Company · Sustainable Commerce
The Company Betting Your Cleaning Spray Can Fight the Plastic Crisis
Grove Collaborative turned a frustration with plastic-wrapped soap into a plastic-neutral retailer. The turnaround since is a lesson in what it costs to actually mean it.
Stuart Landesberg did not set out to run a public company. In 2012 he was simply irritated. Buying household basics - dish soap, hand wash, laundry detergent - seemed to force a choice between products that matched his values and products he could actually afford and find. So he rented space, started shipping a small catalog of eco-friendly home goods under the name ePantry, and tried to remove that choice for other people. Twelve years later that irritation trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GROV.
The company he built, renamed Grove Collaborative in 2016, is not a single hero product. It is a store - an online marketplace and subscription service for eco-friendly home care, cleaning, personal care, beauty, baby, pet, and wellness essentials. Some of what it sells carries Grove's own labels; much of it comes from third-party brands screened against ingredient and sustainability standards. The pitch on Grove's own site is deliberately unglamorous: "Less plastic. More peace of mind."
01 / THE IDEAA store built around subtraction
Most companies that call themselves sustainable sell you one better version of one thing - a laundry sheet, a refillable bottle, a cleaner concentrate. Grove's insight was different: the plastic problem lives in the boring, repeat purchases that fill a home, and the bottleneck for shoppers is trust, not desire. Curate the whole cart, verify the ingredients, and make the sustainable option the default rather than the premium.
That framing shows up in the catalog's organization. Grove groups its assortment into Home, Beauty and personal care, Baby and kids, Health and wellness, Pet, and Laundry, with a flagship "Unplastic Shop" running through all of it. The company's own brand, Grove Co., anchors the home-care aisles with concentrated cleaners and refillable dispensers designed to cut down on single-use bottles.
The plastic-neutral loop
02 / THE PROMISEWhat "plastic neutral" actually means
Grove has been plastic neutral since 2020. The claim is specific: for every pound of plastic the company sells, online or through partners, it funds the recovery of an equal amount of ocean- and nature-bound plastic from the environment. That recovery runs through outside platforms such as rePurpose Global rather than a Grove-owned operation. To date the program has passed 15 million pounds of nature-bound plastic collected.
Sitting beneath that promise is a set of standards the company calls Beyond Plastic - its plan to strip single-use plastic out of its own assortment and, in its telling, to push the broader consumer-products industry in the same direction. Every Grove order is described as both carbon neutral and plastic neutral, and the company reports its progress publicly each year.
The credentials are not incidental. Grove has been a Certified B Corporation since 2014 and recertified with a score of 100.9 - against a median of 50.9 for ordinary businesses. In 2021 it became a public benefit corporation, which writes its environmental and social goals into its legal charter. In practice that means "we'll get to sustainability later" is harder to say when the mission is a fiduciary duty.
03 / THE CUSTOMERWho actually shops here
Grove's customers are value- and health-conscious U.S. households - skewing toward parents and sustainability-minded shoppers - buying the repeat essentials that never stop running out. The company crossed one million households by the end of 2016, its first year under the Grove name, and has served millions since. The subscription structure lets a customer set up recurring shipments or place one-off orders, and it lets Grove build a durable, predictable relationship around products people would otherwise buy on autopilot at a big-box store.
What a shopper can actually do with Grove is narrow and practical. You can swap a cabinet of single-use bottles for concentrates and refills, set the whole thing to arrive on a schedule, and lean on Grove's screening so you are not reading ingredient labels yourself. You can track the carbon and plastic impact tied to your orders instead of taking a green label on faith. For people who want their spending to line up with how they say they want to live, the appeal is less about any one product and more about removing the friction of choosing well every time.
04 / THE RESETA $100M-a-year habit, broken
Grove's story is not a straight line up. The company went public in June 2022 through a SPAC merger with Virgin Group Acquisition Corp. II, at a roughly $1.5 billion implied value. Like many direct-to-consumer names that listed in that window, it had grown by spending heavily - and it was losing money at scale, on the order of $100 million a year.
In 2023, Jeff Yurcisin took over as chief executive and began a multi-year turnaround built on a blunt idea: stop doing the unprofitable things. Grove exited brick-and-mortar retail, a channel that had grown to less than 4% of the business and did not make money. It migrated its e-commerce platform to Shopify in early 2025 to strengthen first-party data and margins. And it leaned back into the direct-to-consumer model that started the company.
The trade-offs are visible in the numbers. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at $173.7 million, down roughly 15% year over year, with a net loss of about $11.7 million - a smaller loss than the company's history, reached by shrinking toward profitability rather than growing into it. Management has said it reached positive adjusted EBITDA during the turnaround, while acknowledging the work is taking longer than hoped.
Where revenue comes from (2025)
05 / THE EXPANSIONFrom cleaner cabinets to a healthier person
In March 2025 Grove acquired substantially all the assets of 8Greens, an early natural-wellness brand known for daily greens supplements in gummy, effervescent tablet, powder, and even lollipop formats. 8Greens was founded by Dawn Russell after a cancer diagnosis pushed her to overhaul her diet - a founder story that rhymes with Grove's own origin in personal frustration. The deal nudges Grove's definition of "a healthier home" to include the people living in it, not just the surfaces they clean.
The logic of buying a brand outright, rather than simply stocking it, is the same logic driving the revenue mix. Owned brands carry higher margins and give Grove control over formulation, packaging, and story - all the things a marketplace of other people's products cannot fully dictate. After the acquisition, 8Greens supplements went live on Grove's site while staying available through Amazon, QVC, and the brand's own channels, keeping their existing formulas and taste. It is a template Grove can run again: find a brand that fits the healthier-home thesis, fold it in, and widen the share of the cart it actually owns.
06 / THE MARKETWhere Grove fits
Grove sits at an awkward, interesting intersection: part sustainability-focused retailer, part consumer-products company with its own brands, part subscription service. Its direct rivals are other values-led sellers - Blueland, Public Goods, Thrive Market, Branch Basics, Dropps - along with individual green CPG lines such as Method, Seventh Generation, and Mrs. Meyer's that now sit on ordinary shelves. And looming over all of it is the everything-store convenience of Amazon and mass retail.
The difference Grove leans on is structural rather than promotional. Method makes greener products; Grove built a green store around a vetted set of them, wrapped it in plastic and carbon neutrality, and made the whole thing a legal obligation via its public benefit charter. Whether that is enough of a moat in a low-margin category is exactly the question the turnaround is trying to answer.
07 / THE TIMELINEFourteen years, one thesis
What holds the fourteen years together is a single, stubborn thesis: that the mundane repeat purchase - the thing under your sink - is where the plastic crisis actually lives, and that fixing the mundane moves more plastic than any hero product ever could. Grove is still proving whether that thesis can also be a durable business. But it has already proven it can be a legal one.