Hapee!

One fine day, while I was at home channel surfing, I chanced upon a tv show in ANC where Cecilio K. Pedro, the President of Lamoiyan Corporation, was being interviewed. Lamoiyan is a Filipino corporation which manufactures and distributes Hapee toothpaste. At that time, Ruffa Gutierrez (pre Ylmaz) was the primary endorser of Hapee.

I don't remember much of the interview, except the part where Mr. Pedro said that the multinationals (presumably the manufacturers of Colgate and Close-Up) routinely purchased shelf space in supermarkets so that the other toothpaste distributors would no longer have any space to sell their products.

From that time on, I started using Hapee toothpaste. And I noticed that indeed, there were some supermarkets (or health and beauty shops a.k.a Watson's, Hortaleza) who didn't have Hapee on the shelves. But this did not deter me. I purposely held off from buying any other brand until I could find a store which had Hapee. I squeezed every last drop...er...gel from the tube. I kept an extra tube in case of shortage.

Nowadays, my happiness is two-fold. More and more supermarkets and h&b shops carry Hapee (even if its shelf space is 1/8 that of the others). And Lea Salonga is the new face of Hapee. As she puts it in Hapee's new tv ad, "[i]pinagmamalaki ko ang Hapee at ang mga Pinoy na tumatangkilik nito!"