My Top 3 Criteria When Choosing Natural Cleaners

I believe that businesses should prioritize two things: profit + helping people. And, I believe it’s entirely possible to do both.

I know that’s a rather unusual way for me to start out a post, right? I’m not typically jabbering here about politics or business ethics (although I did take a Business Ethics course during my B.A. that I strangely fell in love with).

You might be wondering what all of this has to do with laundry soap.

Well, simply put: I believe that businesses should be about more than simply making money. That’s why I was totally elated when I started exploring the Meliora K website. I’ll be honest: when they contacted me about doing a review, I took just a quick perusal of their site, saw that their ingredient list was acceptable to me, and agreed to try them out.

It wasn’t until after I had tried the products and it was time to write my post that I went and really dug into their website. What I saw there impressed me so much.

Here’s what they say on their website:

Meliora K is taking a fresh new look at cleaning products. Gone are the laundry lists of ingredients and complex chemical names.
Simple is easy! Made with everyday household products, Meliora K’s products are effective, safe, and easy to reproduce. That’s right, we’re so confident in our product, we’re giving you the recipes!
Buy from us, make it yourself at home, or vice versa! We look to change the clean product marketplace and increase awareness of what’s in the things we use everyday.

When I sat down to write this post, I realized that the things that I totally loved about their products are legitimately my top three most important criteria for choosing my cleaning and laundry soap.

If I could go back in time to before I tried Meliora K products, and ask myself: “what are the most important features when I’m deciding which natural cleaners/laundry soaps to purchase?”, no word of a lie, my friends – I would have said the following:

My Top 3 Criteria for Choosing a Natural Cleaner and Laundry Soap

1. Eco-Friendly Packaging

I was so ecstatic to see that Meliora K products are packaged in brown paper. I have purchased the same popular non-toxic brand of laundry soap for years now, but it’s unfortunately packaged in a plastic jug. I love the simple, unbleached, eco-friendly packaging that Meliora K uses, and appreciate a company that puts environmental stewardship over a flashy, fancy plastic jug for the sake of marketing. It also cuts down in the overall cost of the product, as paper bags are much cheaper than plastic jugs.

2. Non-Toxic Ingredients

Meliora K soap includes just the basics. They keep it simple because these ingredients are time-tested and powerful workhorses when it comes to getting an excellent clean.

Did you know that there are no laws stating that manufacturers must disclose the ingredients in their cleaning products? Yikes! Very few actually do so willingly – among them Meliora K – and there are zero toxic or questionable ingredients in their soap. That’s about all I can ask for in that department!

Most commercially available laundry soap has tons of toxic ingredients for fragrance, bubbles (totally unnecessary for cleaning), shelf-stability, coloring, and more. Not this company! There’s absolutely no extra junk… just plain and simple ingredients that do the job.

3. High Company Values

This is where the weird intro to this post comes in. This stuff gets me really riled up – businesses using their leverage to actually do good, rather than just fill their pockets with dollars. I LOVE this.

They use the term social enterprise on their blog, and describe it this way:

A new kind of for-profit enterprise combines the best of what nonprofits do (activities to complete some mission such as reducing poverty, improving health, cleaning the air) with the best of what businesses do (come up with creative solutions and find a way to deliver them without relying on governments or private donors). This has been called many things, but Social Enterprise is one name for this approach.

Meliora K’s mission is to raise awareness and reduce the toxins going into your homes. They do so by selling amazing laundry detergent and soap that works, and is totally simply to make. And get this: they even freely give out the instructions to make your own at home! Check out what they say about that:

Either way, we’re replacing conventional cleaning products with ones that are better for our families and for our waterways. If everyone on earth decides to make their own laundry soap, our team will have to find something else to do. We hear there’s money in cosmetics.

(Ha!) SO much yes to all of this. I love it so much!

Bottom line: does it really work?

I am using and loving the laundry soap, the soap bar (love it for pre-treating stained clothes!), and the soap flakes (I have literally never seen my bathtub sparkle quite like that before. Seriously, peeps. Glorious.)

I could rave all day about how awesome their laundry soap is. It works, and it works just as well or better than any I’ve ever tried. It got splattered, dried cranberries out of my 5-year-old’s light yellow t-shirt, after a quick rub with the bar soap and a wash with the laundry soap. It gets all of my clothes perfectly clean (that’s a tall order with 3 kids under 6 years old) – not a single thing has been any less clean than ever before. It’s a humble yet powerful product, and I am now a huge fan.

I think the best thing about this company to me, however, is the business model they employ. Lots of Big Business companies make “natural” cleaning products… but not all “natural” products are created equal. Even some of the popular naturally-minded companies are now owned by giant corporations, which is unfortunate. Meliora K is a small company with a conscience and a mission, and that seals the deal for me.