S9 Ep49: NASA's Dental Care Secret: Saving Teeth with Eco-Friendly Space-Age Tech with Belinda Lau
“I had to find that niche, that core community of people who were trying to solve the same problems that I was and who were passionate about the solution. But if I hadn’t found that, I think it would be tough to try to keep promoting your product and your brand without actually knowing where it fits.” —Belinda Lau
Every toothpaste tube and toothbrush we've ever used might still be existing somewhere on this planet! Plastic dental care products are silent environmental destroyers, with each toothbrush lingering for about 500 years in landfills and oceans.
Belinda Lau, a biomedical engineer with 15 years in medical device innovation, co-founded Elims with her dentist husband to transform oral care through sustainable, science-backed products. Motivated by the environmental impact of traditional dental care and her background in medical technology, she developed a breakthrough toothpaste using nano-hydroxyapatite that delivers clinical effectiveness while dramatically reducing plastic waste.
Tune in as Justine and Belinda explore NASA's nano hydroxyapatite technology, sustainable oral care packaging, TerraCycle's recycling innovation, clean ingredient alternatives to fluoride, bootstrapping a CPG business, growing business as a couple, flavor development strategies, dental professional insights, plus much more.
Connect with Belinda:
With a background in biomedical and material science engineering and over 20 years of experience in the medical device industry, Belinda brings deep science and heart to every product. Inspired by a mission to create better-for-you, planet-friendly health care, she leads ELIMS with purpose, innovation, and impact. Belinda was named to the Forbes Next 1000 list and recognized by the Los Angeles Times as a Visionary CEO for her leadership in driving innovation and impact in sustainable consumer health.
Episode Highlights:
02:24 ELIMS: Bridging Sustainability and Dental Health
09:07 Nano Hydroxyapatite: An Alternative to Fluoride Developed by NASA
16:44 TerraCycling: Sustainability Beyond Product
24:29 Flavor Innovation: Making Toothpaste Fun Again
36:42 Power Couple Entrepreneurship
45:21 Funding Mistakes
Resources:
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Tweets:
Who says aging means losing your smile? "Our goal is to be the hottest grandparent at the old folks home with real teeth", and @justine.reichman talks to Elims CEO, Belinda Lau, about how this can be possible with NASA tech. Tune in! #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #ELIMS #AgingWithStyle #SustainableOralCare #CleanBeauty #SustainableLiving #HealthTech #TerraCycle #NASAinspiredDentalCare
Inspirational Quotes:
03:29 "Oral care is something that everyone on the planet has to do. So every few months, you're throwing away a tube of toothpaste that's not recyclable." —Belinda Lau
14:36 “The third-party pitch is always the best.” —Justine Reichman
15:45 "We all want everything to be very transparent, and we want to know what it is. Why would it be any different for our mouth?" —Justine Reichman
15:55 "These products are going straight into your bloodstream because of the gum line. Why wouldn't you be putting cleaner ingredients into your mouth?" —Belinda Lau
29:31 “I had to find that niche, that core community of people who were trying to solve the same problems that I was and who were passionate about the solution. But if I hadn’t found that, I think it would be tough to try to keep promoting your product and your brand without actually knowing where it fits.” —Belinda Lau
36:10 "Your teeth are the only things that don't heal themselves. So you gotta give it everything you got, and you only have one set." —Belinda Lau
36:18 "Our goal is to be the hottest grandparent at the old folks home with real teeth." —Belinda Lau
41:42 “We have our own set of skills and what we're good at doing and what we like to do, but surrounding yourself with those mentors and those advisors that can give you another perspective and more information is key to success.” —Justine Reichman
Transcription:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine, and I'm so excited to be here with you today. I want to welcome those new guests. I want to welcome back the existing guests and tell you how much I appreciate you carving out time in your day to tune into this podcast, the Essential Ingredients Podcast. It means so much to me, and we want to hear from you, because we want to make sure that we're delivering the kind of content that is important to you, and helping you make the right decisions, both for yourself, your family. And if you're an entrepreneur innovating in this space, we're hoping that this will inspire you. So this podcast today, which I'm really excited to bring you, features the co-founder of Elims. So we spoke with the co-founder, Belinda, and her expertise is in Biomedical Engineering. Her husband is a dentist. And together, they created a toothpaste that uses an alternative to fluoride called hydroxyapatite. This is the main selling point. They talk about studies that show that it mineralizes teeth in the proper concentration, and our toothpaste is one of the only brands to have the 10% concentrate necessary to actually see results. So we want you to join us, see what you think, see what is right for you, and let us know what questions you have, because I think this is super interesting. So you're going to learn from Belinda, and she has a biomedical engineering background about the science, and every Elims Toothpaste is made from renewable sugar cane grown responsibly in Brazilian forests, making it 100% recyclable. So there's a lot that we're going to talk about here. There's a lot of things that they're having an impact on besides the health of our teeth, but also about how they make their containers and what they're using. You've got to listen to the episode, because you can even send back the product, and they will pay for it so that they can help with the process of recycling and make it easier. So you're not going to want to miss this. Stay tuned.
Welcome Belinda, so great to have you here.
Belinda Lau: Thank you so much, Justine. I'm so happy to be here.
Justine Reichman: I'm excited for our community to get to know you, to learn a little bit about your product, where it comes from, what inspires you, and how it differentiates? I think there's a lot of things to cover from how it works to sustainability and what you're trying to achieve. So before we get going, would you mind just explaining to our listeners and our viewers a little bit about what your product is?
"Oral care is something that everyone on the planet has to do. So every few months, you're throwing away a tube of toothpaste that's not recyclable." —Belinda Lau
Belinda Lau: Yeah. We're a biotech dentist crafted sustainable oral care brand. And when we started the business back in 2019, the cross section between oral care and sustainability wasn't there. So what we saw in the market were products that were clinically back, everything that you would see on a target shelf, right? And we thought, okay, those products produced a lot of virgin plastic that people are throwing away constantly. There's some statistics out there that say that for every toothbrush you've ever used, it's out there for 500 years. And every toothpaste tube that you've ever used, it is somewhere degrading in a landfill somewhere for 500 years. And so when we saw those stats, we thought, oral care is something that everyone on the planet has to do. So essentially, every few months, you're throwing away a tube of toothpaste that's not recyclable, a toothbrush, floss picks. All of these things are practically made out of plastic. So we thought, well, why isn't there some intersection between something that works to clean your teeth, and then also some upgrade on the sustainability side of things? And so on the sustainability side, we saw these like bamboo toothbrushes, floss picks and tablet toothpaste. And when we talk to dental professionals, they would tell us, people who use those types of products would come into their offices with more problems. So that was our aha moment.
When we were interviewing dental professionals, we said, how can we bridge the gap here? Because obviously, the beauty community and personal care products are going towards cleaner ingredients, more sustainable packaging. But it somehow didn't hit the oral care industry just until recently, and we feel proud that we were starting the conversation about sustainability and the oral care industry. We started looking also into the ingredients and how they're sourced. If you read the back of your toothpaste tube, chances are you don't know what most of those things are. They're very long chemically named because that's exactly what they are. And so we thought, is there something that we can do, given our backgrounds which I'll get into in a second, and sort of elevate the oral care industry to get it to be cleaner, better for your ingredients, and safer to swallow? These things are going into your mouth so they should be better for you. But also level up the sustainability side in terms of the sourcing of the materials, the packaging, the ingredients, all of that stuff. And so that's what we're trying to do.
My background is, I'm actually a biomedical engineer, and I spent over 15 years working in the medical device industry building all kinds of medical devices, from insulin pumps, to spinal implants, to glucose sensors. And when I was in that industry, I visited a lot of hospitals and met with a lot of clinicians patients in their homes, and a lot of medical products are in these sterile plastic packaging. I always would ask, why does it have to be this material? Why can't it be recyclable? Why does it have to be virgin plastic? And everyone says, oh, it's because you have to keep these medical products sterile. And I have quite challenged that over the years. And then on the other side of things, my husband, he's a dentist, and he's been a dentist for almost 25 years. When I would come home and tell him about all the trash and waste I would see in the medical device industry, he would say, well, you should see the dental office. We just shrink wrap the whole room just to go in and poke in someone's mouth for just a few seconds just to check on things. Then you have to take off the gloves, the mask, all of the plastic wraps, the bibs and all that goes into the trash. And so we were like, we should do something about this. We've got three kids at home who are using the floss picks and throwing away their toothbrush every couple weeks. I don't know why kids just wear down their toothbrushes to flat in just a matter of days. We just felt like there was a gap in the market of finding something that was something that actually is clinically backed and worked for you, but also just making things just a little bit more earth friendly.
Justine Reichman: Was your initial interest in developing something more about the sustainability end, or more about what's in the product?
Belinda Lau: It started with the question about sustainability. That's how it started. So we started looking at all of these products that you would see, like I said, in the oral care aisle at Target. We would say, is there anything we can do to make this better for the Earth? Can we use more recycled materials, bio based materials, just for the packaging alone? There's a lot of easy, low hanging fruit that can be done there. And then when we started digging into it and talking to dental professionals and also to consumers, we realized that the wave of clean beauty that swept through in the last couple decades was coming to oral care, and we wanted to be at the forefront of that conversation. And so we started digging into the ingredients. For example, teeth whitening products have, you can't pronounce any of those ingredients. And so we thought, okay, well, is there a way we can make this actually food grade ingredients? Can we make it simpler? Can we just bring it down from 23 ingredients to just a handful of ingredients? And the answer is, yes, you can do those things. And so it just started with sustainability, but then it went down these rabbit holes of like, what else can we do? How else can we make this stuff better, but still be as clinically valid as the gold standards that are out there that we've seen, that we've been using for years at home? So that's how it started, and that's how it evolved.
Justine Reichman: If we dig into the ingredients, I believe that I read and understood that there was an alternative to fluoride that you were using. Is that correct?
Belinda Lau: Yes. So the alternative to fluoride is called Nano-hydroxyapatite, and it's a big mouthful word. It is a mouthful where I wish there was a cooler way to say, maybe we can reform a marketing term for it. But basically, hydroxyapatite is what your teeth and your bones are already made up. So the dentin, what's underneath your tooth enamel, is like over 70% that's hydroxyapatite. The surface of your teeth, the part that you can touch right here, that's 97% hydroxyapatite. So what we did is we said, okay, can we use this ingredient to just bathe it in what your tooth is already made of? I didn't invent nano-hydroxyapatite. The story behind it is the nano version of hydroxyapatite was developed by NASA back in the 1970s, and they developed it because they were finding that astronauts were going into space. And after they're in there for a couple months, sometimes a couple years, and after the gravity actually reduces their bone density, including their teeth, so they come back with weaker teeth, getting cavities and things like that. And you can't see a dentist in space. Not yet, at least. So the idea was, can we strengthen the teeth of the astronauts? Not using fluoride, but using something different and something better? And yes, it totally works. And so the reason we haven't really seen a lot of this in the US until recently is because NASA sold the patent to a Japanese toothpaste company back in the 1980s. The patent was 10 years and extended for another few more years. And so in Japan and Korea, they have been benefiting from this amazing mineral for so long for almost 50 years. It's just slowly coming to the US. So there's amazing, huge bodies of studies around nano-hydroxyapatite and how it works. You can just Google it, and you'll just see a litany of publications, white papers, clinical studies that all show that it works just as well as fluoride if it's used at a 10% concentration in your toothpaste. So that's what we use. A lot of companies out there use what we call the marketing amount. They'll use anywhere from point 2% to 2% which will get you some benefits, but it won't get you that same protection as fluoride, the gold standard, unless it's at a 10% concentration.
Justine Reichman: Why are some people doing it at a lower level versus YOU doing it at a more effective and higher level?
Belinda Lau: It's expensive. We sell our products at the same price, but they're paying 80% less, maybe 90% less, and so they get more margin, and they don't have to disclose it. Because the FDA has not required us to disclose the percentage. I just feel like the guilty are always nervous so they hide things. And so we put it on our packaging, we put it on our website so everyone clearly knows that 10%, at least for hydroxyapatite, is the gold standard.
Justine Reichman: So does that mean? Are you suffering from financial aid? Is it a challenge for the company to be making money while your margins are a little bit lower, less than these other companies? How is that going to impact how you drive the future of the business?
Belinda Lau: Yeah, that's a good question. I think for us, it really hangs on volume. So when we started producing these products at the beginning of the business, we were just buying the lowest amount, the MOQs. And so obviously, the margin wasn't as good as we wanted it to be. But we've been in business for almost four years now, and we've been able to scale. And so we get better pricing as we have larger volumes. That's how we've been doing better. Also our product works and people really like it. We've sold hundreds of thousands of tubes of toothpaste. And dental professionals love it because of that 10% concentration. We don't pay into marketing. I haven't, to this day, I have not paid for a single paid ad since the beginning of the business, because the product kind of hangs on itself. We were growing slower, I would say, compared to some of these other organizations that have a bit more margin. But we're fine. We're here. We're still here in the CPG space. To have a business that passed the three year mark is amazing. It's very rare. We're like, okay, we got a good product going. We just have to keep a flow, make sure that we're talking to dental professionals because dental professionals are really, I hate to say that there are sales reps, but they are the ones who are really championing our products. I got an email last week from someone whom I had met, very similar to this podcast, and she emailed me. She said, oh, my God, I just went to the dentist and took my son to the dentist, the dentist recommended your product to him. I was like, I just felt like I won the Academy Award. I was like, okay, that's all I need for organic marketing to work this word of mouth of someone who I barely know, a dentist that I've never met to recommend our products so we know that our products are working.
Justine Reichman: That's amazing. The third party pitch is always the best anyway, right? And none of us you're advocating, this is the toothpaste you should use. We all believe our dentists, right? I don't want them to fill my teeth. I want them to be cleaner, and I trust that they know what they're recommending.
"We all want everything to be very transparent, and we want to know what it is. Why would it be any different for our mouth?" —Justine Reichman
Belinda Lau: Yes. I think they really love it because of the biocompatibility element with fluoride. I'm sure you've seen a lot of news about fluoride recently about the conversation around fluoride and kids' IQs, and so it's very top of mind for people to find an alternative that actually works. And I particularly love hydroxyapatite because of the biocompatibility element. All our products, all our ingredients are safe to swallow. They're food grade ingredients. And so my husband, who's a dentist, jokes to his patients that you can slather it on some toast in the morning and eat it for breakfast. It's that great. It's totally safe. Especially for kids where there's concerns about fluoride poisoning and overdose, it's such a great alternative.
Justine Reichman: It sounds like it. I mean, it sounds like a perfect solution. Not only does it have better ingredients, and nowadays, as we look at things that we put into our body, we all want everything to be very transparent, and we want to know what it is. Why would it be any different for our mouth?
Belinda Lau: Exactly, in fact, I would go a step further and say that basically, your product, the products that you put in your mouth, are going straight into your bloodstream because of the gum line. So that's when, when? Why? When you floss and when you brush your teeth, sometimes your gums may bleed. And so why wouldn't you be putting cleaner ingredients into your mouth that you potentially could swallow, but are 100% going into your bloodstream through your gum lines. So that's why we really look for ways to elevate your products that we've already grown up with. But can we make it better? Can we make it more grown up?
Justine Reichman: I think it's a great solution. I love the fact that it's clean. I love the fact that you're sustainable. I want to go back to the packaging for a minute and talk about what it's made of. I think I read about sugar cane. Is that right? If you could tell us a little bit about that and how you made those choices?
Belinda Lau: With our packaging, we've tried a bunch of different things. One of the products, the tube types we've used is a sugar cane ethanol base. So basically what happens is when sugar is made, you take the sugar cane and wring out all of the juice, all of the good stuff, and then the husks are basically just thrown away and composted, burned or whatnot. But because the demand for sugar is so high, there's just a lot of these husks just being thrown away. What happens is they take these husks and basically make it into a fine powder. And when in its powder form, it actually mimics very similar to poly ethanol and all of these other kinds of plastic materials, so it's a substitute for it. So you can make basically the very similar look and feel of plastic, but with a sugar cane base. So we call that a bio based material. It's a great material for sorting the husk, but recycling it on the back end is a bit more complicated because most communities, most countries don't have a way to recycle bio-based materials yet. They're used to things that your yogurt cups are made of, or your milk jugs, and so it complicates the recycling facilities a little bit. We're monitoring all of that stuff. What we do is we actually take back any oral care products that you have at home that are used and empty, and we recycle them with TerraCycle. And that's a free service to all customers.
You don't have to be a customer of ours. You don't even have to send us our products back. You can send us any oral care products that you have at home, and we will recycle them with TerraCycle. Just to close the loop on recycling for oral care products, because most of it is mixed nylon and plastic. We want to make sure that it's getting into the right hands, and we pay for that service. And so we played with sugar cane materials. We obviously have used a lot of PCR, which is the post consumer recycled materials. That one's really great too because we're actually promoting recyclability by purchasing recycled plastics. And there is a way to recycle them on the back end too, so we're monitoring a lot of these different dynamics in the packaging industry to see what is possibly a better outcome. There's also what they call mono materials, which is like one material that is typically easier to recycle in recycling facilities. So there's a bit more options out there. And the exciting part for me is since we started in 2019, I've seen so much innovation in packaging in this space from sugar cane to better PCR, more reliable PCR materials to even just paper pulp materials. Just the things that you can do with different sorts of byproducts that don't really have some value, but taking it and making it into something interesting and useful for consumers at home. I just love how this space is evolving.
Justine Reichman: I know we were talking about the TerraCycle that you're using. And as you're sitting there saying, well, you'll accept any products and you'll recycle them. Did I hear that right?
Belinda Lau: Yes, yes, absolutely. We'll take any brand of oral care products. We take toothbrushes, toothbrush heads if you use an electric toothbrush. We take toothpaste tubes, floss containers, teeth whitening pens, any of that stuff. Paper, you can generally recycle at home. But usually, it's any mixed material of plastics that you would see in a toothpaste tube or a toothbrush that are generally just thrown away and not recyclable. So we take those back, and then we work with TerraCycle to make them into things like backpacks, play structures and things.
Justine Reichman: This is quite an interesting partnership you have with them.
Belinda Lau: Actually, they offer this to almost every company, but nobody really takes up on it. We just feel like it's such a great way to close the loop on a product that you use almost every day of your life, but find a way to have a good way to just put it back into the recycling network.
Justine Reichman: When we talk about recycling, and we talk about clean beauty, and we talk about all these things, there's been a lot of conversation about what is actually recyclable. I don't know if there's a lot of things around, if it's smaller than the size of a lipstick, even though it says it's recyclable, they don't actually take that.
Belinda Lau: They don't stay at home. Usually, it has to be the size of a milk jug for them to actually take that and recycle it. Even the yogurt cups, they're too small. Usually, those end up in landfills anyways. So we looked at that, we said, okay, toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes, they're small. But if we can pull them apart, then can we make it into something and then just promote the recycling loop, and basically encourage people to recycle so that we can reuse these products and see them again in our product lines?
Justine Reichman: I think it's amazing. And I think the way that you've structured it so that you've created a better product with better ingredients that are more effective where there are studies that are sustainable, I guess I have to ask, how does it taste?
Belinda Lau: The toothpaste? I think it tastes great. We have two flavors. We have a lavender vanilla mint and a pineapple orange mint. And one of them, the lavender was designed by me. And the other one, the pineapple orange was designed by my husband. And the reason is because I'm a very busy mom, I'm running a business, have three kids, all kinds of stuff going on, and so by the end of the day, I'm exhausted. We put the kids to bed, and my husband pours me a glass of, I take two sips and I'm passed out on the couch. And then my husband, his serotonin levels are up at night, so he's up doing stuff. And so before he goes to bed, he wakes me up from the couch and he goes, Bell, Bell, wake up. You got to go to bed. And he goes, I go up to our bedroom. And he's like, well, you need to brush your teeth. Don't be gross. He's a dentist so I'm like, okay. And I'll brush my teeth. But usually, these super minty burst toothpaste, they're energizing, they wake me up. And now I'm awake, and now I'm mad because I want to just go to sleep and just have a chill night. But I'm not. I'm awake, and it's hard for me to go back to sleep. Sleep is key when you're a mom. So I said, can we make a flavor or a formulation that actually helps you go to bed. You brush your teeth and it's very chill, so the lavender and the sweet vanilla, it calms you. We put chamomile in there just to give you a chill, soft vibe so that you can transition from whatever you're doing the day. Even if you are abruptly woken up. You can brush your teeth, go to bed and continue to sleep peacefully. So that was our first flavor. And the second flavor, really, my husband designed because he wanted to feel zesty and awake. And it's got a little bit more mint flavor, and it's a bit more fruit forward. And that one is so funny. People say that it tastes like a cactus cooler. If you've ever had one of those, like a bubbly drink. I had it. It actually does taste just like our toothpaste. It's so funny. I never had one before, but my husband designed the formula just to make it taste like something that he loves. So those are two flavors. And then we have a kids line coming out that has no mint, and a lot of natural flavors with no artificial flavors, and no artificial dyes.
Justine Reichman: As you're saying this, I'm thinking it's kind of like when you went to the dentist when you were a kid and they gave you choices of the flavors. Remember that?
Belinda Lau: Yeah. The bubble gum, the grape.
Justine Reichman: Exactly. More in line with that, I feel like it's the traditional toothpaste.
Belinda Lau: We do plan on having a mint going for it, because our customers have been asking us for a plain mint, which I'm happy to do. But I just love taking something that you already know, which is toothpaste. Everyone uses it, and just making it a little bit more upgraded, a little bit more luxurious, so that's why we have these two fun flavors.
Justine Reichman: They sound fun. They do. I think you can even get a kid to try the pineapple on.
Belinda Lau: My kids use both our flavors. They use lavender at night, and they use pineapple in the morning.
Justine Reichman: Can you get kids to use it?
Belinda Lau: There are the pickiest palettes, actually, for our kids line. They are the ones who chose the flavors. We had gone back and forth on different flavors and flavor profiles, and we just picked whatever they chose. So they've got the pickiest palettes on the planet, so we were happy to oblige.
Justine Reichman: Do you remember that life serial commercial? I might be dating myself where they're like, Mikey likes it?
Belinda Lau: Yeah, exactly. I can see our social media already with them, designing the product and little lab coats, and then the kid designed and kid approved. There's three of them, and they all agree. Designed by kids, and approved by kids. That's all you realize. I think. For parents, that's all you all that matters. We'll go for it.
Justine Reichman: I want to go back a little bit, because I know that you were doing other things for 15 years in space. And now, here you are as an entrepreneur. Your husband, a dentist, and a lot of dentists are entrepreneurs because they have their own practices. Is this your first foray into, quote unquote, a CPG product as an entrepreneur?
Belinda Lau: Yes. I wouldn't say that I've been around business my entire life. My parents were born and raised in Burma in Southeast Asia, and they immigrated to North America with literally nothing. They just had a suitcase and $14 in their pockets. And they were able to raise a family by starting businesses. So I grew up in our family gift shop since I was two years old, dusting the shelves, packaging, doing inventory management, writing the signs, which is marketing. Doing the counting of the money at the end of the day, which is bookkeeping. I was exposed to all of that. Literally, every summer vacation, winter vacation, weekend, I was in the shop working until I graduated and went to college. So I had been around. My parents started many businesses in their lifetime, so I was able to see what that was like on the front lines. But as an entrepreneur myself, definitely, this is my first ownership into building a startup and a company, and definitely my first time in a CPG space. As a biomedical engineer, we always worked with products that were sold through hospitals or distributors. And so building a CPG product, and also building a product and a brand from scratch is new to me. And I think the most surprising thing I found about this journey was developing something that didn't exist. So that's a brand new brand product, a brand new company, and getting to that product market fit was definitely a new experience for me, because I had always worked for Fortune 500 companies that had already established brands. And so anything that they would make, it would be going towards a market that they've already had some footprint in, usually. And so for me to come into oral care is not quite medical devices. It's in the healthcare industry, but it is different from some of the other industries that it has been part of. Plus just building a brand and getting to that product market fit.
I just remember that first year being so tough, because how does anyone know we're here? How does anyone know we exist? What do you have to do just to get awareness that we exist in this world? It was a very tough thing. Because early on, I didn't know if we weren't making sales because it wasn't the product. Was it the brand? Was it where we were selling or where we're not selling/ Or was it something else completely? Was it the price? You just don't know. And so we started to hit product market fit luckily at the end of that first year, and we knew it because people were talking about us organically. We were getting press hits on all this stuff without paying for any of that stuff. And so I thought, okay, yeah, it's starting to work. But I really had to find that niche, that core community of people who were basically trying to solve the same problems that I was, and who were passionate about the solution. But if I hadn't found that, I think it would be just really tough to try to keep promoting your product and your brand without actually knowing where it fits that product market fit gap. It was tough learning for me in the very beginning. But once we got it, we knew, okay, the product works. People like the product. The price was somewhat acceptable, even though maybe a little bit high. The promotion, we didn't really have any promotion. Whatever we were doing, the branding and all that stuff was working, and it was just a matter of getting more distribution.
Justine Reichman: You mentioned a couple times that you're a little bit more expensive. How has that been received by the public and by your customers?
Belinda Lau: The benchmark for toothpaste is the Crests and Colgate of the world, and so those ingredients are just significantly less expensive. Flora is very cheap. Probably even just 1% of what nano-hydroxyapatite costs. And so we were nervous about where we should price our products? But honestly in the last few years, what we found is competitors have come into the market, and they're priced even higher than us because of that. So we were initially on the higher side of things for a nano-hydroxyapatite product. But right now, we're just in the middle. We offer a clinically backed product of one that's developed by professionals, but the pricing is in the middle for this particular category of toothpaste. And just recently in 2025 nano-hydroxyapatite toothpaste has outranked every other toothpaste on Amazon. On Amazon, the number one toothpaste is nano-hydroxyapatite toothpaste. So all those the Crests and Colgate that dominated the field for so long, they are no longer number one on Amazon, which is the number one search engine and the number one marketplace. I just found that to be so interesting. At a much higher price point, three, four times what Crest, Colgate and Sensodyne are selling for. But here comes these smaller brands that are taking share from these huge companies. I just see that as a telltale signal for us that we're moving in the right direction. Honestly, the price, yes. Is it higher? Yes, but we don't actually get a ton of complaints about it.
People who understand the ingredients and what we're trying to do, and the sustainability and the mission, all of our products are clinically tested, I think they understand that they're getting a lot of value. We focus on showing what the value of the product is. And I think just talking to you, I can see in your face and your reactions that there's so much more to just your average toothpaste. And so educating our customers and having them understand that this does help, it gets rid of your sensitivity, it helps rebuild your enamel that you lose every single day, and it does it in a way that is so much better for you. When we talk about that to our customers, we said, we've sold hundreds of thousands of tubes at this price point, and so we feel like we're moving in the right direction. Do I want to drop the price of entry? I would love to do that. If we can get to scale and we can keep our margins, I would love to bring that price down so that we can get to a broader audience.
Justine Reichman: I think that sounds amazing. And obviously, I don't want to say when you get there, it will also make it more accessible for others that maybe couldn't afford it, which I think is really important too at the right time. So my other question to you is, though, these other products that we're seeing, that you're talking about that maybe have lower percentages of the nano-hydroxyapatite, how do they compare with their efforts around sustainability?
Belinda Lau: They have no sustainability. They just use virgin plastic, same as the other brands out there.
Justine Reichman: Is it focused around the ingredient, and having a superior product and using more of the nano-hydroxyapatite? You're also a sustainable product, so you're mindful of the planet> What I find so amazing is you don't stop there. You don't stop and say, okay, take care of it yourself. Maybe you can't recycle it. You found a solution, you created a partnership. And now, you invite everybody to send it back to you so that you can recycle it. I don't know that that happens too often. I don't know too many people that take that responsibility. I think Nespresso, you can drop off your little pods there, right? I don't want to take that away from them. But you go a step further and say, hey, we'll take anybody's oral products too.
"Your teeth are the only things that don't heal themselves. So you gotta give it everything you got, and you only have one set." —Belinda Lau
Belinda Lau: Yep, we will. And it doesn't actually cost us that much more. It doesn't take too much more effort. And we just offer. We're open doors. You don't even have to buy any products from us. We'll send you a free label. You just pack it into any box that you got at home, and we'll take care of the rest. I just feel like it's just kind of the right thing to do. My kids are very young.They're less than 12 years old, and they've got a whole future ahead of them. And all the news about microplastics, the oceans, our food and all of this stuff is very scary. I got rid of most plastics in my kitchen. It's all gone. I cook with stainless steel and all that stuff. If it's not that hard, then why aren't other people doing it? It costs money, and we're happy to do that. We feel like it's the right thing to do. But for other people, their priorities, their business priorities are different. Well, maybe you're going to make a move here. Once we start advertising, if we ever do that, then I think that'll be a key message for us, and the key differentiator. It's really sad to see in the oral care space just how easy it is to use even more recycled materials, and people don't do it. And then that makes me a little sad, but we're here. We continue to invest a portion of our revenue back into R&D, which includes the packaging, which includes the materials. So we're constantly innovating. We're finding more studies, more ingredients that work even better, to add calcium and phosphates to the surface of your teeth, to get rid of sensitivity, to all do all the things that we need to do to keep our teeth healthy. Because let's face it, on our bodies, your teeth are the only things that don't heal themselves. You gotta give it everything you got, and you only have one set. I always tell people that your goal is to be the hottest grandparent at the old folks home with real teeth. At the end of our days, that is our goal.
Justine Reichman: I know that you do this with your husband, so you guys work together. I'd love to know a little bit about that. How is it to work with your husband?
Belinda Lau: It's interesting. It's actually really good. We complement each other very well. I always say, with every partnership, there's always brains and beauty. And obviously, I'm the brains, and he's the beauty. He's got the lab coat, and we put them all over our marketing materials. But joking aside, it's actually working pretty well. We've got a pretty good dynamic at home. We split our duties pretty evenly. He takes care of a lot of the bills and house stuff, and I take care of mostly the kids. There's not a ton of overlap. And so the same thing we do, the same thing in business. So in business, he's got his lane, I have my lane. We agree just like a married couple that any big decisions, any strategic decisions, any financial decisions are done together. We said, okay, we set a certain amount of money. If the decision costs us more than this, then together, we have to make the decision. And it actually works really well. He's part of all of the strategy, all of the formulations. He's interesting because he is still a full time dentist. He has his clinic here in Northridge, California. I work in the business during the day. And then when he comes home at night, we're making dinner, or we're cleaning up the dishes, and we're talking through some of the stuff that I've done throughout the day. He's not working on a day to day, and so he comes at it from a very strategic level, he comes in at a much higher level, and he points out the things that I sometimes miss.
Like you said, he's very entrepreneurial himself because he owned his own dental practice for over 20 years, so he understands loans and financing, and inventory management, and time management, and people management, and all those core things that make a business. So he understands those things, and I've actually learned a lot of stuff about business from him, to be really honest. So it actually works really nicely. He gives me most of the decision making power and all of that stuff. But he also knows that I do my research very deeply. I'm a total nerd and engineer, so I do my research. And I come to him and I say, hey, I researched all this stuff. Here are options, option A, option B. And then, we look at it together, and then we decide together which option to go with. So it actually works quite beautifully. And then he comes in with that clinical side of things. I come in with the marketing, product development side of things. When you have a startup, if you're going to have a co-founder, it really helps to have complementary skill sets. And we have that here. Any skill sets we don't have, we have a ton of mentors and advisors that we call and lean on whenever we need some advice about something neither one of us knows about. So we've created a cool little ecosystem in terms of how to get the feedback we need and still grow, and we still respect each other. We still want to hang out with each other even after the kids are gone to bed and we're chatting about business and stuff. We're very used to having a busy life, and so having the startup as our fourth baby, it's kind of cool. It's kind of cool to have to share that. I also learned about his industry, in oral care, in dentistry. So it's actually been really, really fun, and it's been really a rewarding experience working with him.
Justine Reichman: Were there any recommendations you might make for other founders that are deciding to work with their husband, wife or partner?
Belinda Lau: Yes. I would say, very similar to us, just have clear roles of who's doing what, and make sure that all the big decisions are made together. I think that's really the key. I think obviously, if you're husband and wife, you already trust each other. So there's not that hurdle. But talking through things before they become an issue, and making sure you're communicating, making sure that any big decisions are done together, I think that's the most important part of working with your spouse.
Justine Reichman: What would your spouse say about you in terms of what it's like to work with you?
Belinda Lau: I think he would say the same things. He would say that he's more of a clinical guy. And he always says, oh, I'm just the dorky dentist. But he really is. He's very smart in business. And so he would say that, I'm more of the researcher, the R&D person, more of the marketing person in the business. And so I think he would say very similarly, that we work well together because we have very different and distinct, but also important roles to keep the business growing.
“We have our own set of skills and what we're good at doing and what we like to do, but surrounding yourself with those mentors and those advisors that can give you another perspective and more information is key to success.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: You said something before that I agree with, and I actually practice is that, we have our own set of skills, and what we're good at doing, and what we like to do. But surrounding yourself with those mentors and those advisors that can give you another perspective, more information is really key to success. Because I can't be an expert in everything. You can't be an expert in everything. But making sure that you have those people and then listening to them, not just having them and talking to them, but hearing their advice, I think, is really the key.
Belinda Lau: Yes. I'll tell you this really short story, Justine. I have this advisor. He's the CEO and Founder of a major hair care brand, massive hair care brand. He's in every Sephora on the planet. I met him through business school. Early on, we thought, okay, should we raise funds for our business? And I thought, I didn't know. I thought every CPG business just goes and raises money, which is not true. We're totally bootstrapped, even to this day. So I went to him first. I said, oh, I'm putting together this pitch deck, and I'm putting together a valuation, doing all the fancy pitching and all that stuff. And I went to him first. I know he can afford it. So I said, would you invest in our business? Because he had been advising us for a few years. And he turned to me and said, Belinda, if I give you money, I would be doing you a disservice. Because he actually created his brand 100% by himself. To this day, he owns 100% of his company. He said, you would gain so much more by keeping ownership of your business. Plus, you won't actually learn how to solve your own problems if you just throw money at it.
So first, you're going to go spend your time raising funds without running the business. Because raising funds is a full time job. And then once you get the money, you're just going to throw money at the problems. So he said, how will you learn how to do all of the stuff and teach other people how to solve the problems if you don't try to do it yourself? At least try. And he said, I would do you a disservice if I gave you any funding. And at first, I was taken aback. I thought, okay, here's someone who has known my business, who has seen me grow, who has given me advice for years, and I'm sitting here at his kitchen table and he's telling me he won't even give me a couple $1,000. I was blown away, but I quickly realized that he was 100% right. I could have easily not listened to him. I could have said, okay, thanks. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm gonna find another advisor. But I took his advice to heart. I said, okay, he's got something here. So I took his advice. We still to this day have not raised any funds. It's really interesting how the business has grown without me solving most of the problems. I got really scrappy. I did a lot of things on my own. I reached out to different advisors and experts in the things I didn't understand. A lot of people helped me out with their good time and their expertise. And we're still here, many, many years later. I can't say that this is a success story yet. But so far, his advice, once you take it and understand what they're trying to teach you, it actually has paid off. And I text him all the time and say, oh, my God, look at all the stuff that we've done. And he's like, you see. You still own 100% of your business. And he was right.
Justine Reichman: So Belinda, thank you so much for joining me today. It was great to have you here. I love all the information. I'm excited to change my toothpaste myself. I'm just curious if you could just share with our community, if people wanted to go get your product, where would they find it?
Belinda Lau: Oh, yes, absolutely. So we're definitely on Amazon. We're at Walmart. We're in a couple beauty boutiques. One that I love is called Beauty Care Choices. If you're here in Los Angeles, we have a shop here in Century City Mall, which is the biggest mall here in LA at a store called Atlas. And then, of course, you can just come to our website, and we can ship you anything you want.
Justine Reichman: If there's anybody that was listening or tuning in today that wanted to connect with you, maybe for collaborations or innovations, what's the best way to connect with you?
Belinda Lau: LinkedIn is the best way. I've got a nice little community there. So if anyone wants to reach out to me, LinkedIn is the best place.
Justine Reichman: Okay, thank you so much for tuning in. So Belinda, for those listeners and viewers that were tuning in today that are part of this community, that are excited about what you're doing and want to try the product, is there a discount you're going to be offering them?
Belinda Lau: Justine, I love this audience. I've been a longtime listener of your podcast for many years, so I would love to offer all of those in your audience a 20% discount to our website. Just type in "ESSENTIALINGREDIENTS", and you get 20% off.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Belinda, thank you so much. I want to thank our listeners and our community for tuning in today. It's always fun to get to know new people, new products that are paving the way for better for you things in the world, whether it's around our health, our wellness, or the planet.
Belinda Lau: Thank you so much, Justine, it's been an absolute honor.
Justine Reichman: Thank you. So those folks tuning in today on the podcast, don't forget that you can also tune into our videocast on YouTube. And if you are watching the video and want to tune into the podcast, follow us and subscribe to our channel at Essential Ingredients, which is on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen. We'd love to connect and continue the conversation on Instagram at essential.ingredients, so we'll see you again next week.
