New York CNN Business  — 

Getting your dish soap out of the bottle might not be on your top 10 list of daily annoyances. But Procter & Gamble is making it easier anyway.

Dawn, the top-selling dish soap brand, has unveiled a redesigned bottle with “patented no-flip cap technology.” That means the bottle stands, upside-down, on its cap and dispenses from the bottom. A self-sealing valve prevents the soap from leaking.

Dawn EZ-Squeeze, which is now on sale at major retailers starting at $2.84, took more than five years to design with “hundreds” of prototypes before the bottle hit shelves. EZ-Squeeze customers will no longer have to put down the sponge, flip over their dish soap and open the cap.

P&G, Dawn’s manufacturer, said in a press release that EZ-Squeeze is one of the “most researched and rigorously tested products” in its 50 year history.

Dawn EZ-Squeeze is a new inverted bottle with no-flip cap technology.

It may seem like a silly tweak, solving a problem no one had. But P&G hasn’t had a mega hit since Tide Pods, which came out a couple decades ago. So the company develops some periodic innovations for its products to try to boost sales.

For example, in 2019, Dawn rolled out a dish spray it said was designed more precisely for today’s consumer habits: More people are washing one or two dishes during “cooking downtime,” instead of letting them pile up and doing one big wash once they’re all done. P&G said the traditional Dawn bottle wasn’t intended to be used that way, so it also created the dish spray.

In 2020, it launched Microban 24, a line of surface antibacterial cleaning products that the company says kills bacteria for 24 hours. And it continually upgrades the popular Swiffer line, including pads specifically designed for pets or dusting.

P&G does not break out Dawn sales, but the brand is part of its home care division, which makes up one-tenth of the company’s more than $76 billion in annual sales.

The company’s research found that the new bottle design created a “mess-free experience” and the elimination of a traditional cap “improved ease of use for populations who had challenges with existing bottle designs since it could be dispensed easily with one hand.”

Not only has the bottle received an upgrade, but so has the formula. Dawn said that its soap has been updated to help cut grease and other messes more “quickly and easily,” Guerin McClure, vice president of North America dish care at P&G, said in a statement. “You’ve likely spent time shaking, flipping, and banging your dish soap bottle on the counter top in a messy attempt to make the most of every drop.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the lowest price for Dawn EZ-Squeeze. It starts at $2.84.