Supreme Chemicals’ Cumming headquarters may be small, but the cleaning line is popular with many big names.

CEO Ed Rice said his father developed the company’s first product, Krud Kutter, more than 30 years ago in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“I filled bottles for him when I was a kid,” Rice recalled.

The company relocated to Georgia in 1980.

“We were in Roswell and before that in Chamblee,” Rice said. “We moved to Cumming in 2001.”

The local site employs about a dozen workers, Rice said. There’s also a Lawrenceville manufacturing branch, which employs another 30 or so.

That staff has helped make Supreme Chemicals a force in the cleaning industry.

The Krud Kutter products are used by many well-known companies, including Ford, General Motors, Boeing, Disney and Royal Caribbean and Carnival cruise lines.

Jason Roussel, the company’s director of marketing, said the Krud Kutter line offers more than 30 products in about 80 different sizes.

“Krud Kutter is our original flagship product,” he said. “It’s a degreaser and stain remover.

“The industrial strength can be used in automotive settings, by the [do-it-yourselfers] or in various shops. It removes dried paint, food stains, permanent marker and even blood.”

Other products in the line include rust removers and converters, gutter cleaners, oil grabbers, adhesive and paint removers and even graffiti removers.

“We gear our products to different needs,” Rice said.

Some of the newest items include a red clay remover, which Roussel said is being used by many “farm baseball teams” around the Southeast, and a heavy duty cleaner and disinfectant.

Roussel said most of the big-name customers have learned about the products through Krud Kutter’s some 25,000 retailers, which include major department stores, home centers, and hardware, drug and paint stores.

“A lot of times, a retailer will call us up and say they have a client with a specific need and do we have a product to match that,” he said, noting all the items soon will be available for purchase on the company’s Web site.

“We’re really excited about that,” he said. “While our products are available in a lot of retailers, they might not always have what the customer needs or in the right size.”

Rice said many of the products are developed based on client needs.

As a chemist, he works on many of them himself, making sure all are “green.”

“We always first make a product that works and then make it environmentally-friendly,” he said. “There’s no point in making an environmentally-friendly product that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.”

Rice said the Krud Kutter line doesn’t use solvents or bleaches. All are also water-based, biodegradable and non-toxic.

“My dad starting doing that way back when,” he said. “He wasn’t trying to be green or anything, he just knew water was easier to work with.”