Streamlining Your Production and Brand Manufacturing with Outsourced Liquid Bottle Filling Services
- April 17, 2024
- Resources
Benefits of Outsourcing Liquid Bottle Filling
Outsourcing liquid filling of one’s production or brand manufacturing provides a wealth of strategic and financial benefits. From a strategic perspective, outsourcing allows for small scale production runs to test variations, adaptability for product changes, resources for scaling, quick to market path, batching and filling, and access to industry specific expertise relative to: formulators, quality, compliance, procurement, and more. Each strategic benefit is accompanied by financial advantages as well.
Outsourcing allows the brand owner to focus on marketing and growth strategies of their products without diverting internal resources or capital expenditures to support the varied areas of expertise and equipment required for product development and manufacturing.
Regulatory and Compliance Challenges
In today’s environment, keeping up with quality, regulatory and compliance requirements within the United States, and globally is a massive task. The expertise to manage these ever-evolving targets can be a distraction to a company that is focused on marketing their products. It’s not only the time investment but financial expenditure to keep up with the progressive landscape of regulatory and compliance requirements. U.S. Continental is an example of a company that provides such support for brands that range from outsourcing one hundred percent of liquid bottle filling manufacturing, to companies that have internal manufacturing capabilities but seek to expand capacity by using external bottle filling service providers.
TOLL and Turnkey Liquid Filling Solutions
Liquid filling solutions can be provided as TOLL or turnkey. For TOLL requirements, you provide all the materials (bill of materials) to the contract bottle filling company – and the bottle filling company is responsible for filling. In a turnkey scenario the contract bottle filling company procures the entire bill of materials, blends the formula, and then provides the services to manufacture the product. The resources required to qualify vendors, perform all facets of procurement and supply chain management, freight logistics, inbound inspection of components and tracking the inspections in accordance with a robust quality management system (QMS), in the aggregate provide support that far exceeds the primary service of liquid filling and bottling filling services.
In all solution options, the liquid filling solution provider fills the formula into the bottle, applies the closure (cap, sprayer, etc), applies the label(s) if the bottle is not screened or pre-labeled, packs out the product in the appropriate corrugated or shipper. During the entire process quality control and quality assurance processes are executed and documented.
Additional advantages of working with a contract bottle filler or bottle filling service provider is to benefit from the company’s economy of scale. For vendors like, U.S. Continental, leveraging their chemical purchasing and component purchasing volume and supplier relationships often result in lower costs to the brand owner. In addition, as a contract manufacturer, U.S. Continental is regularly investing in the latest technology to ensure cost effective, efficient, accurate manufacturing and liquid bottle filling.
Extending Value with Kitting Services
With many brands seeking to provide greater value to their customers, kitting services is a great add-on option. For manufacturers such as U.S. Continental, designing boxes, chip boxes, elegant bags and other containers to bundle multiple items is a cost-effective way for brand owners to increase the value proposition of their products. Kitting can combine multiple liquid filled bottles or tubes, into a single pack. In the kitted container, other branded accessories can be included as well. In the case of U.S. Continental’s leather and fabric care customers, such accessories may consist of brushes, towels, erasers, individually packaged wipes, etc. The options for leveraging kitting services to enhance product value is endless.
When selecting an outsource partner for contract manufacturing, look for other advantages that can help streamline one’s business broadly. In the case of U.S. Continental, they also offer a robust R&D lab for developing custom, efficacious formulations and eco-friendly products. Other add-on services with U.S. Continental include: kitting, hot-filling of wax based products, tube filling, single packed wipes, shrink wrapping, brand development and 3PL services. When one thinks about streamlining operations, the advantages may be more expansive than solely liquid filling solutions.