Have you ever had a glass of orange juice just after brushing your teeth? Or taken that first sip of morning coffee, only to find it tastes nothing like it should?
We have too.
The reason why is fairly misunderstood.It's simply become an unpleasant side effect of brushing that we've learned to put up with or work around. But when you work professionally with taste, as we did for many years in specialty coffee, it's something you take pretty seriously.
For over 15 years, we've worked in an industry built around the appreciation of flavour. From balancing sweetness, acidity and bitterness in roasted coffee to exploring the subtle differences between origins, varieties and brew recipes, we've dedicated a good part of our lives to understanding what makes things taste good.
So when we discovered that something as ordinary as the toothpaste we used every morning could interfere with our ability to appreciate those flavours, we had some questions.
The biggest was why?
It turns out that sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS), a synthetic detergent commonly used in toothpaste to create foam, can temporarily interfere with our perception of taste. It's one of the reasons orange juice tastes so terrible after brushing.
For us, that seemed like a strange compromise to make every morning and evening.
And the more we thought about it, the more we realised this wasn't just about coffee.
Taste is one of life's everyday pleasures. It's the first coffee of the morning, a meal prepared with care, a glass of wine shared with friends, or discovering something unexpectedly delicious. It connects us to people, places and experiences. Often, it's the small things that make a day memorable.
What began as a discovery about the effects of toothpaste on taste became something much bigger. A mission to protect good taste and create a toothpaste people would reach for, not just use out of necessity.
Three years and countless formulations later, we created Tastebuds. Everything you'd expect from a good toothpaste, with a little more consideration for everything that comes next.
Because good taste deserves better toothpaste.