Meet The Billion-Dollar Family Company That Makes Purell

Jerry and Goldie Lippman cofounded Gojo in Akron, Ohio, in 1946.

^Panic buying is one of the most visible symptoms of coronavirus hysteria, with crazed shoppers emptying grocery store and pharmacy shelves of everything from pasta to thermometers. Perhaps the hardest item to find? Purell, America’s most popular hand sanitizer. 

What most don’t know is that Purell is the cornerstone of a 74-year-old family-owned business in Ohio that makes all types of soaps, sanitizers and disinfectants. Called Gojo Industries, it has about 25% of the U.S. hand sanitizer market and generated more than $370 million in revenue in 2018, according to IBISWorld. Forbes estimates the company is 100% owned by the Kanfer family and is worth at least $1 billion. 

While it might be hard for now to find Purell at a local pharmacy, there should be no Purell shortages, the company insists. (Gojo answered general questions through a spokesperson, but would not answer questions about the Kanfer family nor make any family member available for comment.)  Gojo’s factories, two in Ohio and one in France, are running at full capacity to ensure it can meet the “substantial increase in demand,” says Gojo Industries spokesperson Samantha Williams. Gojo’s “demand surge preparedness team,” which has helped keep production levels humming during past viral outbreaks like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and the H1N1 “swine flu” in 2009, has been working overtime to bring additional capacity online.

The current demand for Purell is “on the higher end of the spectrum, but not unprecedented,” says Williams. But that’s not how it feels out on the streets. A manager at a Duane Reade in downtown Manhattan says the store had been sold out of Purell for four days and didn’t expect a shipment until the weekend while another Duane Reade in Queens is sold out indefinitely. In a Costco in Lawrence, Long Island, a new shipment of hygiene and cleaning products delivered Thursday morning was gone within an hour. “It’s panic buying,” says Sonia, an employee at the Long Island Costco. “This is usually one of the slowest times of the year in terms of sales.”

Unable to procure brand-name hand sanitizer (which is just an alcohol-based cleaner), people are quickly discovering substitutes. The internet is awash in do-it-yourself potions with ingredients like aloe vera gel and rubbing alcohol, while Tito’s vodka felt compelled to announce that its vodka, which is 40% alcohol, wasn’t strong enough to kill coronavirus (the Feds recommend at least 60%). Local governments are scrambling. On Monday, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would use convict labor to manufacture its own hand sanitizer.

The spectacle is all the more fantastic because it’s not at all clear that Purell, or any other hand sanitizer, can keep people safe. Hand sanitizer is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and the agency has strict rules about promoting the use of these products against viruses or mentioning specific organisms by name. And Gojo Industries has recently fallen afoul of those very rules.

For the last couple of years, Purell had been marketing its hand sanitizer on its website and social media as a defense for the flu, norovirus and maybe even the Ebola virus. The regulator sent Gojo a warning letter on January 17, 2020, demanding that the company stop marketing its hand sanitizers with unsubstantiated claims.

“[The] FDA is currently not aware of any adequate and well-controlled studies demonstrating that killing or decreasing the number of bacteria or viruses on the skin by a certain magnitude produces a corresponding clinical reduction in infection or disease caused by such bacteria or virus,” the letter stated. Gojo, in response to the letter, wrote on its website that it has updated its marketing.

Gojo was founded in 1946 by Goldie and Jerry Lippman. During World War II, Goldie worked as a supervisor in a rubber factory in Akron, Ohio, which manufactured life rafts and other products. At the end of each shift, Goldie noticed that workers had a hard time cleaning graphite and carbon black off their hands and resorted to dipping their digits into harsh chemicals like kerosene and benzene. The husband and wife decided they could make a better cleaning product and launched Gojo (a combination of their first names). They worked with a Kent State University chemistry professor to develop Gojo’s first hand cleaner.

In the early days, Jerry would mix batches in their basement and fill old pickle jars to sell out of the back of their car. Goldie handled the books and sourced raw materials. Some of Gojo’s first customers were mechanics and auto shops—any business that handled oil, grease and other hard-to-remove chemicals. Its hand cleaner was so popular that Gojo customers would complain about how their employees would fill their lunch pails with the solution to bring home. In 1952, Jerry invented and patented a portion-control dispenser, which squirted out only a dollop of the stuff at a time, which further boosted sales.

Goldie died in 1972. The couple never had children, so Jerry tapped his nephew Joe Kanfer as Gojo’s new president. Kafner had grown up at Gojo headquarters, mixing product and going on sales calls. He would eventually become the company’s chairman and CEO.

In 1988, Gojo invented what would become its most successful product—Purell, an ethyl alcohol-based, waterless hand cleaner. But it took years for the product to become America’s favorite hand sanitizer. According to the New Yorker, their first big Purell customer was upstate New York grocery store chain Wegmans. In the early 1990s Wegmans stationed dispensers throughout the store for use by both employees and customers.

John Nottingham, whose firm Nottingham Spirk helped Gojo develop Purell’s branding, logo and packaging, says before Purell successfully entered the consumer market in 1997, it was just another commercial hand cleaning product. But in the late 1990s, after Nottingham Spirk suggested that Gojo package its sanitizer in a clear plastic bottle and add bubbles to the formula, which gave it an “appealing, fresh and clean aesthetic,” Purell started to catch on. “Purell was a game changer and it changed consumer behavior,” says Nottingham. “It became a mainstream product.”

But perhaps Purell’s biggest break came in 2002, when the Centers for Disease Control rewrote its healthcare hygiene guidelines after a series of studies showed that alcohol-based hand cleaners were more effective at preventing pathogen transmission than soap and water for healthcare workers. With that endorsement Purell expanded rapidly into the healthcare market and even before the coronavirus scare was nearly ubiquitous in doctors’ offices and hospitals, military barracks, grocery stores and schools.

Jerry died in 2005 and two years later, Kanfer’s daughter (the oldest of four children) Marcella Kanfer Rolnick became vice chair. Kanfer Rolnick, who grew up in the business and worked in dispenser production, the microbiology lab and market research and development, took over her father’s role as executive chair in May 2018.

Cover photograph courtesy Gojo.

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