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.