Filling Your Product’s Potential

Key Package Filling Considerations to Deliver Quality Products, Delight Consumers & Drive Growth

When it comes to ensuring your health and wellness product’s performance, quality and integrity, the filling process likely isn’t the first thing to come to mind. However, the behind-the-scenes processes and technologies just might be what ensures lasting success.

Explore these four behind-the-scenes considerations worth discussing with your contract packaging partner to maximize use of the right filling technology for your current and future needs.

1. Right-Sizing the Process for Your Product

Filling processes cannot be one-size-fits-all. State-of-the-art technologies that fill bottles, sachets, pouches and stick packs with liquids, powders, gummies and more each have nuances that require a close examination of your process’ characteristics to ensure optimal quality.

Many different factors help determine an optimal filling process. Among the top concerns are:

• pH Level – Whether you’re using a hot or cold filling process, it’s important to make sure filling doesn’t alter the product’s pH. Otherwise, you may put product quality and consumer satisfaction at risk.
• Viscosity – Liquids with a higher viscosity take more time and pressure to fill, and the right balance is needed to get things flowing – without overflowing. This will also influence the type of liquid filler you need to fill the package.
• Material Behaviors – Powders that are more prone to going airborne require careful consideration to protect machinery, prevent waste and ensure precise filling of your packaging.
• Size and Shape – The firmness, geometry and consistency of some gummies, for example, can pose challenges for filling machines and laser counting systems.
• Packaging – The size, weight, shape, material and seals of your packaging design can impact the quality of the final product.

2. Food Safety Requirements

It goes without saying that your contract packaging partner must have the right standard operating procedures (SOP) – like environmental and microbial monitoring – in place to protect product safety. Other technologies, like automated or manual product inspection systems are an added measure of protection.

To start, obtain copies of your co-packager’s certifications for your records. Depending on your application, these certifications may differ, but a trustworthy partner will likely be certified by:

• NSF: National health standard that protects food, consumer products and the environment.
  • NSF Certified for Sport: Extension of NSF available for sport supplements, functional foods and personal care products.
  • Over-the-Counter (OTC): Managed by NSF, this audit protects non-prescription drug safety with compliance checks of associated manufacturing / packaging facilities.
• ASQ: Mark of quality excellence by the American Society for Quality.
• SQF: Global food safety and quality certification from the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).
• GMP: Signifies health and wellness products are manufactured with food safety best practices.

Whatever your requirements, working with a trusted, certified supplier, like WePackItAll, will help you ensure the highest standards of food safety and quality.

3. Automation & Optimization

With all these other considerations in mind, it’s important to work with a co-packaging partner that can customize a solution that maximizes the efficiency of your process(es). Whether we’re working with new technologies or tried and true methods, we take the time to test, identify issues, solve problems and improve our overall system. We typically launch new technologies with more oversight, then advance from manual to semi-automated to automated procedures.

The goal is always to fill more at a time, with less labor, while maintaining product quality. We do that by creating the right filling methods first, before integrating automation wherever possible.

4. Your Future Growth & Evolution

Ever-changing consumer tastes and demand make our industry exciting. To stay ahead, we all need to be nimble. The easiest way to do that? Find a co-packaging partner that can leverage a wide range of filling technologies to fill almost any mix of product and packaging type.

Imagine the wide range of products and packaging types you might evolve into – e.g., grab-and-go options, sustainable materials and more. A co-packaging partner with the ability to seamlessly adapt to your changing needs will play a critical role in getting you on shelves faster than your competition.

Discover Why Filling Technology Matters

At the end of the day, you can only be as innovative as your processes and a partner with diverse capabilities will invest in new machinery and technologies to help you keep up with the latest industry advancements. At WePackItAll, continuing to focus where we excel – the co-packaging and filling process – strengthens our ability to invest resources, take on new challenges and gain expertise with innovative materials and processes.

In a dynamic industry, that’s how we continue to deliver for health and wellness brands after 49 years and counting. Interested in learning more about how we can help you optimize your filling and co-packaging process? Give us a call at 626-301-9214 or reach out to our packaging experts today.