600 percent.
That was the rate of increase for hand sanitizer sales in 2020 from 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports, and it kept things extra-busy at the industry's dominant player, Akron-based GOJO Industries, the maker of Purell.
The COVID-19 pandemic, obviously, drove the huge sales increase last year. And now, the Journal says, GOJO "is making a big bet that America's fixation on clean hands will outlast the global COVID-19 health crisis." The piece notes that GOJO has "added both a factory and a warehouse — the family-owned company had just one of each before the pandemic — and restructured its supply chain, all with the expectation that demand for hand sanitizer will remain exponentially higher than before the pandemic."
Such an investment "is an unusual move in the consumer-products world," the Journal said, and it notes others in the industry "have stopped short of building new factories or making other major long-term investments that could backfire after the health crisis eases."
But GOJO is moving forward with confidence, in part, the Journal notes, because of "the dearth of flu cases this season" as people were being cautions due to COVID.
"Before the pandemic, hand sanitizing was viewed as not necessary, or not necessarily value-added in terms of risk reduction when it comes to health," Jim Arbogast, GOJO vice president of hygiene science and public health advancements, tells the Journal. "The pandemic is a real wake-up call for everyone globally on the importance of infection protection."
GOJO CEO Carey Jaros tells the Journal, "We hadn't planned on adding new facilities for a decade." But things changed fast. Jaros says GOJO spent $400 million on capital investments in 2020, roughly 10 times what it spends in a typical year. The company had 2,500 workers before the pandemic but now has 3,000. And GOJO "now makes its own bottles and pumps rather than buying from suppliers, after a shortage of containers stopped up production last spring."