Statement from Carey Jaros, President and CEO, GOJO
The pandemic has transformed how the public thinks about hygiene – including handwashing and hand and surface sanitizing. But unfortunately, the pandemic has also spurred the production and sale of hand sanitizers that are not all safe and effective.
The FDA has issued warnings, alerts, and bans on more than 100 hand sanitizers for being unsafe or ineffective, including products contaminated with methanol (also known as wood alcohol) and 1-propanol, both toxic ingredients.
PURELL® Hand Sanitizers are not formulated with 1-propanol or methanol; the active ingredient in PURELL® Hand Sanitizer is ethyl alcohol. Our name, PURELL, says it best – we have the highest standards and use the purest ingredients.
For us at GOJO, nothing is as important as making sure that everywhere from classrooms and restaurants, to hospitals and homes have access to the highest quality formulations of hand sanitizer. In line with our GOJO Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Life Better, never have we felt more responsibility to deliver on this promise.
We have been operating all of our facilities 24/7 since January. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the growth of our facilities. We worked with our suppliers to dramatically increase raw materials and component supplies and implemented creative partnerships with other companies who have directed bottles and caps our way. Additionally, we plan to hire more than 250 team members over the coming months.
These exhaustive efforts, and more, have allowed us to double our production across all of our operations and double the amount of product we are shipping into stores and online retailers over 2019 levels. We are shipping more than a billion uses of hand sanitizer per week in North America alone, and it’s going into every market and geography we serve, including healthcare, first responders, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, stores/online retailers, mail and parcel carriers, U.S. military, food processing, convenience stores, restaurants, airports, and more. This massive expansion plan will allow us to make many times more sanitizer than we are producing now. We do all of this so we can provide more peace of mind through our beloved PURELL® products, which are in staggering demand.