From Natural Fibre to Consumer Experience - the Hidden Potential of Cellulose in Fabric Care

Interview with Geoffrey Stijfs,
Head of Sales Valida Homecare

You’ve been part of the SEPAWA community for a while now, first as a visitor and now also as a speaker and exhibitor. What keeps bringing you back to this particular conference?

SEPAWA is the place to reconnect with the industry in a truly meaningful way. Conversations don’t feel rushed, and there are ample opportunities to have a coffee or sit down with your business associates turned commercial partner or friend over the course of the three days of exhibiting. It’s also a place where new ideas and gradual (or acute, with the coming of artificial intelligence) changes to the cleaning industry are highlighted in a way that is met with curiosity and constructive criticism, rather than being dismissed as wishful thinking.

Organisation-wise, I find SEPAWA one of the most streamlined and welcoming conferences I’ve had the pleasure of visiting in my career. The attendee pool is well-balanced and encompasses an excellent representation of the European cleaning industry, with a growing presence in personal care.

In summary, SEPAWA is the ideal place to put your ambitions to the test in front of a well-rounded representation for all industry aspects. Doing so has given me the courage, knowledge, and reassurance that my ambitions were grounded from my context to the right context, while still remaining true to the goal of pushing the industry forward.

For those who may not know your company as well yet, how would you describe what you do – and what problem you’re most passionate about solving in fabric and laundry care?

Sappi is a woodfibre company that unlocks the power of trees for sustainable solutions in commodity applications. Aside from paper and pulp solutions, this vision translated into a well-rounded biomaterials portfolio. One such biomaterial is fibrillated cellulose, a highly branched, 100% natural cellulose fibre that has an extremely high surface area.

One of the biggest challenges the cleaning industry faces, in my opinion, is the high impact transportation has on the ecological footprint of fast-moving consumer goods. If laundry detergent, in an ideal world, would only be produced in a solid format, the overall logistic overhang for that market segment could be reduced dramatically… Sadly, there are limitations to solid detergents, such as their cleaning power and incompatibility with certain key ingredients.

Back to fibrillated cellulose. Our fibres’ surface area binds significantly more ingredients to its surface, compared to other binders in this product format, boosting cleaning power. Our cellulose is also natural, meaning it can resist chemical breakdown from more volatile ingredients, improving compatibility. Overall, I’m proud to share that we have seen success in commercialising a solid detergent sheet format with superior cleaning performance, with one of our key customers. 

You’re presenting some exciting findings at SEPAWA this year. What made you start looking at microfibrillated cellulose as a potential solution in fabric care?

Indeed… I want to express my thanks to connections I made at SEPAWA, many of which helped me a great deal in arriving at this new topic, which I will be presenting at SEPAWA this year.

Recent commercialisations with Valida have resulted in a promotion for me, to Head of Sales for our fibrillated cellulose products in the wider homecare area. As part of my new responsibilities to build and grow our homecare business, I started digging into what is at the core of innovation at the fast-moving consumer goods manufacturers. That gave me three general directions: consumer experience (visible clean and noticeable freshness), sustainable innovation, and cost saving.

Ideally, you’d like to do all three at once, right? So, the next logical question is: ‘what ingredient is essential for consumer experience, yet bears high cost in use?’ And the answer is fragrance… I’ll explain during my talk how we continued from there!

When developing laundry products, how important are the sensory cues that consumers associate with cleanliness and freshness?

Consider the following: How do you judge if your laundry is clean? You use your eyes to see if the stains are gone, and the fragrance inside of the laundry detergent provides a second confirmation that the washing was successfully completed. If it looks clean and smells fresh, it feels clean.

Being a manufacturer, a lot of selling points to consumers are based on these two central values. Think ‘deep clean’, or ‘long-lasting freshness’, as opposed to ‘ease-of-ironing after washing’. The first two claims are essential nowadays (and will remain so in the future), whereas the latter is more ‘nice to have’.

Imagine you take a piece of clothing out of your closet, and it has been laying there for a while. When you put it on, you smell a faint, yet pleasant freshness, as if the clothing was washed yesterday. This is the type of thing that keeps the consumer coming back to your product. The question for manufacturers is ‘How can I achieve this, without incurring too much cost?’, because price kills all value at some point.

There’s often a perception that sustainable innovation comes at a premium. Is that something you believe the industry needs to rethink?

I’m going into SEPAWA with the aim to share my ambitions, as I know from experience that it will bear fruit in time, through finding the right context. In particular, this year I wish to challenge the idea that the use of biomaterials imparts a significant cost to manufacturers (and by consequence, consumers), while showing inferior performance. With my talk, I’m proving my belief that cost saving, enhanced consumer experience and sustainable innovation can go hand-in-hand… if you find the right place to innovate in.

www.sappi.com/en-gb/products-services/products/cleaning-products