The Sachet Economy: Why Asia Buys Shampoo One Wash at a Time

Walk past any corner shop in Manila, Chennai or Hanoi and you will see the same thing hanging in the doorway: long strips of tiny plastic packets. Shampoo, three-in-one coffee, laundry powder, fish sauce, toothpaste. One wash, one cup, one load at a time.

To a shopper raised on family-size bottles and warehouse clubs, this looks backwards. Everything we learn about money says buy big and save. So either half the planet is bad at shopping, or the rule we learned only works under conditions most of the world doesn't live in.

Episode 1 · 7:13Why Asia Sells Shampoo One Wash at a TimeWatch the episode →

How big is the sachet habit?

Bigger than almost any other packaging format. Around 855 billion sachets are sold worldwide every year, and roughly half of them in Southeast Asia (Phys.org / SciDev).

The Philippines is the clearest case. People there use about 163 million sachets a day, close to 60 billion a year (SCMP), in a country of 109 million people at the 2020 census (PSA). That is more than one packet per person, every single day.

A farmer, a folder sealer and a garden hose

The idea is usually credited to Chinni Krishnan, an agriculturist in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, who also packed medicines. Shampoo existed in India, but a whole bottle was out of reach for most families. His answer was to stop selling the bottle. He built his first sealer from a modified machine for sealing PVC folders and a length of transparent garden hose, and his family sold its Velvette shampoo in sachets for two rupees (Madras Musings).

Krishnan died in 1979, aged 48, before the idea took off. His son C. K. Ranganathan pushed it further in the early 1980s with a brand named after his father's initials, Chik, sold at 50 paise when rivals charged two rupees (ICMR case study). He also let customers trade in a handful of empty sachets for a free one. The exact terms differ from source to source, but shopkeepers and customers both liked the deal (NextBillion).

The multinationals followed. By 2004, sachets accounted for roughly 70% of shampoo sales in Indian cities and 90% in rural India, according to Saabira Chaudhuri's book Consumed (Kathmandu Post).

The price that matters is the price per day

Most explanations stop at "sachets are cheap". That misses the point. The sachet is not about being cheap; it is about being small.

If you earn a monthly salary, spending ten dollars on a bottle that lasts weeks is a non-event. Many people across Asia are paid by the day instead: street vendors, builders, motorbike drivers. Money arrives daily and leaves daily. Around 2012, about one in four Filipinos lived on roughly one US dollar (46 pesos) a day (Rappler).

On that budget a full bottle is not expensive. It is impossible, because you never hold that much spare cash at one moment. The number that decides the purchase is not the price per millilitre but the price per purchase.

When the small pack is the cheaper one

You would expect a catch: surely the poor pay more for buying in pieces. Sometimes it is the other way round. In one price check in the Philippines, around 2012, the same Sunsilk conditioner cost:

That is about 30% more per millilitre for buying bigger (Rappler). A single check from over a decade ago is not proof that sachets are always cheaper, but the reason behind it still holds. A Unilever executive estimated that 60–70% of the country's shampoo was sold in sachets. The sachet is not the side product in that market; it is the market. That is where the volume and the fiercest competition are, so that is where prices get pushed down. The bottle becomes a small status upgrade, and people pay a little extra for it.

When it becomes a tax on being poor

Move to West Africa and the pattern flips. A study of laundry detergent in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon found that packs of 50 grams or less cost on average about 25% more per kilo than larger packs. Economists call this the poverty premium (Erasmus University).

The same study explains the twist. Market traders used to buy big bags, split them and resell the pieces at a markup. Brands saw the opportunity and started packing small in the factory. The middleman disappeared; the markup stayed.

So the sachet is neither a gift nor a scam. Whether it is a deal or a tax depends on how much competition there is, and who does the splitting.

The bill that never shows on the price tag

A sachet is several thin layers fused together: plastic, sometimes aluminium, sometimes paper. That is what keeps shampoo fresh in tropical heat, and it is also why almost nobody recycles it. A plastic bottle has scrap value, so a collector will pick it up. A used multilayer sachet is worth nothing (Mina News).

Companies have tried to take them back. Unilever's Sachet Recovery Program in the Philippines, started in 2012, collected somewhere between 4 and 10 million sachets a year, against roughly 60 billion used: fewer than one packet in every 6,000 (Wilson Center). Sales are still growing, with projections of 1.3 trillion sachets a year by 2027 (Phys.org / SciDev).

So why does Asia sell everything in tiny packs?

Not because people can't do math. When money arrives one day at a time, the smartest price is the one you can pay today. The sachet put products that used to be for the rich within reach of billions of people. It also turned a cash problem into a trash problem, and until daily incomes change, that strip of packets in the shop doorway is not going anywhere.

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Every number in this article comes from the episode's fact sheet; the sources are listed in full on the episode page. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].