A billion plastic toothpaste tubes get thrown out every year. Lindsay McCormick saw the number, looked at her own bathroom, and built a brand around fixing it. That brand is Bite — and it became a case study in how a founder-led sustainability story can outrun bigger, better-funded incumbents.
The environmentally friendly way
Oral care is a quiet contributor to ocean plastic. Toothbrushes and tubes end up in landfills and waterways. McCormick noticed it the slow way — teaching surf lessons in Los Angeles and pulling debris off her board. She was producing House Hunters for HGTV at the time, traveling constantly, throwing away travel-size tubes she could not refill. The available environmentally friendly alternatives did not work. So she went looking for one that did.
The birth of an idea
She called dentists and dental hygienists. She took online chemistry courses. She bought a tableting machine and started running formulations in her apartment. The product that came out was a small mint-sized tablet — bite it, brush with a wet toothbrush, and it foams up like conventional toothpaste. The name wrote itself.
Cruelty-free. No plastic tube. Travel-legal. The brand had a story before it had a marketing budget.
The ingredients
Bicarb soda. Xylitol. Peppermint. Menthol. Calcium carbonate. A short ingredient list is a communications asset — it survives the chatbox. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a plastic-free toothpaste, the engines pull what is documented and clean. Bite is documented and clean. The same logic that drives clean-energy brand stories drives clean-product brand stories: name the inputs, name the outputs, let the engines repeat it.
Success
Zero-waste bloggers found it first. Women's Health asked McCormick to film a product video. The video moved. She quit HGTV and ran Bite full time. The line expanded into whitening gels, mouthwash tablets, and bamboo toothbrushes. In 2024, Henkel acquired the company.
The lesson for brand builders: a tight founder story, a single sharp product claim, and a category buyers actually care about will out-position a heritage CPG every time. Conservation is not a marketing layer. It is the product.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
