The shampoo sachet: How we learned to love plastic

Editor’s Note: The origin story of plastic pollution in India has an unlikely villain: the humble packet that made a luxury product like shampoo affordable to millions of Indians.  In this excerpt, author Saabira Chaudhuri uncovers a revolution that started with a school teacher in rural Tamil Nadu. Excerpted from ‘Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic’, by Saabira Chaudhuri, with permission from HarperCollins India. 

The practice of shampooing has a centuries-old history in India. In fact, the word derives from the Hindi champo, meaning to press or massage. But among the revolving door of India’s finance ministers, for a long time commercial shampoo was seen as an indulgence used by a small slice of the country’s upscale urban population. The government taxed shampoo as a luxury product, which of course ensured that’s what it remained. Shampoo bottles of 200 millilitres were priced at about 25 rupees (30 cents), which was unaffordable for most people.

And so most Indians ignored commercial shampoo. They washed their hair using homemade concoctions made from reetha (soap berries) and amla (gooseberries) or just used body soap. They relied on coconut oil to condition it. The few who used packaged shampoo did so for weddings, religious festivals or birthdays.

The man who would first try to convince regular Indians to buy shampoo en masse wasn’t a Unilever executive but rather a one-time schoolteacher called Chinni Krishnan who hailed from the port city of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu. In the late 1960s, he quit teaching to start a business repackaging large bags of powdered pharmaceutical

products into small portion sizes that poor people could afford. Making single-use sachets for dry products was easy if labour-intensive. India’s loose-leaf tea sellers had for years been selling small portions of tea in paper packets for as little as 3 paise. Chewing tobacco makers employed similar sachet packaging, made from thin metallised plastic.

But it was Chinni Krishnan who figured out how to make plastic sachets that could hold liquids. In 1972, he cut a hosepipe down, sealing both its ends using a machine designed to seal plastic file folders. He later shifted to using softer polyvinyl chloride tubes, creating puffy sachets that resembled tiny plastic pillows. Chinni Krishnan tried selling shampoo in his new sachets, creating a brand called Velvette, but in the absence of marketing it didn’t sell particularly well.

His efforts caught the attention of Hindustan Lever. The consumer goods giant briefly tried its hand at selling PVC shampoo sachets in the mid-1970s, but pulled the plug in less than a year. Shopkeepers found the transparent, pillow-shaped pouches difficult to store; their shape meant they couldn’t be stacked and had to be kept in bins. Consumers found the sachets hard to open, particularly with wet hands. For Unilever, they were expensive to make and sell. ‘The margins were half of what the bottles were,’

recalls Nihal Kaviratne, who worked as Hindustan Lever’s marketing manager for personal care in the early 1970s. ‘Although the unit price was low, on a per-wash basis they were also very expensive for consumers.’

In time, Chinni Krishan’s son, C.K. Rajkumar—who took over the business after his father died—found a way to make the Velvette sachets easier to open. Another son, C.K. Ranganathan, launched his own shampoo brand in sachets, Chik.

Just as Hindustan Lever’s salesmen had shown villagers how to use bar soap, Ranganathan’s new band of employees found models—usually schoolboys easily swayed by the promise of free sweets—whose hair they could publicly shampoo as the rest of the village gathered around and gawped. ‘We applied shampoo on one half of the head and on the other we applied soap—the split head method,’ says Ranganathan. ‘After washing, and once towelled and nicely dried up, we asked the public to touch and smell the soap part and the shampoo part.’ Chik’s sales began to tick up.

Despite its desire to sell to rural Indians, Hindustan Lever remained focused on pushing products like vanaspati, bar soap and fertilisers. ‘The definite policy at Hindustan Lever at the time was not to be seen as a company selling luxury items,’ says Alec Lever,

a voluble and floppy-haired Englishman who began working at Unilever’s India business in 1985. ‘They didn’t want to be seen as a multinational making products for a westernised elite.’ Lever, no known relation to the company’s founder, had arrived in India from the Philippines, where P&G was using sachet packaging for its Prell shampoo. Prell was sold in the form of a solid green needle that foamed when mixed with water. Lever copied the sachets, but imported Hassia packing machines from Germany to fill them with liquid Sunsilk. The liquid shampoo was far easier to work into hair and made for a more luxurious experience than needles. Sunsilk’s sales shot up and liquid shampoo in sachets quickly became the norm across the Philippines.

India’s growth had long been so sluggish that economists despairing of its plodding socialist polices nicknamed it the ‘Hindu’ growth rate. But by the late 1980s, when Lever arrived in India, this was changing. Crop yields were rising, jobs were opening up in rural India courtesy of manufacturers lured by government tax holiday schemes, and better roads and more television ownership were making it easier for brand-owners to reach villagers.

Hindustan Lever’s board gave Lever the green light to try to convince the hundreds of millions of Indians who had never given shampoo a second thought to buy Sunsilk and Clinic. While Chik and Velvette were already being sold in South India, Hindustan Lever had enormous national reach. Suddenly, shampoo sachets started showing up across the country.

The new versions were made from several layers of two types of polyethylene and aluminium, and were much easier to handle than the old PVC ones. A strange quirk about the new sachets was that, on a per ounce basis, they were priced cheaper than larger bottles, flying in the face of long-established industry precedent that bigger is cheaper. One theory is that demand for flimsier plastic sachets from the smokeless tobacco or gutkha makers dotting every street corner created a big sachet market long before the package was used for shampoo, driving packaging prices down. Another is that, given how large and promising the Indian market was, companies were willing to subvert precedent if it meant building demand.

For women, who typically were in charge of buying household essentials, the appeal of sachets went beyond price. They offered built-in portion control—precluding wayward children or careless husbands from using too much, the way they might from a bottle.

Less than a quarter of villagers had access to running water at home. Many bathed by a local river or water body, or used buckets of water drawn from the village well. This made sachets—designed to be used once and thrown away on the spot—far more convenient than bottles.