions and businesses are excepted, but the poor grunts that pay for these institutions are expected to willingly accept the deterioration in laundry and dishwasher performance!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphates_in_detergent
“Marketplace response
Consumer Reports product testing found that new detergent formulations without phosphates did not wash dishes as well but were satisfactory replacement products.[5][6][26][27] Similarly, testing found that phosphate bans in laundry detergent led to newer products which did not clean clothes as well but still could compete with the older products containing phosphate.[28][4] ”
Like the new Sudafed PE, I noticed immediately, it didn’t do the job the old product did.
In short, get the cheapest powder, and add appropriate amount of phosphates.
Agree with Viking but here are some other thoughts:
1. Although Dishwasher detergent can no longer contain phosphates, Fryer Boil out detergent can.
https://www.amazon.com/Pack-Cascade-Phosphates-Professional-Fryer/dp/B00PT0324C
This is the product formerly known as Cascade powdered dishwasher detergent. Only the name on the box has changed. This is good if you don’t feel like procuring STTP separately
2. I don’t think the Costco pods are the same as Finish. The Costco pods are all one color and don’t contain the “Powerball” dot .
3. The Costco pacs are 11 cents each so according to you the TJ ones would be 3 or 4 cents each – I don’t think that’s right.
4. In the old days of powdered dishwasher detergent, the products WERE essentially the same. Sodium carbonate (washing soda) and phosphates, with a few others thrown in just to mix things up. Now that phosphates are out, you have to try different approaches since none of them really work. Maybe someday someone will find an effective no-phosphate formula and then all the detergents will work again and will converge back to a standard formula. For now they are just all stumbling around in the dark and some stumble further from the door than others. The products that don’t work nowadays are the ones where they removed the phosphates but didn’t put anything effective back in their place. In some cases the substitute ingredient was sodium silicate (aka sand). You can imagine removing 1 of the 2 main ingredients in your product and replacing it with sand does not lead to an effective product.
3. The #1 ingredient in the gel detergents is water and usually #2 is sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Neither is very good at cleaning, not as good as washing soda, a strong alkali.
Not all dishes are the same. We tried a dishwasher detergent that stained and scratched our stainless steel pots and pans. So we didn’t buy that one any more, but there are people who don’t put pots in the dishwasher, and such people might like the way their plates came out.
In all seriousness – they are different for the sake of being different because it opens a hole for marketing. No one wants to be a commodity business.
If they used the same formula and worked equally well, it would be common knowledge and you’d buy whatever is cheapest. Since we know they work at widely varying levels of quality and you generally can’t or don’t want to do research on a $9 product standing in a grocery with a list of two dozen more such products to go, you either buy cheap or you buy the brand name in the hope that it means you get a better average purchase That’s assuming you’re not a victim of the $XXX million Cascade has spent on ads to program you not to even think about it.
If you get a terrible wash out of Cascade, you might try another brand – if multiple months of Cascade haven’t just normalized a poor wash to you and you have the mental energy to question every $9 purchase you make on a routine grocery trip, or you might just assume that the other brands are even worse.
But, you ask, why don’t the cheap brands just use the good formula and steal market share from the top brands sowing confusion? Putting aside whether there is any cost/benefit tradeoff on the ingredients there is still a reason – the pricey brands set a high price ceiling that allows for profit to be made at varying levels between the top and the bottom (store brand). Without doing any research I am still certain that the parent company of Cascade has at least one lower-tier product that allows them to carry out price discrimination.
Do you think there is a place in today’s world for Consumers Report with Wirecutter and lots of other sources available for free? I got tired of their progressive politics and trial lawyer perspective and it did not seem to me that following their recommendations was any better and often worse than reading reviews on Amazon. Even at $12 annually (along with their annual buying guide!) it seemed like a waste of money. And how often do you go out and buy a lawnmower or a dishwasher or patio furniture? And when they stray from that kind of stuff their analysis often seems no better than a google search.
I suspect this is a case of emergent behavior. If it wasn’t for all these brands competing, then we’d have Progress brand detergent (“crushing capitalist grime since the revolution!”) and over time the ratio of sand to soap would increase to infinity, until one day John Galt-Procter started getting rich selling real soap off his donkey cart, and then competitors would spring up and we’d be right back where we are.
I would recast your question to ask why, if you know better than the market how many kinds of dish powder there should be, then why can’t a roomful of pedigreed eggheads decide how many car companies we need or what the maximum wage should be? You’re at least smart enough to say you don’t understand and ask why. The real idiots are the ones who see a fence they don’t understand and tear it down. They usually have Ph.D.s.
Chesterton’s fence!
I’m an adult-n00b to dishwasher detergent packet doodads. I noticed a significant difference between the target generics and the walmart generics. Walmarts make the plates taste funny (sometimes; probably a reaction w food residues) and leave a residue on wine glasses if you put them in a certain angle. I assume whatever bag I buy next will be different again, because stuff always works this way.
Change is good for entrenched workers in rent seeking professions, like commodity salesmen. The loss of phosphates (which I wasn’t aware of) means bureaucrats, testers, engineers, chemists, marketing people: everyone gets something to do. Like the little “pod” things. I’m sure that nothingburger “innovation” made tons of work for soap powder people -and I’m pretty sure they raised prices to boot; who knows how much it contributed to GDP. Yet, it adds zero value to my life or dishwasher experience. Maybe the schmutz in the pods is better for the environment, or maybe we’ll discover in 10 years it causes people to sprout broccoli like tumors or kills fish and they’ll all be given more to do. Anyway it’s arguably still better than “people’s soap powder factory #31.”
I’ve often thought about that as well. Products like soap, toilet bowl cleaners, toilet paper, etc – it is really surprising to me that the market can be so diverse. My current buying algorithm is to simply buy the cheapest product (usually the store brand) and then if I’m not happy to stick with that product, just move up in price, until I find the best price/result ratio. 20 years ago generic usually sucked.. but these days I often find generic/store brand to compete pretty well with the more expensive labels. The more expensive labels just mean more marketing to me.
Some background on modern dishwashers:
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-dishwashers-have-a-garbage-disposal-in-them-so-I-dont-have-to-rinse-plates-before-washing-them