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GrabGreen Fragrance Free Dish Soap | |
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Review Score | |
Ewg Rated | A |
Ingredients | Water Lauryl Glucoside Sodium Laureth Sulfate Cocamidopropyl Betaine Glycerin Benzisothiazolinone Dipropylene Glycol Sodium Chloride |
We have used products that clean better. And we have reviewed products with ingredients that are gentler on you and the environment. While the company must be applauded or being this transparent with the contents of the dish soap, we really hope their next formulation shows a little more imagination with the cleaning agents and preservatives. It's a decent dish soap, a step up from the usual supermarket bought brands, but we have tried better. | |
Grab Green Fragrance Free Dish Soap is targeted at customers who want a kitchen dish liquid that’s gentle and transparent. Not only is this dish soap dye-free, each ingredient and the purpose of all ingredients is listed on the bottle. This is unfortunately rare in this industry. The situation of ingredient disclosure is so bad, at Safe Household Cleaning we will only review products that list each and every ingredient. How else do we know what w’re buying?
In this review, we’re going to take a closer look at how well Grab Green delivers on their performance claims, how well the dish soap competes with other similar products, and what each ingredient purports to do and how the chosen ingredients look through a health and safety lens. We aim to educate you so you can make smarter purchases that are safer and healthier for you and the environment.
Who makes Grab Green and what are they all about?
Grab Green is made by MaddieBrit Products LLC, a private company founded in 2008 based out of Camarillo, California. MaddieBrit does business as Grab Green, offering a full line of “home care solutions” that they claim are “effective, non-toxic,” and “gentle on you and our planet.”
It appears MaddieBrit doesn’t offer another product line besides Grab Green, so when you buy Grab Green you can know you’re supporting a company that is obviously dedicated to greener, healthier products. The same can’t be said for mainstream brands that have both a “regular” product line and a “green” product line.
Grab Green’s mission is to
“innovate the best eco-responsible products on the market that perform even better than the leading brands.”
That’s a pretty bold mission – there are plenty of players in the green and healthy business, including offerings from leading brands.
However, Grab Green is available at Target, Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers, so they have obviously made an impact in a competitive niche.
Here is what Grab Green promises to deliver for each and every product:
- effective
- eco-responsible
- healthier
- innovative
- beautifully fragrant (though this product is fragrance-free, other variations are offered with natural essential oil proprietary scent blends)
While all that sounds great, plenty of companies out there can talk a good game, so let’s get into the details that actually matter.
What about the packaging?
The dish soap is packaged in an attractive and simple 16oz (473ml) clear bottle with a press-top lid instead of the usual flip-top lid found on most dish soap.
The press-top lid actually offers a significant advantage over some other lids: you can easily open and close it with just one hand.
In light of their mission to innovate and offer an eco-responsible product, Grab Green could offer the dish soap in 100% post-consumer recycled plastic packaging.
How well does it wash?
Aside from being safe and healthy, the most important question about any cleaning product is how does it perform? We tested the dish soap three different ways:
- On dirty dishes after meals (washing before loading before the dishwasher)
- On a oven greasy pan after cooking (soaking before washing and drying)
- Handwashing (before meals and after washing dishes)
Grab Green’s dish soap worked well enough on dirty dishes that were going to go into the dishwasher after a scrubbing. After a meal that left some melted cheese, ketchup, and grease on a plate, a rough scrubbing sponge with a dab of the dish soap efficiently removed the food remnants and the dishes came out of the dishwasher looking clean and sparkly without soap or other residues.
However, if you don’t use a dishwasher and instead clean your dishes entirely by hand, you may find some downsides with Grab Green dish soap. It took a little bit more elbow grease compared to other dish soaps. It’s also a relatively thick liquid that takes longer to rinse.
This pan soaking in dish soap was used to cook bacon at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Note the lack of bubbles.
The next test was soaking, washing, and drying a pan that had been used to cook bacon in an oven at 400° F. The performance here was average, but nothing special – after about a ten minute soak, the trusty scrubbing sponge was used and the pan came clean. It took a couple of applications of dish soap to get the level of desired clean, because the product produced less bubbles per application compared to competitors’ products after the soak. Again a fairly long rinse time was noted.
For someone doing a whole lot of dishes, scrubbing efficiency and rinse time could be very important factors in their selection of dish soap!
Handwashing performance was average before meals and after washing dishes and pans as described above. No sensitivity or allergic type reactions were noted.
What is it made of?
It is worth noting that the ingredients in this product are:
- biodegradable
- cruelty-free
- manufactured in the USA
All very commendable!
In addition, the company have disclosed exactly what ingredients goes in this bottle. The company have even gone the extra mile by including a list of all the ingredients and their purpose.
Great job.
The dish soap formulation only contains 8 ingredients, which is relatively small by industry standards. And some of these ingredients are worthy of extra discussion.
There are two cleaning agents in the product, and both will be familiar to regular readers of this site:
- Sodium Laureth Sulfate – a synthetic surfactant used in many cleaning and personal care products. Some people are sensitive to this product.
- Cocamidopropyl Betaine – commonly added to formulations with sulfates as a secondary cleaning agent. It had the dubious distinction of being awarded Contact Allergen of the Year in 2004.
But the ingredient that really stood out was Benzisothiazolinone – a synthetic preservative that is an environmental toxin that is known to cause contact dermatitis in some folk. It’s banned for use in cosmetics in the EU and to see it listed in a product made by this company is a real surprise.
Closing thoughts
We have used products that clean better. And we have reviewed products with ingredients that are gentler on you and the environment. While the company must be applauded or being this transparent with the contents of the dish soap, we really hope their next formulation shows a little more imagination with the cleaning agents and preservatives.
It’s a decent dish soap, a step up from the usual supermarket bought brands, but we have tried better.
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