One of America’s most recognizable icons of fresh-scented cleanliness comes from New Jersey. No matter where U.S. shoppers are lucky enough to spot cans of Lysol, the sanitizing spray was almost certainly produced at the same sprawling, tan-colored factory, in a suburb an hour’s drive from New York City. Over the noisy plant’s concrete floors, a steady stream of empty cans clink through an assembly line, waiting to be filled. On the line, a machine packs them all with a blend of ethanol, another disinfecting chemical called a quaternary ammonium compound, or quat, and some scent. Employees call the mixture the Juice.
A machine called a Filtec scans each can to make sure it got exactly 19 ounces, then a device called a crimper adds the metal top that will spray the Lysol through the attached plastic straw. In a separate room, another machine uses the straw to inject the butane that propels the spray; then the can gets a bath in a pool of 140F water surrounded by a half-inch of ballistic glass. This makes it almost impossible for the top to burst later, unless somebody throws one into a bonfire. “If it’s going to explode, it will blow here,” says Shahzeb Malik, the site director. “Not on the shelf of a Walmart.” Other machines push on the plastic nozzle, wrap on the Lysol label, and add a cap up top. The cans are bundled into cases and pallets, which are placed onto distribution trucks by forklift, while new, empty cans arrive from a supplier in Pennsylvania.
The Lysol plant in New Jersey can make 700 to 800 cans a minute.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
The pace has been quicker throughout the pandemic, because the plant has been running around the clock, excepting the downtime for shift changes. Every day the factory uses up at least three tanker cars of ethanol that arrive by train, each carrying about 30,000 gallons. The plant can produce 700 to 800 cans of Lysol a minute, all of them quickly bought and used, or hoarded, by Americans desperate to keep their stuff virus-free.
For the record, Lysol works. SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus, a clump of genetic material wrapped in a membrane of fatty lipid molecules. Lysol’s ethanol and quat act as solvents, ripping apart the lipid skin and leaving the viral material inert. That doesn’t mean anyone should inject it, a treatment President Trump suggested doctors consider with disinfectants, including bleach, earlier this year. “Under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body,” the updated Lysol website currently reads, because that’s where people are at these days.
Cases of Lysol spray are put on pallets for shipping.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
Over the course of this maddening year, Lysol has been one of the few products that’s steadily experienced an unprecedented demand. It’s approached frenzy, a level of panic-buying on par with purchases of toilet paper and rice. In early March, when the New Jersey sales team tested the fervor by sending one retail store in Florida 10,000 cans, they sold out in less than two hours. Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc, Lysol’s corporate parent, says that by yearend it’ll be producing 35 million cans of Lysol in North America each month—more than triple its pre-Covid-19 peak and enough to put a can in most American households before winter is over. So far, Lysol sales are up more than 70% this year, pushing Reckitt’s market value to well over $6o billion. The company has gained market share while rivals like Clorox Co. have stayed flat or struggled to keep up. And yet the increased production hasn’t been enough to keep store shelves consistently stocked.
Reckitt Benckiser saw this coming, both from its corporate headquarters outside London and at one of its biggest manufacturing hubs, located about 140 miles west of Wuhan, China. But there was only so much the company could do to accommodate everyone. Lysol’s parent has proven a leading indicator at several key points in the pandemic. With winter approaching, the latest is this: For all its successes in adapting its lean global supply chain to a hundred-year plague, the company still hasn’t quite managed to match supply to demand. “We’ve been very transparent about what we have and what we don’t have,” says Reckitt Chief Executive Officer Laxman Narasimhan. “In some cases, we do disappoint.”
Covid terror would have sounded familiar to survivors of the cholera epidemics that swept much of the globe in the mid-1800s. Outbreaks killed hundreds of thousands of people who lacked access to clean water in the U.S. and Europe. One killed 3,000 New York residents in a matter of weeks and chased tens of thousands of people out of the city. By the end of the 19th century, germ theory had for the first time pointed to microscopic pathogens as the cause of infectious disease, and businesses were promising new forms of chemical protection. In 1889 a German chemist named Gustav Raupenstrauch created Lysol. During the snake-oil era, the early owners marketed Lysol as everything from a household cleanser to, more troublingly, a feminine-hygiene product.
Today’s owners have restricted Lysol’s use to surfaces, not people. Besides the cans, the company sells disinfecting wipes, which rely on milder quats; cleaning sprays for kitchens; and a toilet bowl cleaner. The modern brand owes much of its luster to Joe Rubino, who started working on Lysol research and development in the 1980s, a couple of owners ago. Rubino, known inside the company as Mr. Lysol, is the R&D unit’s go-to communicator. He’s spent most of the past few decades running experiments to show just how gross everyday life can be and what a good chemical spritz that kills 99.9% of germs can do about it. “We’re designed to share germs,” he says in a Garden State accent. “Even if we’re healthy, we’re spreading our organisms to everybody.”
Joe Rubino has worked on Lysol R&D for more than 30 years.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
In a 1990s study, Rubino’s team coated a toy ball at a day-care center with a harmless virus that could serve as a sort of contact tracer. When the researchers used swabs to test for the virus at the end of the day, all nine kids at the day-care had bits of it on their hands, and they spread it everywhere at home, too, from high chairs to bathtubs to beds. In 2007 the company put 30 people with the common cold in separate hotel rooms for a night, then found traces of the cold virus throughout the rooms.
Some of the more photogenic Lysol science has taken place at the brand’s R&D center in Montvale, N.J., located below the New York state line. The R&D team keeps a list of about 1,000 customers it can invite into its mock kitchen or suite of glass-enclosed bathrooms to provide opinions on product scents and spray-bottle sounds. The pièce de résistance is room A-154, better known as Flushing Meadows. It’s an ode to the commode, a throne room lined with 104 toilets from around the world, arranged inches apart in three aisles beneath national flags. Tanks and filters in an adjacent room replicate the water conditions in different countries, and above each bowl, mechanized plungers test the toilets at different flush rates. “Laying the foundation for success,” a plaque on one wall reads.
In the room known as Flushing Meadows, toilets replicate water conditions from around the world.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
During a Bloomberg Businessweek visit to the R&D center this fall, the Flushing Meadows toilets were helping to test experimental products code-named for Donkey Kong, Tetris, and other video games. To conduct smell tests, the staff can fit a plexiglass hood over a bowl, then open a top flap on the hood in turn and breathe deeply. “A lot goes into making toilet bowl cleaners that you would never even think about,” Rubino said in an understatement. “We can make rust stains in here. We can make simulated fecal stains, and we’ll see how well the products remove that.” (The faux poop comprises dirt, brown dye, and sometimes peanut butter, he said. “There is a formula for it.”)
This visit was Rubino’s first time back at the R&D center in months. Although he semiretired in 2019, he’s continued working from home three days a week through the pandemic. His version of the Covid nightmare began in late December, with an email from a medical alert service called ProMed. The subject line was “Undiagnosed pneumonia—China.” A week and several escalating alerts later, Rubino sent a note to colleagues: “Here’s something we need to watch.”
Up the Yangtze River from Wuhan lies the city of Jingzhou, home to one of Reckitt’s biggest manufacturing plants. (Most of the products made there are part of Lysol’s sister brand, Dettol.) In late January, when lockdowns began in Hubei province—which includes both cities—David Gao, site director of the Jingzhou plant, called his lieutenants and told them not to go home. The timing could hardly have been worse; it was the start of the weeklong Chinese New Year, when the whole country goes on vacation. About 350 of the factory’s 400 workers had already left the city, and not enough remained to restart disinfectant production. With the public-health crisis spiraling, Gao canceled his employees’ vacations and negotiated travel permits with the government to allow them to return to work. “I talked to the government and told them we are the factory to make the disinfectant,” Gao says.
The permits came through WeChat, and managers helped return close to 300 people. One worker rode a bicycle six hours to get to the plant, Gao says; another walked 13 hours. The government helped put the Reckitt staff up in hotels for weeks, isolated even from their families, and a neighboring factory boss topped up the plant’s dwindling supply of masks in exchange for disinfectant. Gao says no one at the plant got Covid. “The employees sacrificed a lot,” he says. “Nobody quit.”
By the end of January people in Europe were testing positive for the disease, the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus an international public-health emergency, and Narasimhan, who’d been Reckitt’s CEO only a few months, ordered his executives to maximize production by any means necessary. “Guys, turn on the factories 24 hours,” he recalls telling them during a conference call. “We went full blast.”
One problem with going full blast was that every consumer hygiene company in the world was doing the same thing, and they all rely on a lot of the same key ingredients. With Lysol and its rivals gobbling up hundreds of thousands of gallons of ethanol and tons of quats, there wasn’t enough to go around, even when the pandemic-jumbled supply chain was at its best. And like many global manufacturers, Reckitt keeps little spare material on hand; it relies on shipping companies to deliver steady supplies. “It’s a global supply chain, and it’s not integrated,” says Frederick Dutrenit, senior vice president of supply for the company’s health division.
Products being tested in the Montvale R&D Lab.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
The Jingzhou factory, for example, needed outside suppliers to deliver more than 100 different raw materials and parts. When he learned there wasn’t enough of a critical chemical left in all of China to meet its increased production needs, Dutrenit decided to eat the cost of flying in more from the U.K. For a supply chain executive, having to air-freight tens of tons of raw materials across continents is something close to a worst nightmare. His bosses didn’t want to raise prices and be seen as taking advantage of the pandemic. “We decided not to do any compromise on this,” Dutrenit says. “Margin has not been a driver.”
As Covid spread through the U.S. and Lysol hoarding began in earnest, the assembly lines started running short of quats and ethanol. Again the supply team found answers in Europe, flying in more quats. Eventually the company located a plant in Nebraska with spare ethanol from its lower-grade gasoline additive and retooled it to make purer ethanol for Lysol. It also looked online to see who around the world was selling alternatives to Lysol or Clorox products—the hundreds of small, never-heard-of-it brands that suddenly populated Amazon.com and other websites this spring—and began signing deals with the smaller companies to use their production capacity.
Pre-Covid, Lysol production capabilities in North America topped out at about 10 million cans a month, according to Reckitt. With more than a dozen contractors signed up to produce more, the monthly number should hit the 35 million mark by the end of the year, the company says, plus more than 30 million cans of wipes, up from less than 7 million cans a year ago.
While the company still hasn’t been able to meet all of the demand, its gains in market share suggest that it’s outpacing competitors. Along with the 70% revenue increase for Lysol products, Dettol sales are up 50% around the world, and Reckitt has managed to keep other cleaning supplies in circulation, too. Because people are staying home more, they’re using more of the company’s dish detergent. They’re lonelier, so they’re getting pets and buying more Resolve, its spray product for carpet messes. More cooking and pets mean more smells in the house, therefore people need more air fresheners. Sales of the company’s Durex condoms, however, have yet to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.
Reckitt expects something like the current level of demand to last through much of 2021. It says increased capacity from new contract manufacturers will allow it to sell as much Lysol as retailers want by the spring and to resume making products in the scents and sizes it eliminated this year for the sake of efficiency. “People will want to get their favorite fragrance back,” says Harold van den Broek, the president of Reckitt’s hygiene business. “They will want to get the wipes that they were used to.” Narasimhan says he’s considering introducing a hand sanitizer in the U.S. market, where Purell dominates.
Reckitt Benckiser Group’s products on display.
Photographer: Chris Maggio for Bloomberg Businessweek
Reckitt is also investing in more U.S. manufacturing facilities, so it can reduce its reliance on contractors later this year and, it says, be self-sufficient by 2023. The added capacity is a bet that the pandemic has permanently changed how people think about cleaning their houses and themselves. “Even when this all goes away, demand for our products will be structurally higher than what they were pre-Covid,” Narasimhan says.
While that bet seems pretty safe right now, it remains tough for the company to gauge exactly where demand might settle. About three months ago, the Lysol team began sending 10 times its usual shipments to a group of 30 to 50 U.S. retail stores, depending on the day or week. Some days, the company says, every last item sells within two hours. (It’s not a perfect test; the Lysol team has received reports that customers post online whenever they spot cans or wipes in the test locations, bringing in more shoppers.) For now, and likely through the winter, many Americans in search of Lysol and other household disinfectants won’t be able to buy as much as they want.
During a typical shift at the New Jersey factory, from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., a digital counter on a wall keeps track of how many finished cases the assembly line has produced. On that day this fall, with about an hour left in the shift, the count stood at 6,475 cases of Lysol, or almost 80,000 cans. In the packing area, the machines were still loud enough to require earplugs. Cal Swedberg, Reckitt’s regional manufacturing director, looked up as hundreds of finished canisters wound down rows of conveyor belts stacked 20 to 30 feet high. Employees call it the Wall of Lysol. As the cylinders rolled off the line to be wrapped into cases, and then into 2,000-can pallets, Swedberg said: “That lasts at Costco about 3 minutes.”
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