Gard Chemicals is a privately-owned family business formed in 1977 to develop industrial cleaning and maintenance chemical products.
The business, which supplies market-leading chemicals across a variety of industries, was contacted by a large UK-based leisure group as they were experiencing problems with body fat build-up.
It emerged that the organisation was using multiple products across their sites to remove and clean the build-up, including general tile cleaner, scum line paste, sauna and steam cleaner and safety floor cleaner.
Despite their best efforts, after cleaning their tiles still had a brown/orange film of body fat on them, consisting of natural oils from people’s skin.
For the leisure sector, Gard Chemicals was faced with multiple surfaces and situations where any given formulation needed to be effective to reduce the number of products required.
Any chemical to be used for these particular leisure applications had to have no effect on swimming pool readings (pH and TDS), which presented another challenge, but one which we were able to overcome.
Through our knowledge and experience in the leisure industry we already had an advantage in testing materials, which enabled us to swiftly formulate a new and exciting product. Degree Shower and Pool Cleaner very quickly breaks down all body fat residue from a variety of surfaces, including tiles, glass, wood and metal etc.
This specialist formulation immediately became a success, and it was evident that a unique gap in the market needed filling in the leisure industry.
With the rollout of Degree on a national basis, other application requests started to head our way including a calcium remover, tile restorer and a non-acid based limescale remover.