The Benefits of GEMCO’s Porta Hopper for APS and Its Cosmetics Clients

Advanced Powder Solutions (APS) is a contract manufacturer that offers testing, blending, packaging, and labeling services across various industries and applications. They rely on GEMCO’s machinery, especially the Porta Hopper, a versatile, powerful, and rapid blending technology.

One of their prominent clients is a global cosmetics manufacturer renowned for producing high-quality products, primarily for multilevel marketing vendors. Their expertise lies in body powders, fragrances, and other skincare products.

Challenge

Six years ago, they embarked on a quest for a more efficient way to blend their ingredients, seeking uniformity, efficiency, and heightened customer satisfaction. They experimented with ribbon blenders but encountered issues like high material losses, lengthy blending times, and quality problems that led to customer complaints. In the cosmetics industry, common powder problems include:

• Disruption in the underlying microstructure, impacting particle size distribution and affecting the product’s appearance, performance, and stability.
• Negative interactions between ingredients, leading to clumping, caking, or other undesirable effects.
• Harmful impact on the product’s physicochemical properties, affecting the product’s flowability (rheology), friction (tribology), and surface activity.

Solution

The cosmetics manufacturer decided to give APS a try. APS presented them with superior blending technology using the Porta Hopper, designed, and manufactured by GEMCO. The Porta Hopper, a versatile mixing and material handling tool, that blends any material in minutes, eliminating dead spots or segregation. The Porta Hopper incorporates GEMCO’s exclusive high-efficiency D/3 double-cone design, featuring a detachable hopper as half of the blender. This portable hopper is mounted on wheels for easy transportation and can be sealed with dust-tight covers during transit. By employing multiple hoppers, the system can handle and process materials in a semi-continuous cycle, reducing downtime to the minimal period required for hopper exchange. APS also offered customized services, including labeling, analysis, and documentation. APS’s ISO certification ensures adherence to the highest good manufacturing practices (GMP) standards in the cosmetics industry.

Outcome

The trial was a resounding success. The cosmetics manufacturer was astounded by APS’s service quality and speed. They conducted their first product test, a popular body powder with fragrance, and the results surpassed anything they had previously manufactured. The texture and feel of the powder, crucial for skincare products, were especially impressive. They chose to continue their partnership with APS, contracting them to produce at least 10 different products. They have become loyal customers, favoring APS over other manufacturers. Here are some benefits the cosmetics manufacturer enjoyed from APS’s service with GEMCO’s Porta Hopper:

• Reduced Losses: The Porta Hopper features a unique discharge system that facilitates complete discharge without manual intervention, saving both money and resources.
• Faster Blending Times: The Porta Hopper employs macro blending to consistently move the entire material bed using gravity as the primary force, reducing blending time and energy consumption. This increased the cosmetics manufacturer’s productivity and profitability as they could produce more batches in less time.
• Improved Quality: The Porta Hopper ensures geometric uniformity and superior distribution of active ingredients, leading to consistent results across different batches. This enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, it preserves the material’s physical characteristics, such as color, shape, size, and density, allowing the cosmetics manufacturer to deliver products that meet their high standards.

The customer has been with APS for six years now. Year after year, APS manufactures uniform and repeatable results. Every year, APS has seen an increase not only in the volume of materials but also in the number of products it services within the customer’s portfolio. APS has become a true extension of manufacturing for the client.

Conclusion

APS takes pride in its partnership with GEMCO and the utilization of the Porta Hopper for its blending requirements. They have witnessed remarkable results in terms of quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Their ability to meet and exceed their customers’ high standards and expectations in the cosmetics industry and beyond has been a testament to their trust in GEMCO’s technology. Furthermore, APS has effectively saved money, time, and resources for its clients by reducing losses, blending times, and energy consumption. They place their confidence in GEMCO’s technology to provide the market’s best blending solution.