Innovation Center Supports P&G's Tide New Detergent

A rare public peek into P&G's innovation center by Jared Newman.   Done for the introduction of Tide Pods.

Fifty Cameras, a Fake Home and Virtual Reality: How Tide’s New Detergent Came Together
Laundry detergent is not my regular beat. But when Procter & Gamble invited me to check out one of its secret lairs, with a PR rep touting “advanced modeling and virtual reality” within, I couldn’t resist.Yes, the maker of Tide, Bounty, Duracell, Head & Shoulders and countless other household brands has a secret lair near its Cincinnati, Ohio headquarters. It’s one of 52 P&G “Innovation Centers” around the world, and until this week, the press has never been allowed inside any of them...

The occasion for lifting the veil of secrecy was a new line of detergent, called Tide Pods. These little packets of polyvinyl, roughly the circumference of your thumb and forefinger together, are stuffed with highly concentrated detergent, along with isolated swirls of stain remover and brightener. Instead of measuring a cup of liquid, you drop the whole Pod into the wash, and it dissolves at any temperature. P&G regards this as a revolution–the iPad of detergents, if you will. Apparently for every year you use Tide Pods, you’ll save an hour ....

The Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, a 137,000 square-foot building in the middle of a West Chester, Ohio office park, had little to do with the science behind Tide Pods. The actual experiments go down at other centers. The BRIC, as it’s called, is all about figuring out how people go about their lives so P&G can learn how to make its products better. That’s where the technology comes in..... "