Home and personal care product manufacturers face mounting pressure to release their products quicker while simultaneously ensuring product safety and quality.
As production timelines shorten and approvals are fast-tracked, waiting 3-5 days for traditional agar plating results for microbial release are no longer efficient. You’re willing to spend money on equipment to streamline your operations and manufacturing processes, but have you looked at a new rapid microbial method (RMM) technology as a solution?
The “rapid” in rapid microbial methods refers to faster time to result. Some methods can reduce your time to result from 5 days down to 1 day: that’s getting product out to the market 4 times faster. Rapid methods have high throughput, objective results, and can process samples efficiently with minimal input. The economic benefits of RMMs can make a significant impact on your operations and overall costs.
While traditional agar plating microbial limits testing has proven to be effective, the subjectivity of it prolongs the production cycle, delaying your time to market. An RMM system can mitigate the risk of human error or subjective readings while being easy to validate and use. Some rapid methods require quite a bit of lab space and may need additional modules to accommodate testing volume. So, look for a system with a small footprint that can easily integrate into your existing laboratory bench space and can readily handle throughput requirements. When integrating an RMM into a lean manufacturing process, testing raw materials and in-process formulations enables companies to detect microbial contamination earlier and reduce production waste.
Pairing your RMM with an accurate identification method can also affect your operational efficiency and costs. Because operational decisions are based on microbial identifications, it’s critically important that those identifications are accurate and reproducible. Look for a partner who can support your microbial detection and identification needs.
RMMs don’t just serve a valuable purpose for the lab. They can also benefit your entire organization, starting from the bottom up. Think of it as a domino effect – RMMs deliver quick, definitive answers on whether your product is free from microbial contaminants, enabling your company to make a more confident decision for consumer safety. This definitive decision enables you to increase your manufacturing process speed and get products to market faster. Getting products to market safely and fast equates to a higher revenue share, which boosts your bottom line, enables you to really reap the benefits of rapid methods, and keeps your consumers coming back for more.
