Seventy Years After the First Cat Litter Brand Was Founded, Do We Understand This Strange Creature Any Better? | QDaily Business History

This is not a buying guide for cat litter.

Most cat owners don't try to tame their cats the way you'd tame a wild animal, even though cats are far harder to train than dogs. They still want the cat to stay indoors, clean and presentable, like a well-mannered member of the family.

That common ideal depends on something called cat litter. As the cat-owning population has grown, these capsule-sized granules — or sometimes just loose crumbs — sold $4.933 billion worth worldwide last year.

In case you're not yet one of those owners, allow us to explain what is peculiar about this product:

Cat litter collects a cat's waste. You pour it into a container of a suitable size — call it a litter box — which creates the toilet environment a cat is used to. With a bit of guidance, the cat notices that this corner of the house resembles its ancestors' wild habitat. It settles on the spot and stops going wherever it pleases. When it's done, it will paw the litter deftly over its waste to bury it — a survival trick stored in its genes, so that bigger, stronger animals can't track it down and end its life.

But until 1947, nobody thought this could be a good business.

Before that, people built indoor cat toilets out of sand, sawdust, or whatever filler was at hand. Cat urine is high in protein, so a strange smell hung in the room.

Kaye Draper, who lived in Cassopolis, in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Michigan, was used to handling her cat's waste with sand. On a day of snow and ice in January 1947, Mrs. Draper found her box of sand frozen solid. Stuck, she knocked on a neighbor's door. The neighbor's son, Edward Lowe, 27, had just left the Navy and was helping run his father's sawdust business. As he answered, he thought of the bag of clay in his car trunk: dried and granulated, and, according to his father, highly absorbent and fireproof enough. Lowe suggested Mrs. Draper try it.

Mrs. Draper must have liked it, because a few days later she came back for more. At least that is how Lowe told it. Edward Lowe went on to retell the story often: inspired by it, he took ten large bags of clay granules, wrote "Kitty Litter" on them, and carried them to a grocery store.

Today people credit Edward Lowe with inventing cat litter, and treat those ten bags of clay marked "Kitty Litter" 70 years ago as the start of the business. At the time five pounds of sand cost five cents and would collect waste just as well. Lowe suggested the store price his five-pound (about 2.25-kilogram) bags of clay at 65 cents, which startled the owner. But as he'd expected, the clay sold well on the strength of its absorbency, and Lowe founded a company under his own name.

In the 70 years since, new litters have come out one after another, with manufacturers finding every kind of way to meet the differing needs of cats and their owners. The products, in turn, have fed people's appetite for keeping cats. Public data from the American Pet Products Association (APPA) put the number of cats in American households at roughly 85.8 million in 2015-2016. In China, according to the consultancy Euromonitor, there were 11.95 million pet cats in 2016 — still under half the number of pet dogs, and far behind pet birds.

Big companies have also decided that pet care is a growth area beyond human consumers. They are now the biggest holders of this market.

"Your Nose Knows"

Sociologists say that before the 1960s people treated pet-keeping as a harmless pastime and didn't take it terribly seriously — the sand used as cat litter back then tells you as much.

After that, things changed sharply. First the pet population grew fast, and pet food, along with products and services including cat litter, grew with it. In the 1970s the United States had 21 million cats. One estimate put the cat litter market at $35 million, up 35% from the year before. Which caused which is hard to say, but people were clearly far more attentive to their pets than they had been 20 years earlier.

Lowe was the first person to print the word "litter" on a bag of cat litter. But he came to dislike calling the stuff litter, a word that usually means garbage and scraps. Now that companies were developing products specifically to collect cat waste, rather than borrowing something made for another purpose, a fitter name, Lowe said, would be something like "cat box filler."

These purpose-built products began to answer an important unmet need. In the past all a manufacturer had to do was find a material absorbent enough to keep liquid waste from seeping through and fouling the box. Now litter makers wanted to tell consumers that the smell coming out of the litter box had become harder to bear than before.

Unilever's Lipton had a cat litter brand at the time, Tabby Litter, which stressed that it added chlorophyll to "control odor."

By the 1970s the bleach giant Clorox was already a big player in cat litter. Edward Lowe once said sourly that they were a big company and could afford to burn money. Clorox had just launched Litter Green, built on new technology and new material — the first litter to add alfalfa, which it claimed controlled odor better. Then Clorox started "burning money" on advertising at scale.

A 1971 Litter Green ad claimed that a strong smell would scare cats away from the box and make them more likely to relieve themselves elsewhere in the house, because "a cat's sense of smell is sharper than a human's." "Your nose knows," the ad said.

In 1985 Edward Lowe began spending on advertising too; the company's ad budget that year was $5 million. Even so, the central theme of these campaigns for decades to come stayed the same — the power to control odor — and to this day that is still the most important selling point of most cat litter. This Purina litter ad from the 1990s laid on cats' sensitivity to smell, with several close-ups of a cat's face.

When Purina's own Tidy Cat brand launched crystal litter in 2001, three cats in the ad discussed the difference between diamonds and crystals, along with the complicated new clay-crystal formula: the clay absorbs moisture, the crystal kills the smell. A 2014 ad for Clorox's Fresh Step brought in a dog who loves and hates the cat in equal measure and, no longer able to smell anything, leaps around in a panic thinking the cat has disappeared.

Look closely at these ads and you'll find more secrets.

In January 2011, Clorox ran an ad in a cat's voice saying it disliked the smell of Church & Dwight's Super Scoop and preferred Clorox's Fresh Step. That infuriated the competitor. Church & Dwight took Clorox to court, arguing that "cats cannot talk, and it is widely accepted in the scientific community that cats' perception of odor differs greatly from humans'."

But this claim made on the cat's behalf gets rewritten in most product marketing — the cat always appears in human form, and its perceptions are treated as no different in kind from ours. When the buyer and the user can more or less be treated as one, the buyer comes first. Especially since the buyer is also the one doing the actual work.

That calculation was on full display in the cat litter ads of the 1980s. Manufacturers played up the politics of smell: it was not only about cleanliness but about respectability and an idea of what a woman should be. Most of the people who appeared in litter ads then were women — sensitive, and the ones who bought the household goods.

The doorbell rings and the woman holding her cat is delighted; a gentleman with a bouquet is already waiting outside. Then she remembers that the smell in the house could ruin everything. Reaching for perfume would be the stupidest possible fix, and cat and human alike would object. Carol Channing — the star of Broadway's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949, who played that part ever after — ends the ad in a diamond-covered costume, stroking a white cat, concluding that she trusts only diamonds and Litter Green.

Is There Anything More of a Chore Than Scooping Litter?

Odor was not the only nuisance. People wanted new litter products to free them, bit by bit, from the costs of owning a cat so they could just enjoy the company — and that owes something to a discovery in 1980 that sped the change along.

Before the 1980s traditional litter had to be changed often. Then came Thomas Nelson, a biochemist and cat lover, who found that a certain bentonite clay clumps once it absorbs moisture.

Litter makers seized on the material. Church & Dwight, today the third-largest maker, launched Ever Clean in 1988. The pitch had moved from "removes odor" to "easy to clean": each time, you could scoop out the liquid waste as easily as the solid, top up with a little fresh litter, and skip waiting until everything piled up and the whole box had to be dumped and refilled.

Probably because this lowered the bar to owning a cat — you no longer had to be exceptionally patient to keep both the litter box and your home clean — the cat population grew quickly in those years. In 1985 cats passed dogs to become the most popular pet in the United States.

A few years later, sales of the new litter slipped a little. People had begun to worry about the safety of the technology, arguing that it catered to human habits and ignored the harm it might do to cats. Those worries came from owners' own experiences: they said that cats clean themselves with their tongues after using the box and swallow the dust shed by the litter, and doctors had found this clumping clay in the stool of cats with digestive trouble. Other critics said that if the dust clumped inside a cat it could cause dehydration or urinary problems, or coat the digestive tract — the list ran on and on, all the way to danger to the cat's life.

Most of the argument over clumping litter came from personal stories, not scientific evidence. The one article on it, published in June 1997 in the Journal of Veterinary and Human Toxicology, dealt with a suspected case of bentonite poisoning. Veterinarians promptly cast doubt on it.

Even without solid support, brands saw the controversy as a sizable opening and used it to launch "safer" and pricier litters, including ones made from grain, corn, tofu, or peanut and walnut shells. Consumers who choose those litters today aren't necessarily thinking about that old safety fight; they may simply like the way they smell.

Once the peak of the controversy passed, clumping bentonite kept selling well because it was easy to clean up, especially the kinds that clump firmly and shed little dust. In 2004, 60% of the cat litter sold in the United States was clumping litter.

But litter, as a way of collecting waste, could never fully solve the cleanup problem for humans. Two later versions went further than litter itself. One is the automatic litter-cleaning machine. In 2016 Scoop Free, one of the brands making them, shot an ad in the style of a mystery: six or seven cats suspect their droppings must be worth a fortune. Humans used to scoop by hand, looking as pleased as if they'd brought in a harvest; now they've invented a machine and are hauling the week's crop away in a truck. Humans, the cats guess, must be turning it into clothes, burning it as gasoline, mashing it into face masks, and trading it on the side.

What the ads never show is whether cats actually take to these machines. Of all the product material about cat litter, only Church & Dwight, in the course of suing a competitor, released failure data on its product's core function: of 158 cats tested, six refused to use Super Scoop litter and went somewhere else in the house.

Another novel way to free humans from the chore is to train the cat to use the toilet, a practice that goes back to the 1970s. In 1991 a book called How to Toilet Train Your Cat: 21 Days to a Litter-Free Home was published, and books and videos like it have since produced a group of owners who have given up litter altogether. One of them wrote in the reviews on a sales page that the whole family laughs walking past the litter shelf at the supermarket: they no longer have to deal with cat waste, or waste money on it.

Sellers had a vague sense of these extreme wishes. In a 1992 Arm & Hammer ad, Church & Dwight's baking-soda deodorizer business invited people to imagine how good it would be if a cat could clean up after itself using the toilet — and its baking soda offered a similar freshening effect.

But even environmentalists were unenthusiastic about the idea, though cat litter has contributed a great deal of urban waste over the past few decades. "Most people won't do it. You might as well innovate on the litter formula instead," they said.

Pet Consumers Grew Faster Than People, So the Big Companies Came

By the time Edward Lowe died in 1995, he had watched his competitors multiply and cat litter improve several times over. In the 1970s he had dismissed Clorox's product innovations, insisting people trusted the traditional formula more; by the end he no longer said such foolish things.

He did turn cat litter into a big business. By 1989 Kitty Litter held 40% of the entire U.S. cat litter market, with annual sales of $150 million. The company also grew a new brand, Tidy Cat. In 1990 he sold the old company to several investment firms for $200 million. The new company was named Golden Cat, and in 1995 Golden Cat, by then worth $500 million, was sold to Ralston Purina — an American company founded in 1894 and today among the top names in the pet industry.

But Edward Lowe missed what came next: big companies carving up the pet market, the way they do with every fast-moving consumer good.

In the cat litter market of 1998, everyone seemed to want to be number one. Clorox bought First Brands, swallowing three litter brands along with First Brands' trash bags, car-care products, and another $440 million in debt.

In 1998 Church & Dwight's Arm & Hammer entered the litter market properly, rather than just supplying baking soda as an additive. It then ran 31 straight quarters of growth. Church & Dwight is an old company, founded in the 19th century on kitchen baking soda in a yellow box. In the 20th century it became a classic business-school case: it first put baking soda to work deodorizing refrigerators, then extended it to every setting with a smell problem, and never scattered into unrelated products because it always stayed close to its "core technology." For cat litter in particular, this was another fine example of borrowing something made for another purpose — the same move as in 1947.

In those years Ralston Purina set out to become a pet company and nothing else. After 1998 it shed its other businesses one by one, including animal feed and batteries, to concentrate on pet food and cat litter. Most of its sales at the time still came from the U.S. market.

Everyone believed they were looking at a promising market. Cat litter had become a widely used product. People keeping cats indoors also started buying proper litter boxes to complete the sense of order. In 1998, only 19% of Americans didn't own a litter box.

For the big food and household-goods companies, pet products looked like a new source of growth too — this set of "consumers," at least, was growing faster than people. Around 2000 the number of cats and dogs in the U.S. rose about 4% a year, roughly twice the rate of human population growth.

Through steady acquisitions Nestlé now owns 2,000 brands, but its $10.3 billion purchase of Ralston Purina in 2001 was the first major acquisition in the pet industry. After that, Mars and Nestlé were the two giants of the pet world. Mars's pet brands include Whiskas, Pedigree, and the Catsan litter brand — which, according to the consultancy Euromonitor, currently holds the largest share of any litter brand in China.

By 2010 the shape of the litter market had largely settled. Behind Nestlé Purina and Clorox came Church & Dwight's Arm & Hammer in third, and Mars in fourth. The order has barely changed since.

But it has to be said that the biggest winners of the pet boom were the people making and selling pet food, not the people making the thing that collects its waste. Premium pet food brands launched in large numbers in the 1980s. By 1989 sales of premium and super-premium pet food in Britain already exceeded those of mid- and low-end products by 47%. By 1993 the gap had reached 50%. That year the British spent £100 million more on pet food than on fresh fruit and vegetables for themselves — though their per-household pet spending ranked no higher than fifth in Europe. In 1990s Japan, pet food routinely grew in double digits.

As an external device for collecting waste — and one that in most cases only cats use — litter fared far worse. Even after it squeezed into supermarkets, it sat on the bottom shelf. Salespeople had to suggest that companies shrink the packaging so customers could lift bags off the bottom shelf gracefully and compare them. It rarely worked. In 1989 all the litter sold alongside cat food in stores came to just $400 million — less than Purina's sales that year.

Nestlé's 2015 numbers make it plain. Total revenue that year was $88.8 billion; retail sales of cat litter were $873 million. The Purina pet business, bought for $10.2 billion, brought in $11.5 billion. That is, Purina made up 12.95% of revenue, while Tidy Cat litter came to less than 1% of the company's total.

Cat Litter Is Going Natural Too

The cat litter market today doesn't look very lively.

Over the past five years it has grown about 2% a year. The top ten brands have held a steady 50% of the market. In 2015 litter sales fell 5.4%, an unusual drop; cat food fell 8.2% the same year.

Most products still revolve around removing odor and being easy to clean, and mature technology has kept the barrier to entry low. "With all these new products, cat owners need to remember that texture and smell still matter most to the cat," said Lisa Mak, senior brand manager at Cat's Pride, another bestselling litter brand. In emerging markets these ideas are being emphasized all over again — no longer through television ads, but by pet shops and online sellers.

The reasons people love cats today were more or less summed up back in the 1990s: not a functional need like catching mice, but companionship, as more people live alone. At the same time more people share apartments, and few pets are as convenient as a cat — no walks, and it won't bite unless you push it too far, as a 1990 New York Times article put it.

But the pet trade publication Pet Product News says a new trend is taking shape: as people increasingly treat pets as family members, once they become absorbed in natural, healthy living for themselves, they want the same for the animal.

As with the new trend in American food, on Amazon the bestselling litter, Precious Cat Ultra Premium Clumping Cat Litter, comes from Dr. Elsey's, a brand that sells itself on entirely different terms than the big companies. It claims no deodorizers, no added fragrance, naturally hypoallergenic, and suitable for cats recovering from surgery. Other newly fashionable litters intend to go back to the non-clumping era — which is to say, back to being a real chore to clean.

The trend Dr. Elsey's represents should not be underestimated. In 2013 the brand put its name on the largest cat show, the Cat Fanciers' Association International Cat Show. In 2012 those naming rights had gone to Royal Canin.

The pull toward natural products shows up more clearly, of course, in the better-regarded business of pet food. Over the past decade there has been little news of litter brands being acquired, but every so often another company buys a niche pet food maker. In September 2015 Nestlé acquired Merrick Pet Care, which makes 100% natural, organic pet food.

Litter makers itching to follow have been less fortunate. Cats and their owners are conservative here: if a litter is acceptable, it rarely occurs to anyone to switch to a new one and take on the risk that the cat won't adapt and will go somewhere else.

In China, the second-largest share belongs to a bentonite producer in Lingyuan, Liaoning. The company offers one product, in a few package sizes.

One of the few genuinely interesting products was Double Duty, launched by Church & Dwight in 2010. The baking-soda company was still pursuing its fixation on odor, and its product description said so bluntly: it controls not just the smell of urine but the smell of feces.

No one had done that before, and no one had ever said it without covering it up. They had always wanted to make this product romantic.

Cover image: Garfield