Pampers' Dry Max diapers, touted by the company as disposable diapers' greatest innovation in 25 years, have launched far more buzz than the company could have hoped for, but for all the wrong reasons. Less than one month after the product's official launch, but over a year since it the company being introducing it to consumers both through test groups and surreptitious product swaps, the company is facing an investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an anti-Dry Max 8,000-plus-member Facebook group whose members answer consumer questions on Pampers' own Facebook page faster than P&G marketers do, and a class-action lawsuit. It's a tangled web, and we were determined to get to the bottom not only of the potential problems with Dry Max but the hype that has swirled around the product from both supporters and detractors.

We have organized the results of our research in a series of three four posts on what has become for us a fascinating if somewhat disturbing topic.

In this post, we'll offer a brief history of the competition between Pampers and Huggies that has, in our assessment, led directly to the introduction of Pampers Dry Max. In doing so, we'll touch on the advances in disposable diapering technology that will give you the background you need to get the most out of our second post in this series. In that post, we will dissect both pre- and post-Dry Max Pampers, discuss the scope of the Dry Max diaper rash problem, and highlight some possible product features that could relate to what appears to be an increased incidence of extreme diaper rashes. In a third and final post, we'll explore the social media and corporate damage control that have helped make this story a media feeding frenzy, and we'll look ahead to the future of sustainable disposable diapering, and Procter & Gamble's surprising role in it. (Update: The series has been expanded to four installments; the second, which covers the scope and nature of the problem, is now online.)

Our position regarding the safety of Pampers Dry Max has not changed. We'll explain our impressions of the scope of this problem - as well as narrowing the field of possible sources of it - in our next post, but if all you need is our recommendation, look no further.

On to some ancient history.

Diaper science and diaper marketing

The secret of disposable diapers is that they are highly engineered products that are designed to work in simple ways. Shielding a human being from the potential hazards of his or her own waste while keeping it contained in a package that does as little to offend the world outside as possible is a daunting task, and most of us would agree that every bit of R&D is money well spent.

After the initial invention of disposable paper diapers in the 1940s, advances in diapering technology were fairly incremental for four decades. The deployment of "nonwoven fibers" like plastics and cellulose in the 1950s and 1960s, the evolution of elastic waistbands and stretchy adhesive tabs from the 1960s onward, and the layering and quilting of layers of wood or cellulose fibers to maximize absorption all proceeded along a relatively predictable path. Like astronomers tweaking Ptolemy's model of an Earth-centered universe, engineers perfected the sandwiching of layers that drew wetness from the baby's skin, locked it in absorptive layers, masked odors, and even adjusted skin pH to discourage diaper rashes or used dyes to advertise wetness and needed diaper changes from the outside of the diaper's well-sealed chamber. By the late 1970s, disposable diaper companies, led by Pampers, were putting the final nails in the coffin of widespread cloth diapering in the United States.


But just as Pampers had vanquished its primary competition, everything changed again. The catalyst was a new brand that out-pampered Pampers: Huggies.

The gospel of superabsorbents

In the 1980s, diaper manufacturers gained access to USDA-developed superabsorbent polymers, which could absorb up to 500 times their weight in liquid, and rapidly introduced them in their products. Suddenly, the quantity of wood pulp or cellulose fibers in disposables, could be drastically reduced, as it was far less effective in absorbing urine and fecal liquid than the SAPs. (Current estimates for wood pulp absorption are 4x its weight; Pampers cites is own current SAP as holding up to 25x its weight.) For Procter & Gamble, the arrival of this technology in the manufacturing supply chain couldn't have come at a better time. After decades in business as the top cat of disposable diapers, P&G executives watched as paper company Kimberly-Clark introduced Huggies in 1978 and by the mid-1980s was regularly wiping the church nursery floor with the tear-streamed face of the once-proud Pampers brand. (Pampers, if only by virtue of its attachment to a global industrial giant, still dominates the European diaper market.) Kimberly-Clark, which had built its brand on Kleenex, toilet paper, and newsprint, turned its expertise to the task of building a better diaper, and consumers fled Pampers in droves. When it came to paper products, K-C could beat P&G to a pulp.


Even a quarter of a century ago, Pampers appears to have hoped that SAPs could help them get out from under a competitor that knew its paper. The full story of how Huggies wiped out Pampers as the leading U.S. diaper brand remains to be told, but one notable difference in their branding, marketing, and product development strategies was that Huggies embraced the image of the engorged, load-carrying diaper, flaunting its bulk on happy, oblivious babies. Pampers, in contrast, campaigned relentlessly on the merits of thinner diapers; no other brand embraced this gospel as completely as the engineers at Pampers did. Browsing the commercials available in the scattershot archives of YouTube reveals the fascinating fact that Pampers' story with Dry Max - touted as the company's "biggest advance" in diapering "in 25 years" - is, in fact, an old saw indeed.




Prior to the entrance of SAPs, for all the minor innovations that gilded the lily, premium diapers were thicker diapers; more padding meant a company wasn't skimping on materials, and that diapers could simply hold more. It was natural that P&G, a company with deep links to the chemical industry, could leverage polymer chemistry more rapidly and more fully than Kimberly-Clark, a recent entrant to the diaper market that didn't divest itself of its own wholly-own timber reserves until 1999. Through Pampers, P&G marketing spent thirty years attempting to link sagging, bulky diapers to both physical and emotional constriction, tapping into parents' anxieties about sensitive stages of child development.

The problem was, parents didn't seem to prioritize diaper thinning as much as Pampers did. Year after year, Huggies competed with Pampers for the same premium customers who valued the latest incremental advances and recycled feature additions and were willing to pay for them, and Huggies won the battle every time. For three decades, Pampers has sat in the #2 slot in a product category it helped define in the 1960s.

The diaper war abroad

Ironically, the struggle for the U.S. baby bottom is not as important to these companies as it might appear to us. Sure, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark battle for market share through misleading television advertisements and premium-listed prices undercut by a river of manufacturers' coupons and loyalty programs. Certainly, priorities shift greenward as rethinkers like Seventh Generation push the behemoths towards just enough corporate responsibility to combat their message, and if cloth diaperers could vote in the Diaper Awards they might have a sleeper on their hands. But what's happening here is just a skirmish compared to the spoils to be had in the developing world.

You see, the U.S. disposable diaper market is what industry analysts would term (if you'd forgive the unavoidable pun) "saturated." Fully 95% of American families use disposable diapers, and the market grows only when births rise, diapers get used more quickly, or parents are upsold to from economy to premium brands. The rest of the world, however, is full of people who don't wish to use disposable diapers, or don't wish to use diapers at all, and convincing them to do so in countries like China, India, and Latin America is as potentially lucrative as the African continent was to Nestle formula in the 1980s. Speaking of Africa, the most recent figures we've seen pin diaper "penetration" on the African continent at 15%. In short, the business of diapering in the next decade is the classic international chess game of carefully cultivating a nascent potential "need" using relevant local cultural vibes to create a new baseline of progress that includes a highly profitable product people seem to be doing fine without.

Dry Max: A marketing innovation with real-world consequences

Given the obsessive focus with which manufacturers must attend to marketing products that are in many ways the same, it should not be too surprising to learn that the real innovation behind Dry Max is not one of new technology, but of turning an old solution to a new stated purpose. In short, the thinness Pampers once strove for as a mark of convenience is now being sold as sustainability. "If every Pampers mom switches to Pampers with Dry Max, together they could save almost 20 million pounds of trash every year - That's the weight of 63 Statues of Liberty!" states the Procter & Gamble sustainability website Future Friendly. The pitch below by Pampers R&D's Kerri Hailey is typical of the promotional push Pampers has made for Dry Max, although it is colored by the emerging outcry over diaper rashes that have stolen Pampers' thunder as its rollout unfolded. At about 4:00 Kerri gets into the environmental stuff - a 20% thinner diaper means lower pulp content, fewer resources used, lower transportation costs, and so on - things that moms "as a mom" can feel good about.


Procter & Gamble announced last month that it had formed a "Sustainability Expert Advisory Panel" to advise the company on greening practices throughout the company. Some of those same contacts are now being leveraged to help combat consumer claims of increased incidences and severity of diaper rashes caused by the new Dry Max diapers.

In our next installment, we'll turn a critical eye on P&G's assessment of the Dry Max diaper rash connection. Then a third post will share findings from a dissection of Dry Max and pre-Dry Max Pampers Swaddlers, discuss the design changes behind the new diapers, and catalog some potential sources of irritation in Dry Max diapers that could cause Pampers wearers who never experienced rashes from the older version to suddenly get severe ones. Then, in a fourth and final installment to this investigative series, we'll discuss the public outcry over Dry Max diaper rashes, evaluate the fairness of P&G's falsely-marketed rollout and aggressive response to consumer complaints, hint at new directions for diapers and P&G's real prospects for sustainable disposable diapering, and explore the evolving role of social media activism in confronting potentially hazardous consumer products. Stay tuned!

Part 2 is now online. Read it here! Love this in-depth consumer reporting? Get free RSS or email delivery, connect with us on Facebook, or follow @ZRecs_Safety, @ZRecsMom, and @JMcNichols on Twitter and you won't miss a thing.

We've begun expanding the ZRecs Guide to include a number of major brands of infant toys, and Fisher-Price is one of them. Astute users of the Guide may notice that every single Fisher-Price product listed is currently flagged with a Low confidence rating, which is the way we show that we are not at all convinced that a product is safe. Sometimes we assign Low confidence ratings because companies have lied to us in the past, because we have received contradictory information from company contacts, or because they just won't tell us anything at all.

Special treatment for a major past offender

The AP reported today that Mattel has received approval from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to use even more of its labs to self-certify Mattel toys' compliance with federal safety standards, rather than using third-party testing labs as all other companies in the known universe are now required to do. This is an expansion of a special - nay, unique - privilege they first granted the company last summer. That move led us to lower our confidence in Fisher-Price teethers then in the Guide to "Low," and when we added more Fisher-Price products this past winter, we stuck with the designation.

Considering that Mattel's 2007 toy recalls provided a massive boost for children's product safety reform, thanks to which our children are now supposedly protected from hazardous levels of lead in toys and other kids' stuff thanks to increased testing requirements and tightened restrictions, this is quite a corporate win. Fox, henhouse. Enjoy.

The conflict of interest

The CPSC states that they have empowered Mattel to conduct its own testing because its facilities are awesome. This is bogus. The problem with company-conducted testing is the clear conflict of interest and the potential for corruption of either specific test results or of the testing process itself.

Imagine that a major Mattel competitor were offered the opportunity to have their toys tested in Mattel's totally rockin' product testing facilities. How many do you think would find this an acceptable alternative to independent, third-party testing by an outside lab that was not in the business of selling toys? None, I'd wager. Does that mean they're paranoid? No. It means they don't operate with blinders on, which is exactly what the CPSC is doing in accepting Mattel's proposal. To assert otherwise is pure politics, and an insult to consumers' intelligence.

Our solution

Unless and until the CPSC gets its act together and holds Mattel accountable for third-party testing, all Fisher-Price products - as well as products by any other subsidiary or brand of Mattel that cannot demonstrate to us that they are committed to independent, third-party lab testing for their products - will be flagged as Low confidence. For consumers who rely on our guide for information about whether we consider a product to be safe, it's the best red flag we can wave for products for which we lack proof of known hazards, but which cannot demonstrate to our satisfaction that their products are safe for your children.

If this breakdown of a basic system of checks and balances is ever extended to other companies (and if others, heartened by Mattel's success, were to invest in significant testing facilities, they'd have every right to petition for - or sue for - equal treatment), we'll take the same precautionary approach with their products in the ZRecs Guide.

So when you see that we've assigned a "Low" confidence rating to the chemicals of concern listed under a bath toy, infant toy, or teether, the reason may be that it's a company or brand owned by Mattel. And if you like to have a reasonable degree of confidence in the things your baby puts in his or her mouth or that your child uses in the bathtub (two exposure conditions we pay special attention to), we recommend any of the many brands and companies that are required to have their products tested by third parties - more and more of which you'll find in the ZRecs Guide in the days and weeks ahead.

We were excited to see a new line of bath toys from Boon, and were happy to hear from them yesterday that they'd set up a Facebook image gallery to do some advanced promotion. We're still waiting for the release of their Bug Pod (a sister ladybug to their bestselling Frog Pod, a bath toy holder and scoop that hangs on your shower or bathtub wall, so we're assuming it will be a few months before these are ready for purchase. But one of the items in the line is pretty unusual, as well as very well made, so we thought it was worth a mention now.


Boon's Scrubbles are a lot like the little scrub brushes you might use to wash your dishes. In this case, they're just as useful but a lot more fun. The TPE/polypropylene surfaces of the brushes are soft, textured, and intriguing. They're great for sucking in and squirting out water, like many other water toys, but also putting a bit of water with baby soap in, so you can scrub your kid with them. They have that blend of the fun and functional that Boon's best products share. They're also - as are all the products in this new line, which you can check out on Facebook if you have an account - BPA-free, phthalate-free, and even PVC-free. (Considering that the line includes four bath duckies, that's saying something.)



Recognize the two-part design here?


That's right! Hey, I wonder if they components are interchangeable...

Last week saw two very instructive kids' product recalls, each important in its own way.

First, the CPSC demonstrated the enhanced powers Congress and President Bush granted it, and the limits of those powers, by going directly to consumers to warn them against Simplicity cribs, which have strangled and killed two infants, ages five and four months, within a year's time. Simplicity was facing bankruptcy after numerous product defects, including the "close sleeper/bedside sleeper," which had a slat width that did not meet regulatory standards, when it put itself on the chopping block last year and got bought out by a soulless conglomerate run by a private equity firm. The new company purchased all assets but claimed no responsibility for defective products manufactured by the old company, which promptly ceased operations, and this clever act of liability laundering left no one holding the bag when regulators at the CPSC learned of the second infant death.

The happy new company refused repeated requests for a negotiated recall, but under its new powers the CPSC was able to issue a warning directly to consumers without the company's consent, urging parents to stop using the crib because of the immediate hazard posed to infants. The commission later reported that most of Simplicity's retailers had agreed to recall the product themselves. Greg at Daddytypes has been all over this story, and honestly? It makes us sick.

The second is one that many of our readers would be puzzled or even incredulous to hear about: A voluntary recall by HABA of nineteen wooden rattles, "clutching toys," and other infant toys. HABA is in many ways setting the bar for wood-and-cloth toys, and has prided itself for years on its natural materials, non-toxic paints, innovative design, and overall stellar safety record. Has the venerable European toy company gone sloppy, lost its edge?

As it turns out, the CPSC approached HABA's American brand with a requested recall of seven products, based on things that sometimes happen to wooden toys when they are repeatedly soaked in water - i.e., when they are washed in the dishwasher. Each of the toys the CPSC had targeted as potentially dangerous had small pieces - mirrors, plastic jewels - that loosened or fell off of the toys after such use.

HABA's wooden infant toys have been labeled with care instructions for a long time. It seemed pretty likely that the reports coming in were not based on design flaws, but user error. The problem seemed confined to the U.S., where consumers are relatively unfamiliar with wooden toys. But the inset bling was a relatively new feature, and a hazard is a hazard, whatever the source. We have seen companies blame consumers for their problems, and it's never pretty. HABA took a different route.

The company took the CPSC's request, looked it over, and countered with a list of eleven additional products the CPSC had overlooked that utilized the same type of design. If the seven the CPSC had targeted posed a problem for American consumers who were accustomed to aggressively cleaning toys with hot water, the other nine should be as well, they reasoned, and proposed their own recall of 17 products, including many popular rattles.

Not all recalls are the same. When a company acts aggressively to confront a potential problem at the earliest possible stage, it can preserve or even build on its reputation. HABA isn't about to stop making wooden infant toys and they aren't about to stop selling them in the U.S. We'd suggest they increase the size or prominence of their care instructions, and they are looking at alternatives to some of the inset items - foil stickers instead of inset mirrors, for example - that will circumvent some of the problems. Overall, this may make HABA look even better than it did before.

But it isn't just spin. Just as individuals reveal themselves most deeply when responding to crisis, corporations' responses to crises are dictated by their culture. I'm not sure many companies have ever responded to recall requests in the way HABA handled this one, and the move speaks volumes about the benefits of buying from companies you know you can trust.