If you’ve looked around the soap aisles, you’ve noticed that foaming soap is more expensive than simple liquid soap. The very thing that makes liquid soap foam – the pump dispenser – is what makes it more expensive.
Beyond the Sticker Price
Take a second, though, and you might discover this is a time to look beyond sticker price to overall value and cost. Foaming soap hasn’t been around as long as liquid soap, and certainly not as long as bar soap, but it’s the choice of a growing number of consumers and manufacturers. Early market studies haven’t reached the level of big data, but they do suggest some primary reasons for making the foaming-soap choice:
- It’s more enjoyable to use.
- It’s less likely to be messy, less prone to waste.
- It’s less expensive to use, overall.
- It’s a surprisingly good grease-cutter.
Why So Enjoyable?
Comments gathered from consumers who find foaming soap more enjoyable to use cite these reasons most often:
- It feels less slippery.
- It holds its shape, so there’s more control over flow and less likelihood of dripping.
- It takes less water and time to rinse away.
- It’s already a lather!
Better Value Over Time?
There’s also reason to believe that foaming soap will prove itself to be a better value over time. In a series of stories in 2013, Clean Link, The Professional Cleaning Industry’s Online Resource, suggested exactly that.
Clean Link focused on the switch to foaming soap from liquid by the Regional School District in Litchfield County, CT. By one measure, over the course of several years, the district cut their product consumption with foaming soap to a third of what it was with liquid soap. Janitors in the district replaced soap in dispensers every week with liquid soap. With foaming soap, that time has expanded to nearly three weeks.
Using Less, Using Instead
Using less soap is good for a couple of major reasons, one personal, one potentially global:
- Using less is ultimately cheaper for individual users
- Using less soap means less down the drain, which is especially an issue with commercial skin detergents, still what most people use. Using less means fewer parabens, less dioxane and triclosan down the drain and into the common water supply. With organic soap, none of these are an issue.
Foaming soap still isn’t as common as liquid soap, but there are good reasons to think it could be, or at the very least, should.