Vancouver-based Before, a leader in clean oral care and award-winning toothpaste, has launched Before Brilliant Breath MouthWash, a next-generation rinse designed to elevate breath freshness while supporting a balanced and healthy oral microbiome.
Marking a major innovation milestone, it is the first mouthwash in North America packaged in fully home compostable, plastic-free Vivomer, made entirely from plants, said the company.
Formulated with Before’s signature SuperMint flavor, Brilliant Breath delivers an instant cooling boost and long-lasting freshness you can feel immediately. Unlike conventional mouthwashes that rely on alcohol and harsh ingredients that can strip the oral microbiome, Before Brilliant Breath MouthWash is formulated without alcohol, peroxide, SLS, parabens, or dyes, offering a clean, gentle, and super fresh rinse.
“We’ve always believed fresh breath shouldn’t come at the expense of your oral health,” said Steve Thorp, CEO and Co-Founder of Before. “Traditional mouthwash can feel like a fire drill for your mouth. Brilliant Breath brings the cool, long-lasting freshness people love, but in a microbiome-friendly formula that actually supports your teeth and overall mouth health.”
Sea salt helps sweep away debris for cleaner teeth and gums, while hyaluronic acid, aloe, zinc, and vitamin C work together to nourish oral tissues and promote microbiome balance, said the company.
Key Benefits
- Kills harmful bacteria and combats bad breath
- Sea salt removes particles for cleaner teeth and gums
- Hyaluronic acid and vitamin C help restore moisture and microbiome balance
- Before’s SuperMint flavor delivers incredible taste and long-lasting freshness, elevating your daily oral care routine
- Leaping Bunny certified and vegan friendly
- World’s first mouthwash in fully home compostable, zero-plastic Vivomer packaging
- 1% of sales fund environmental initiatives through BeforeCares™
The bottle is made from Vivomer, an advanced plant-based natural material developed by Shellworks. Fully home compostable and plastic-free, Vivomer helps reduce reliance on traditional petroleum-based plastics that pollute landfills and oceans.
“Vivomer represents a new generation of materials designed to work in harmony with nature,” said Amir Afshar, Co-Founder, Shellworks. “We’re proud to collaborate with Before to bring this innovation to oral care, proving that high-performance packaging can be made entirely from plants, be entirely stable in use and yet safely return to the earth at end of life.”
Before Brilliant Breath Mouthwash is available at beforecompany.com across the U.S. and Canada, on Amazon, and exclusively at Sprouts Farmers Market locations nationwide within the retailer’s Forager Innovation Set.
Thorp said it will be available in Whole Foods in mid-June.
The company was incorporated in 2021 and spent about two years in formulation and brand development, launching in 2023 with a toothpaste.
“We specifically launched really soft online, D2C, just to get our wings underneath us and get production supply chain really dialed in.
And then in the first couple of months, I started, literally myself, just knocking on doors,” said Thorp.
“We really wanted to have kind of a ground-up groundswell of influential individual accounts, boutiques, that would really drive some good brand awareness. I literally hit the streets for the first few months, knocking on doors, and opened up some really great boutique accounts. I spent about four to six months doing that, mostly in Canada and then a little bit into the US, just to get the brand started.
“Past that, I started to knock on some bigger retail doors after about six months.”
Thorp said the reason behind starting the company was that he always found toothpaste specifically to be a little bit of a boring category, and anybody that he talked to didn’t really have a brand that they loved or something that sat on their counter that was really important to them.
It was just kind of a product everybody had to use.
“I always found that so fascinating that, for a product that everybody uses twice a day, there just wasn’t really a lot of love or brand loyalty for the category. It was just this thing that you had to do,” he said.
“And for something that’s so important for our overall health and for a product that you use so often, I always found that so fascinating.
“In our first focus groups, I remember back when we were really starting to get serious talking about the category and the product, I would ask all of my friends and peers, friends in the industry that either own brands, are really in tune with the industry, or are in the wellness category, and I would ask them, “Hey, what toothpaste do you use?”
“And they would always be kind of stumped. They’d always be like, “I don’t know. I think I use Colgate,” or, “I think my wife bought something.”
Better-for-you oral care was still a very, very small overall percentage of the category in terms of dollars and volume, he noted.
“It’s growing at a rapid rate and was five years ago and is today even more, but still a very small representation compared to the rest of wellness or personal care beauty, which have been disrupted quite a bit with better-for-you products,” he said.
“Now that we’ve really started to establish our retail presence and our supply chain and distribution, we’re definitely starting to scale up.
“We’ve got some other really great mid-tier retail partners. Choices has been a great partner for us on the West Coast. On the East Coast, Healthy Planet has been a really great partner for us as well. And I think the next stage is we’d really like to step up into conventional grocery and look at some national partners.”
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