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•🦷 Who: Dr. Jordan Harper, DMD, and business partner Kyle Schroeder
•📢 What: Launching ENML, a luxury oral care brand with fluoride-free products
•📅 When: Following Niceville’s fluoride removal decision in January
•📍 Where: Niceville, Florida, with international expansion plans
•❓ Why: To offer an alternative to fluoride-based oral care products and establish Niceville as a global player in high-end dentistry
I got a little whiplash from an email courtesy of Dr. Jordan Harper, DMD.
You see after Niceville decided to stop putting Flouride in city water at their January city council meeting – I expected dentists to show up with pitchforks in hand to the February meeting demanding the Flouride machine (yes, there is a machine) and get switched back on.
No dentists arrived in the council chambers on Tuesday with farming implements, and Dr. Harper’s message was the exact opposite of what I’d expected.
He told me he’s been watching this trend for some time – and that cities removing fluoride from water may not be such a bad thing.
“I’m happy to provide some perspective to the readers from a professional standpoint as this is groundbreaking stuff that is going to cause a shift in the trends of oral care moving forward,” the email read.
Like I said, whiplash.
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Harper is a dentist – and says he dreamed of becoming one since he was 14. After dental school, he moved back to Niceville and began practicing in a white building on Palm Boulevard that reminds you of a freshly cleaned molar as you pass it by on the way up or down the road.
He says the trend away from Flouride just is – “I take a stance of being Flouride Agnostic,” Harper said, “Flouride works. It protects your teeth.” Harper added that there was no doubt among scientists and dentists that adding fluoride into drinking water drastically reduced the number of cavities that dentists saw and helped shift dentistry from a reactive to a preventative stance with the public. But, Harper acknowledged concerns about the element and its potential effects on people who get too much of it. (You can read about those effects, which include everything from nausea and vomiting to congenital disabilities and cancer if too much is consumed, in this NIH-funded and backed research paper.)
But he’s also not just a dentist. He’s something of a serial entrepreneur, too. He’s got his dentistry practice, real estate, and a company that wants to launch your tube of Colgate Extra Plus Super Duper Whitening With Baking Soda Crystals into the sun – cap first.
A couple of months ago – he launched ENML (enml.com). The company’s concept is simple – many people post-COVID have become quite discerning about what they put in their bodies. As a result, they are more concerned about overexposure to Flouride.
ENML sells toothpaste and mouthwash with a compound called Micro-Hydroxyapatite (pronounced no-no hi-drox-e-ap-uh-tite) that cleans and protects teeth like fluoride – but is chemically the same content as the outside of your teeth. According to ENML’s literature on their website – the compound is supposed to “works by actually rebuilding your enamel. It’s not just about surface protection—it’s about restoration.”
Chemical companies produce gobs more fluoride – because it’s what most people use. Micro-hydroxyapatite is a lot more expensive because far fewer chemical manufacturers make it. Adam Smith’s classic supply-and-demand issue.
Ultimately, market forces make a jar of the tooth-cleaning tablets that are supposed to replace your toothpaste cost about $25 for sixty tablets (so you can brush twice a day).
Harper and his business partner (and past Niceville Valedictorian) Kyle Schroeder ultimately want to create something like an über luxury brand of oral care – with a line that expands far past toothpaste and mouthwash.
“Think of this like the Hermès or the Louis Vuitton of toothpaste oral care in general,” Harper explained, “Because ultimately, we started with toothpaste. Now we have mouthwash. There’s going to be other things. We got a pipeline of products coming over the next couple years, as they get [to] R and D, to get produced, and all this stuff comes together.”
Research and Design (R and D) caught my ear and made it sound like they are planning for something big that could mean jobs in Niceville (or Bangladesh, if they decide to outsource it, right?). So I asked, ‘What does this do for the City of Niceville in the long term?’ – because I’m a Niceville homer at heart.
“We have always wanted to do something cool in Niceville, right?” Harper said with exuberance, “We just thought, ‘How cool would it be to build this internationally?’ Because that’s the goal. It’s going to be an international brand that’s freaking headquartered in Niceville. Not Miami, it’s not New York, it’s not, you know, LA, it’s Niceville. We just always thought it’d be cool because we both grew up here.” And he believes these small tablets could be the way forward. “Because ultimately, the goal is not to, the goal is not to like, we’re not trying to like, create a little drop in the lake here. We’re trying to create a wave,” Harper concluded.
So – could Niceville’s economy soon run on money generated from the military-industrial, tourism, and teeth complexes?
Maybe.
