Thread by @ArmstrongDrew

A few months ago, I asked the makers of Lysol if they'd tell me every last thing about how they make it and how it works.

Twenty hours of interviews later, a lot of chemistry, and many, many questions about trains, air freight and factories...

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Please come for the ethanol chemistry, and stay for the quat supply chain stories:
bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Lysol's parent, @discoverRB, is on track to make 35 million cans a month in the North American market. Their usual max -- running 7 day a week, 24 hours a day, is 10 million.

How'd they do it? Read the story. But a key part of it was going on Amazon and Alibaba and finding anyone selling wipes or spray in a can. They went out and signed up all these little manufacturers as contractors. Huge boost to production.
bloomberg.com/news/features/…

And let me tell you about FLUSHING MEADOWS. Lysol also has a toilet bowl cleaner.

How do you test a toilet bowl cleaner?

104 toilets from around the world, with matching water conditions, controlled by mechanical arms.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

If you'd like to know how they simulate ,,,💩stains,,, you will have to click.
bloomberg.com/news/features/…

“There is a formula for it.”

OH, also, where is the parent company's biggest factory in Asia, you might ask? Where they make most of the Dettol, Lysol's disinfectant sister-product?

RIGHT DOWN THE ROAD FROM WUHAN

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

They closed for one day in the middle of the outbreak in China, right in the middle of the Chinese New Year holiday. Which is, frankly, wild.

How'd they do it? Well, it turns out there was a mask factory just a little bit away...

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Throughout this whole thing, the company has been trying to figure out a key question: How much Lysol is enough Lysol?

So they've been sending 10x the normal supply to a number of test retailers around the country.

It's usually gone in an hour or two.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

I had so much fun reporting and writing this story. The RB people were wonderful and open and excited.

Especially this guy, Joe "Mr. Lysol" Rubino.

And it was just very good to, uhh, get out of the house.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Anyways, please read the story and share it. It was a labor of love to report and write that at one hand had a 10-foot-long story diagram of index cards laid out on my basement floor.

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

And a very big thank you to Patty O'Hayer, who has (virtually) seen the mess in my basement/office evolve over the last weeks, and dealt with endless questions emailed to her *well* after UK working hours.
bloomberg.com/news/features/…