How her grandmother did it: Weymouth woman turns family recipe into green cleaning company

ABINGTON – When Mary Conroy emigrated from Kylemoore, Ireland, in 1917, she quickly found work in the service industry and maintained a list of wealthy Boston-area clients, including a local judge who hired her as a housekeeper.

For years she worked in the judge's home, and her granddaughter Anne Joyce would visit her as she worked using an all-purpose cleaning concoction Conroy  whipped up in the kitchen.

Conroy had no way of knowing that, more than 100 years after leaving her home country, her granddaughter would cherish those memories and ultimately use her homegrown recipe to start a small business.

"I owned my own cleaning business and I was using all that toxic stuff – Clorox Cleanup, Comet, you name it – and my hands were pale and dried out, I was breathing it in and it was awful," Joyce, now a 64-year-old mom of four, said. "As I was working, I thought maybe it's time to go back to the way my grandmother did it."

Today, Joyce sells four different variations of her grandmother's environmentally friendly cleaning product under the brand Annie's Pure and Simple. She claims the cleaner is truly all purpose – she can give you 24 different uses for it off of the top of her head – and it's made using a handful of all-natural ingredients that make it one of the only truly green cleaning products on the market.

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"You can wash your fruit in it, use it around babies and pets. You could drink it and nothing bad would happen to you," she said.

Annie's Pure and Simple is made using organic vinegar, water and essential oils. The only other ingredient listed on the bottle is sodium lauryl sulfate, the agent used to clean the bottles before the solution is poured in. It also helps bind the ingredients together. Sodium lauryl sulfate has been deemed a safe additive to everything from personal care products to food by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 

All of Annie's products – the cleaner comes in peppermint, lemon, grapefruit and lavender scents – are made by Joyce and two employees in a warehouse in Abington. The bottles are cleaned and labeled, the cleaning solution mixed, the bottles filled and caps twisted on all by hand. They then box everything individually and it is either picked up by a distributor or personally driven to the stores that sell it.

"It's a lot of handwork," Joyce said. "I never thought I was going to sell a cleaning product. It was just important to me that the people who worked for me used clean products."

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When she started selling Annie's Pure and Simple to friends, family and cleaning clients 15 years ago, Joyce said there were very few green products on the market, and switching to less toxic products wasn't the movement it is today. By the time her product hit the shelves in 2014, however, the shift was in full swing.

When she first started the brand, Joyce was making about 24 bottles of product per week in her kitchen and garage. Now her team is producing 150 six-bottle boxes per week in the warehouse.

"It's for our health. Our homes are being polluted by these toxic chemicals that have nowhere to go once we spray them. They just stay in the air and we breathe them in over and over," she said. "When you breathe in a green product, it isn't going to hurt you. You have to think about the greater good."

Annie's Pure and Simple is available in New England Whole Foods locations, in dozens of small grocery stores and at anniespureandsimple.com. Bottles are $8.99 for 32 ounces and $4.99 for 16 ounces

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Uniquely Local is a series of stories by Mary Whitfill highlighting the South Shore’s farmers, bakers and makers. Have a story idea? Reach Mary at mwhitfill@patriotledger.com.

This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Weymouth woman uses family cleaning recipe for Annie's Pure and Simple