The market's choppy / consolidating pattern continues, suggesting the need for an additional defensive play or two (or perhaps more), and with this as a backdrop, Ecolab is worth a review.

Ecolab (NYSE: ECL) is a global supplier of cleaning, sanitizing, and maintenance products and services for the hospitality, institutional, and industrial markets.

Analysts expect the company's domestic institutional, Kay, food & beverage, health care, and pest elimination units to continue to expand. Revenue is expected to increase a healthy 10-13% in 2008.

Further, international sales should continue to be strong, with better-than-adequate margins. Overall costs remain reasonable, even with higher raw material costs. In short, it's a largely positive commercial landscape for ECL, bolstered by favorable international economic conditions. The Reuters F2007/F2008 EPS consensus estimates for Ecolab are $1.66/$1.90.

Laundry detergent manufacturers have done it again; doubling the potency of detergent while cutting the bottle size in half. The Wall Street Journal talks about the marketing challenge that Procter & Gamble Co. (NYSE: PG), Unilever (NYSE: UL) and their competitors are about to face. The impetus for this move is not a greener earth or a more useful product, but instead, pressure from retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) to squeeze more product into the same shelf space. You will be able to do just as many loads with half as much detergent, and the price will be the same per bottle. The problem is getting people to realize that and, more importantly, convince them that they aren't somehow getting ripped off.

As the Journal says, "Retailers are pushing the big shrink in detergent bottles because when their shelves are full with smaller bottles, they lose fewer sales to products being out of stock and less employee time is spent replenishing product. Retailers also save on transportation costs because more of the smaller bottles can fit on a truck. Meanwhile, manufacturers, which over the past two years have been hit hard by high oil prices, save on the petroleum-based plastic packaging as well as the costs of shipping to retailers."

Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott's strategy of promoting the products as green-friendly makes sense, given how in vogue that is right now -- less plastic, less transportation -- it actually is environmentally friendly. But there's still the emotional, less rational problem: How do you convince someone to pay the same amount for 50 ounces as they used to pay for 100? And what's more, why do the retailers and manufacturers get all the benefits?