In 2017, the most consumed household food was coffee. In 2024, it was meat. That doesn’t just mean many Americans are eating more animal protein than ever. It means there are downstream effects in other products—including how our dish soap is formulated.
Today, Dawn is introducing a new product called Dawn Powersuds. It has twice the suds of the old Dawn, with bubbles that promise to “stay white longer” and dishes that rinse more easily. The more interesting point is that the formulation is the direct response to cultural practices around diet that have become obsessed with protein. Back in 2017 when Dawn created most of its cleaning formulas used today, our top consumed foods were coffee, eggs, butter, oil, and milk, according to Procter & Gamble, which makes Dawn dish soap. Now, they are meat, coffee, eggs, oil, and cheese.
Neither meat nor cheese was on the list less than a decade ago, but the company says that thanks to diets like keto, consumers are cooking vastly differently at home. It drove P&G to spend the last two years creating Powersuds as a response to consumer needs.
“Proteins and fats we see are really on the rise,” says Angelica Matthews, P&G’s VP of North American Dish Car, whose company interviewed 10,000 people last year about their dishwashing habits. “Things like a one-pan casserole dish like a chicken cheesy bake is something we see being really popular.”
Dawn PowerSuds is P&G’s new detergent is more bubbly and grease-cutting than any of its products to date, as a way to mitigate the messes of a protein-rich, fat-laden diet. The biodegradable formulation advertises two times more suds than Dawn Platinum, and its grease-trapping formula is protected by five separate patents, promising that if you stick a pan of bacon drippings into a full stack of other dishes, the oil will be encapsulated instead of coating your plates. The formula also balances this task for those of us who don’t fill a whole sink of water, and avoids being so concentrated that you can’t simply squirt it onto a single dish as many people do.
America’s shift toward meatier, more complex diets
The truth of contemporary diets is a bit more complicated than protein. According to P&G, we’re not just cooking more meat and cheese; we’re actually cooking more involved dishes across the board with “more complex soils” than just a few years ago. The company credits a shift in the food media as whetting our appetites and ambitiousness for actual cooking rather than food entertainment.
“Think of being at home in the 2010s and watching Gordon Ramsay yell at people in a kitchen . . . you were maybe making a little less complex dishes yourself,” says Morgan Eberhard, principal scientist at P&G. “Now we’re seeing just more accessibility, more availability of different cooking recipes through social media—through Instagram, TikTok, and things like that.”
Anyone who has cooked an ambitious meal with lots of ingredients and pans knows that it’s the dishes that can be the most daunting part of the project. Dawn calls this phenomenon the “mental load,” and points to dishwashing as the second most hated chore after cleaning the toilet. The company argues that dishes that clean more easily will reduce this mental load, thereby encouraging us to cook more at home.
“If I can get a consumer with Dawn Powersuds to go from spending 30 minutes a day cleaning the dishes to 25 minutes a day cleaning the dishes, five minutes doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it really is,” says Matthews.
Aside from dishes, P&G notes that Dawn is formulated to stretch outside the sink to serve as something of an all purpose cleaner. They see customers grab it for all sorts of other tasks, like wiping down cabinets, washing plastic lawn chairs, and degreasing tire rims. Cutting through soil and oil with a product always on your counter, and tested to not turn your hands into a mummy’s, has a most certain appeal.
The Powersuds experience
As I fill my sink with water and soap, I have to say, the new Powersuds are really something. They’re so white they almost have an almost blue tint, like freshly bleached teeth. Thirty full minutes later, I return to the sink, and the bubbles are still sitting there, confidently smelling like apple Bath & Bodyworks (a bit too strong for my taste, tbh, but clean-feeling all the same).
Dawn’s obsession with the sud has driven much of the reformulation, even though its actual relationship to cleaning power is more demonstrative than functional.
“The suds are more of a cue of what’s happening,” says Eberhard. “So you can think of the suds as the tip of the iceberg, and all of the the ingredients that are doing the cleaning that are breaking down the grease and tough food under the water.”
As Eberhard explains, when suds dissipate on their own, you can actually agitate the water to bring them back. But when they dissipate while doing your dishes, it’s indicative that the surfactants (which break up oil) and other cleaning agents under the water are binding to food and losing cleaning power. In this sense, the longer lasting suds are an advertisement and cue of longer lasting cleaning power. They’re a bubbly data visualization.
Overall, how much better the new Dawn cleans than older Dawn is hard for me to quantify. Egg stuck in a frying pan is still a pain in the butt to clean, no two ways about it. I saw a bigger jump from Dawn to Dawn Powerwash, the company’s superb spray-on degreaser, than I did from Powerwash to Powersuds. But I rarely fill a whole sink to do dishes—and my cheesy chicken casseroles are pretty rare.
P&G contends its beta testers are saying they can wash all their dishes in a single sink of water, without draining and restarting. I trust that’s true. But there is a depressing twist to this innovation: meat now necessitates a frothy new solution to its own growing problem.
