Probably basically the same reason as lemon scented cleaners. The natural scent/taste of the active ingredients is bad, so you need something strong enough to cover it up, yet tolerated by most people. Then it becomes what people expect.
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I think it may have been The Toothpaste Millionaire, which I remember for teaching me what a Great Gross (12*144 = 1,728) was.
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Author of The Pushcart War? Wow! I don’t remember the connection, but they were both great books.
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Monkey tooth powder (mainly charcoal) is popular in India:
Just make sure you don’t mix up the order and get the powdered monkey tooth.
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Perfect for use with my monkey’s paw toothbrush.
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YES
That book inspired little me to try selling homemade toothpaste to my third grade class. It didn’t go over well, and I learned never to aspire to anything ever again.
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some of the new jazz like the rainbow varieties have those micro-beads
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Well, if you want the right abrasive…
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For me the tube is empty when its completely flat, then you squeeze the edges of the round head bit up into the nozzle, I don’t think you can get any more out than that! Maybe if you carefully use a steamroller but that seems excessive.
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Yes! You’d still need to do the squeezing of the edges up into the nozzle though. My gran had something similar but it was about 1/5 the size, made of plastic and generally more effort that even I’d be willing to put into it.
Also, given the amount of toothpaste a device like this would save from being wasted you’d probably need to hand it down to your grand-children to make your money back.
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Excellent!
That’s the first concrete lead I’ve heard 
And also, @OtherMichael , I recall the baby food jars and the later switch to toothpaste tubes, so I think the movie may have been relatively faithful to the book.
Edit to add:
Well, damn… 
Now that I look at the link to the book, I see the protagonist was black, which was changed (as I recall) in the movie. At some level, I’m not surprised, but I’m retroactively disappointed.
On a happier note, I read The Great Pushcart War with great pleasure, so I have every confidence the book will be far superior to the movie.
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I didn’t remember the protagonist as being black at all, but I’m nearly certain I checked that book out from the library during the summer as a child at some point in the 1980’s. It almost has to have been this one. After all, how many juvenile fiction books about homemade toothpaste empires have been written?
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I’m surprised the anti-fluoride brigades haven’t shown up yet.
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When I first saw the topic, I nearly started complaining that this isn’t very good toothpaste due to the lack of fluoride but decided to wait till now.
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But it says he put sodium fluoride in it…
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Oh, didn’t even watch the video. Just read the text which didn’t include that as a component.
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Weirdly, you were right that he didn’t include fluoride. I just now watched the video, but the description text in the drop-down did say he used NaF. (Although in the video he said he didn’t bother with it because he wasn’t going to use that toothpaste for the rest of his life. It’s just a proof of concept.)
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Leela: How can you trick people into drinking something that comes from your behind? It’s disgusting!
Slurm Queen: Is it? Honey comes from a bee’s behind. Milk comes from a cow’s behind. And have you ever tried toothpaste?
Fry: Whose behind does that come from?
Slurm Queen: You don’t want to know.
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[quote]There was a big scandal a few years back when it was found that some brands in India were using human bones as their source of toothpaste calcium.
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Meh. They’re dead.
I’d still use it if it were properly processed.
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