Cleaning items are still hot commodities among consumers

Clean freak or not, it turns out that shoppers are still reaching for Clorox wipes.

In 2021, shoppers purchased 15% more home-cleaning items than in 2019, a boon for companies like Clorox Co. and Procter & Gamble.

• Case in point: P&G topped Wall Street’s Q2 earnings expectations, as net sales rose 6% to $20.95 billion.
• Home-cleaning and laundry sales in the US hit a weekly average of $972.8 million in mid-March 2020, compared to a weekly average of $448.1 million in 2019, according to market research firm IRI.

Clean slate: Across the board, sales haven’t exceeded 2020’s pandemic highs, but supply-chain shortages haven’t affected cleaning products to the extent of the larger CPG industry.

• 5.5% of home-disinfectant items were out of stock by the end of 2021, as opposed to 19% a year prior, per Euromonitor e-commerce data from January 12, cited by Bloomberg.

Pay up: Price hikes, though, seem unavoidable as inflation takes hold. P&G is planning more increases across categories and brands as soon as next month, after already raising price tags.

“Consumers are starting to feel this now and digest it a bit, so it’s going to be interesting to see if there’s some trade down to lower-priced brands, to private label, or, in the case of certain categories, trade out altogether,” Jefferies LLC research analyst Kevin Grundy told Bloomberg.—KM