Reinventing Brushing: How Duo is Disrupting Oral Care, One Tablet at a Time

I had founder Dr. cial residency. Bobby the of opportunity Dentiste Johnson, The two Kirkland a to speak with Dr. Stevie Roberts, in Seattle, Washington and recent graduate of Oral Maxillofaare married and both met at Tufts University in Boston. They come from deep dental roots with many family members in the dental field. Their idea for Duo came about because they were in the Sun Valley on vacation with their co-founders. It was 2 am and one of the cofounders, a nondentist, was really distraught that after an amazing day he had to end it by brushing his teeth.

Dr. Bobby Johnson and Dr. Stevie Roberts (Duo): Patients are just so bored by brushing their teeth. It’s really hard to motivate them, and the whole brushing experience really hasn’t changed since the 50’s. We’re been squeezing the same mint flavored toothpaste out of a tube for generations now. So we went back to the drawing board. We were like, “Wait - we actually could make brushing way better: flavors, adding vitamin D and B12, melatonin.” And then we went down this rabbit hole. At first we explored making traditional toothpaste, and then we stumbled into tablet toothpaste.

By making it a tablet, we could put the toothpaste in a glass bottle with an aluminum cap that can be recycled. And the beauty of the tablet is we could also dose it. Instead of telling people, “squeeze out a pea size of toothpaste,” we know that one tablet is 380 milligrams. And if it’s our sleep toothpaste, we

know you’re getting 1.5 milligrams of melatonin, which would be impossible to know with traditional paste.

We asked ourselves, “why is brushing teeth so damn boring? And why hasn’t it changed? Why is the oral care aisle the most boring aisle in any pharmacy or grocery store?” And we just kind of decided to turn it all on its head. And one thing led to the next, and you know, here we are.

Duo: There was a company doing tablet toothpaste before us called Bite. In terms of the eco-friendly aspect of it, they do a good job. But we wanted to do better . And then we added the functional elements to it. There are a few companies that make tablet toothpaste. We are the first dentist founded company to do so.

Honestly all toothpastes, especially in tablet toothpaste, use surfactants for foaming. Surfactants being amphiphilic molecules like soap. But ultimately that dries out the mouth because it latches on to both water and oils and pulls water out of the mouth. We were the first ones that did foaming without using any surfactants. We use Xylitol. We use nano-hydroxyapatite, which others do as well. Nano-hydroxyapatite is growing in popularity as an alternative to fluoride. It’s just as effective as

fluoride at remineralizing teeth. Better at whitening, better at treating sensitivity, and better preventing plaque accumulation.

Fantastic. Oh, yeah, they still exist. Bite was the 1st one to make it popular. They actually went on Shark Tank.

Yeah because there’s no water needed for manufacturing. Also, no glycerin. So glycerin is what gives traditional paste its consistency which is made by animal byproducts. A lot of it is vegetable based. The glycerin takes a lot of manufacturing just to get to that form.

A lot of research. Like a lot of a lot of research. I mean, it was interesting. There weren’t even that many textbooks on toothpaste. In dental school, you learn that you want fluoride in your toothpaste. I’d argue it didn’t really go past that. But we did find one super helpful textbook that’s just toothpaste. It’s pretty thin, but it’s the only toothpaste textbook ever published. It was 3 months of research, pubmed and just boiling down the ingredients.

It’s manufactured in an FDA approved facility in New York. We bought an industrial pill press. So you buy it from this company out of Texas. But it really comes from China, and I got a call from a DEA agent who was like, “what are you doing with this pill press?” Because, according to Reddit, 90% of street Xanax is made on the same pill press. There are only so many pill presses in the world. And this thing is just an electric rotary motor. There are 2 pistons that come together. But it was a lot of experimentation, because there are things that have to go into it. You combine all the ingredients that are powder, and you need to make sure they’re evenly distributed. They also have to flow into the machine. They have to not stick into the machine. They have to compress so that they don’t just crumble when the tablets are made. The 2 pistons come together in the cylinder, and then the tablet also has to be ejected out of the machine. So you have to make sure that the tablet is not so compressed that it gets stuck in the machine. It was a lot of time in our garage. I had a lot of bloody fingers and a lot of frustrating evenings. A lot of research

on the front end with ingredients, and then trial and error with the tablet press, and it was before ChatGPT. I think that might have made some of this journey a little bit easier, especially for the tablet pressing part. But we got there.

Stevie had a little bit of time off. I had just moved to Seattle. And COVID hit right then so we had some time. As a medical student, you get out pretty early and have much lower commitments than a practicing dentist. It happened to be at a time where both of us had far more time than we do now. It was hours in the garage of just pressing tablets and seeing what we liked the most. We wanted to keep it to as few ingredients as possible, but still obviously make it a great tasting, great experience with the toothpaste, like no surfactant. Everyone uses surfactants because that’s what makes it foam like in your shampoo. That’s what makes it sud up. So it was a big deal that we were able to find a way to make our toothpaste foam up without using the surfactant. 90% of the toothpaste market is still made up of Sensodyne, Crest and Colgate. But if you read the back of those ingredients - fairly unrecognizable. If you read the back of our ingredients, you will recognize every ingredient is there to benefit oral health.

Nick is our CEO. He’s also from Seattle. Him and Mike, our 4th co-founder - they met at Columbia Law School. Nick had gone off after law school and had practiced corporate law for a while, and then he did some interesting stuff with products. Mike went straight into finance. Today they are full time on Duo. They run the company and are instrumental - a wealth of knowledge and

WHAT skills that we certainly don’t have from our clinical training.

FLAVORS DO YOU HAVE? Building a team has got to be at least at the forefront. It’s the most important thing.

We have the original. And then we have immunity with vitamins D and B12. They are all mint based and have a hint of something else. The immunity one has a hint of sage. Our sleep pone has HOW’D YOU FIND THIS TEAM?

lavender and melatonin and l-theanine, and then our energy one has caffeine and l-theanine. They are our friends! Mike was a great advisor early on, and then we kind of went through some of the early stumbles as a startup - a few months of us developing the product. And then once the

ANY LAST THOUGHTS BEFORE ENDING THIS INTERVIEW? product was viable, they went to work on actually building the brand and the operations behind it. Nick first left his full time

It’s been a really exciting journey. Dentists are inherently entrejob, and then Mike left his full time job after that to come work

preneurial, right?. That’s why a lot of us go into this so you can for the team. They have a salary from Duo. It’s nominal comrun your own practice or live your own life. We’d love to help pared to what they could be making out in the world but it kind

other people. There are so many great ideas out there, and people of goes to speak to the belief they have and that we all have in it.

are just so busy in their day to day and their clinical work and with their patients. But we just want to be a resource for people that want to use their degree in a slightly different way. DO YOU HAVE A BACKGROUND IN CHEMISTRY, OR ANYTHING?

After the development of the toothpaste tablet, I felt like I reached a ceiling of what I can contribute as a dentist to this Stevie has a master’s in biomedical science. Bobby majored in

company. And I had a friend that was in venture capital work sociology.

with consumer packaged goods, and he was like, “don’t underestimate the value of your degree, and what that brings to a company.” WHY ARE THE BIG BRANDS NOT DOING TABLET TOOTHPASTE?

We have such a clinical based degree that has a science backing. But dentists need to recognize that there’s a lot of knowledge Colgate tried? It came in a plastic jar for one. They were really

and value there. marketing towards Gen Z. We honestly thought that it would have legs. We were like, “Oh, wow! What are we going to

ington University in St. Louis and Stony obviously working towards mouthfeel but at the detriment of

Brook University School of Dental Mediactual beneficial ingredients for oral health, which we think we

cine, where he received his Doctor of managed to finesse both those. I think it’s hard to pivot as a big

Dental Surgery. He completed his postcompany like that to do big changes. We can move quickly. We

doctoral orthodontic training at Tufts get all of our customer feedback instantaneously and can act on

University School of Dental Medicine. He it. Our manufacturing runs are still small enough, and we have

is the owner of Wall Street Orthodonthat close relationship with our manufacturer, that when we

tics in NYC. He started the Instagram need to pivot we can pivot quickly.

page @futuredentists, works with the educational organization @ignitedds, and has an orthodontic tiktok page @drshap.