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Unilever innovates two new product formats for Loop

A refillable stainless-steel deodorant package and new toothpaste tablets are among the innovations developed by Unilever for the Loop circular shopping platform.

Unilever has developed a refillable, stainless-steel deodorant stick called minim™ for its Dove, Rexona, and AXE brands.
Unilever has developed a refillable, stainless-steel deodorant stick called minim™ for its Dove, Rexona, and AXE brands.

In 2010, $63 billion global consumer brands company Unilever set itself a number of ambitious targets around sustainability, including a commitment to have all its plastic packaging be fully reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025. Given that the company produces 400 brands covering the food and beverage, household cleaning, and personal care markets, these goals are ambitious indeed.

When first approached by TerraCycle in 2017 at the World Economic Forum regarding the new Loop circular shopping platform, Unilever saw it as an ideal opportunity to explore and test a reuse model for specific local markets. Loop also provided Unilever with a platform through which it could pilot new product formats, including a refillable deodorant package called minim™ for three of its global brands and toothpaste tablets under the Signal brand, as well as design premium packaging for five of its other brands.

A Unilever spokesperson shares that the company’s nine brand teams began working on the new products and packaging in mid-2018, in accordance with TerraCycle’s design brief. By the time Loop was announced in January, the team had the prototypes or finished packages ready to go. “We worked very quickly and innovatively in a lean, agile, startup way,” says the spokesperson. “For example, the whole design process for minim took only four months.”

For this product, Unilever’s three biggest global deodorant brands—Dove, AXE (called Lynx in the U.K), and Rexona (called Sure in the U.K. and Degree in the U.S.)—joined forces to create a solid, roll-on deodorant that is fully circular. The product was designed in Europe by the Unilever packaging team along with “a key partner agency.”

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