Producing pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and personal grooming products require a specialized processes. To process and blend sensitive materials, the proper configuration of pumps and mixers is a non-negotiable. In addition, these products can use chemicals, water, powders, thickeners, coloring agents, preservatives, and a wide variety of other substances.
Generally, the equipment must meet strong sanitary requirements, just as you find with food and beverage production. The FDA is strict about hygienic standards to preserve production quality across different manufacturers.
Let’s look at a few examples of common production processes for cosmetic and pharmaceutical items. It’s easy to see why one pump system solution does not work for every application.
Toothpaste
Toothpaste gets its name because of its thick, pasty consistency. A general composition for this product may contain water, humectants, abrasives, thickeners, surfactants, coloring agents, flavoring agents, and preservatives.
To achieve the ideal consistency, an agitator mixes the key ingredients with a vacuum-sealed tank and feed system to blend in secondary ingredients at specific times, speeds, and temperatures. Ultimately, a hygienic progressive cavity pump will pull the end product from the tank to feed into the product packaging plant.
Soap
Soaps, shampoos and shower gels are designed to have an optimum viscosity and specific pH levels. They may be composed of surfactants, demineralized water, sodium chloride, perfumes, coloring agents, and preservatives. An inline mixer or agitator may be used for the initial blending of ingredients, sometimes requiring additional heating elements for certain phases. Ultimately, the final gel or fluid will be transferred through a hygienic pump system.
Deodorant
Unlike soap or toothpaste, a standard deodorant stick is more of a powder-based product with just enough moisture to stick to the skin when applied. With this in mind, there are gel and roll-on deodorants with different liquid consistencies, often made from demineralized water, fragrances, humectants, emulsifiers, thickeners, aluminum chlorohydrate, and special additives. Mixing, agitating, and pumping equipment requires special configurations to meet hygienic standards.
Inoxpa Hygienic Pumps
For more examples of different cosmetics and pharmaceuticals production processes, check out Inoxpa’s website. You can quickly see that each application has similar, yet unique challenges to overcome because of the various ingredients and the consistency of the end products.
Inoxpa is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of hygienic pumps. A handful of industries and applications utilize their sanitary pumps, mixers, agitators, and other equipment—food and beverage, cosmetics, dairy, pharmaceuticals, and breweries are a few examples. If you are looking for a high-quality hygienic pump system, consider Inoxpa equipment. Inoxpa’s pumps have a strong reputation for consistent, accurate, and dependable performance.
DXP Pacific is proud to be a longtime product partner with Inoxpa. We recommend their pumps and equipment to many of our pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry clients. To learn more about Inoxpa and see if their systems are right for your specific application, contact us today.