New Colgate toothpaste Totally worth the wait

To support the launch of the brand-new formulation of its market leading Colgate Total® toothpaste, Colgate has staged a 4-city roadshow across Australia and New Zealand for dental professionals.

New Colgate Total with Dual-Zinc + Arginine will completely replace the existing triclosan/copolymer-based product and is available now from Henry Schein Halas ahead of the consumer launch in April.

The dinner events in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland featured presentations on innovations in dentistry from Prof. Ira Lamster, Dean Emeritus and Professor of Dental Medicine at Columbia University College of Dental Medicine together with Dr Barbara Shearer, Colgate's Director of Scientific Affairs for North America.

Dr Shearer, who completed her undergraduate dental degree as well as her Masters in Prosthodontics at the University of Otago and later a PhD in Oral Pathology, managed Scientific Affairs for Colgate in Australia for many years before moving to the company's New York headquarters.

Dr Shearer said that the launch of new Colgate Total is the biggest launch at Colgate since the original product came on the market 20 years ago. So much so, in the U.S. the company aired a TV ad on the Super Bowl - a first for the brand - featuring Hollywood actor Luke Wilson.

Dr Shearer went on to explain that while Colgate Total is the number one selling toothpaste in the world, the culture within Colgate calls for "continuous improvement". "So even when we launch a new product, our scientists continue to look for formulation improvements for the next generation," she said.

"The new Colgate Total has been reformulated and has a new active system based on Dual-Zinc plus Arginine. It contains two forms of zinc - zinc citrate and zinc oxide - and the addition of Arginine then helps with delivering the zinc to the biofilm on the different surfaces within the mouth.

"The goal of the new Colgate Total is to maintain the plaque and bacteria fighting capabilities for which it is renowned and to then add new benefits. Because of the way consumers have changed over the past 25 years, they're demanding different, additional benefits. With the original formulation, it was very difficult to innovate on that backbone because the chemistry was very sensitive and it was difficult to add any additional benefits. With the new formulation, however, we have a whole innovation pipeline in the works."

With teeth being only 20% of the surfaces in the mouth, Dr Shearer said that the new Colgate Total is designed to offer consumers "Whole Mouth Health".

"The new Colgate Total is designed to protect against plaque biofilm on both the hard and soft tissues, so the teeth, the tongue, the cheeks and the gums all benefit from antibacterial reduction," she said. "It also delivers all the benefits that we've seen from the existing Colgate Total formulation, such as a reduction in plaque and bacteria, as well as adding additional new benefits.

"One of those benefits is a real focus on instant neutralisation of bacterial odours associated with oral malodour. In addition, there's also a new flavour system that the consumers really like and it seeks and fights bacteria for enamel protection."

From April, new Colgate Total with Dual-Zinc + Arginine will become available in all consumer outlets with several variants available.

Over 50 patents have been granted relating to the new formulation with a further 100 pending patent applications in progress globally.

The Journal of Clinical Dentistry has published a Special Issue containing some of the initial clinical and in vitro data, mode of action of the new Colgate Total with Dual-Zinc + Arginine formulation along with a publication on Whole Mouth Health. More publications will follow.