How Do Probiotic Cleaners Work?
Part Three: Continuous Cleaning
Part One: Postbiotics
Part Two: Competitive Exclusion
Part Three: Continuous Cleaning for Up to 7 Days
Continuous cleaning! Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Who wouldn’t want a product that kept on cleaning for seven days after you first used it! But isn’t that impossible? How does it work?
It all goes back to our probiotic products being alive–which isn’t true of all probiotic cleaners. The problem is that the claims that “probiotic” manufacturers can put on their products are not well regulated.
The Difference Between Probiotics That Are Alive and Those That Are Dormant
Probiotics have two basic modes: they can either be alive, as they are in our products, or dormant as spores. Probiotics go into a dormant (aka “asleep”) state for a variety of reasons. Usually it is because of a change in environment that a live cell could not survive. When this happens, the microbe changes into an inactive form often called a spore. When the spores reach an environment that would support a live microbe’s growth and reproduction, they reactivate.
While these re-animated cells are real probiotics, they have to be freeze-dried to preserve them. Drying them too much reduces their cell count when they reactivate. Most products that use spores also include only one species of probiotic, not ten or more like ours. Which is why you’ll see these kinds of products combining probiotic spores with traditional chemical or plant-based surfactants.
Because we use a living ecosystem or ten+ probiotic strains, ours create their own postbiotic bio cleaners that include organic acids, hydrogen peroxide (oxygen bleach), and biosurfactants. These postbiotics are valuable in a few ways: they enable our probiotic cleaners to be shelf stable for 2 years, they immediately help break down dirt, grime, and odors once sprayed on a surface, and they help the probiotic ecosystem stay alive and reproducing.
Product labeling does not distinguish between the different forms that probiotics can assume. If your product has even traces of dormant spores in it, it is legal to call it “probiotic”. That’s like tossing a cupful of whisky into a barrel of moonshine and calling it “Scotch”.
Live Probiotics Can Clean Continuously for Up to 7 Days
But what’s that got to do with continuous cleaning? A lot, actually. Our living probiotics populate cleaned surfaces, then continue to live and grow on them for as long as seven days. During that time, they keep producing the postbiotics that cleaned the surface in the first place. These continue to loosen dirt and other substances, which makes it hard for unwanted microbes to grow and spread.
Which means that instead of cleaning a surface every day or every other day, you can wait three, four days or more and still have a shine on your countertop. Heavy-use surfaces will need cleaning more often than that, but it will still be easier to clean each time as–thanks to the live probiotics–there is continuous cleaning action going on at the microscopic level. Low-use surfaces that are typically cleaned every few days can go longer in between cleanings–to the point where they only need to be cleaned once a week.
And time is money. Whether you’re in the commercial cleaning business or you’re selling to consumers who are strapped for time or resources, being able to reduce the amount of time spent cleaning (or worrying about cleaning) is uniquely valuable.
