Over the course of your life, it's likely you'll brush your teeth more than 50,000 times.

In the process, you'll go through 450 tubes, almost 170 pounds of toothpaste.

Toothpaste is one of the first things you use every morning and one of the last

things you use every night. But you might not give it much thought unless you're someone like

Stefan Habif. I would have to say I spend about 40 to 50% of my time thinking and dreaming

about toothpaste. I'm even counting the time home and when I'm sleeping.

Habif is one of the people responsible for creating the toothpaste in your bathroom cabinet.

He's the chief technology officer at Colgate Palm Olive.

It's a multinational corporation that makes many of the household products at the drugstore.

Speedstick deodorant, Irish Spring Body Wash, Palm Olive Dish soap. But none is more

significant for the company than its flagship toothpaste brand Colgate.

Oral Care is our number one category. More households purchase at least one Colgate product a year than any other

brand in the world, including Coca-Cola. There are about 20 billion toothpaste tubes

produced globally. And at Colgate, we make a little less than half of all the stoops.

There's a good chance your toothpaste of choice is made by Colgate or its leading competitor, Crest.

Together, these two brands control around 75% of the $22 billion a year global toothpaste market.

And staying at the top requires constantly thinking about everything from the precise

level of mintiness in the formula to the speed at which the paste comes out of the tube.

You want to make sure that there is easy evacuation. Also, you don't want it to come out too liquidy and too much comes out.

So it's a whole science, believe it or not.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Crackett.

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