How to Produce Regulatory-Compliant Color on Life Science Pills, Liquids, Gels, and Capsules
Studies show consumers identify medications by color. Life Science Product Manufacturers must ensure accurate and consistent color on liquids, gels, powders, plastic films, capsules, and more to ensure safety and authenticity and confirm compliance for electronic record-keeping.
Challenges
Accurate color is necessary for consumer safety and to minimize the risk of counterfeiting but producing consistent color across different product types and materials is challenging.
- Color is difficult to match between liquid, gel, film, and solid products
- Incorrect color can lead to expensive product recalls
- Regulated products require compliance tracking, but electronic record-keeping is difficult to maintain
Solution
Digital color solutions enable manufacturers to effectively communicate with brands and efficiently formulate, produce, and control the color of Life Science products. By implementing an end-to-end color workflow that includes a spectrophotometer, formulation software, quality control software, and a light booth, manufacturers can confidently manufacture a range of product types, including powders, pills, liquids, gels, and films. In addition to ensuring tolerance, digital color solutions also create an automatic compliance audit trail for electronic record-keeping.
Results
- Improve color communication and quality
- Validate tolerance adherence and catch color drifts early
- Minimize errors caused by visual evaluation
- Reduce waste and recalls due to mismatched color
- Integrate compliance data into electronic record-keeping
- Scale from a single location to a global, multi-facility enterprise
How It Works
- The brand digitally communicates product color and acceptable tolerance.
- The manufacturer uses formulation software to create a color recipe for liquids, powders, plastic films, etc.
- Throughout production, the manufacturer takes measurements using a spectrophotometer fitted with an attachment to hold powders, liquids, and other difficult to hold samples.
- The color measurements are loaded into quality control software to compare against tolerances and generate scorecards to share with brands to validate compliance.
- If the brand supplies a physical standard or reference, the manufacturer can compare it against the production sample in a light booth to ensure color harmony under controlled lighting.
- The manufacturer generates a compliance audit log that details each event with operator ID, date, time, etc. for use in electronic record-keeping.
Featured Products
Benchtop sphere spectrophotometer that offers tight inter-instrument agreement and repeatability to measure color samples and ensure they are within tolerance. It can measure in both reflectance and transmission mode and be fitted with containers to hold a variety of samples types, including liquids, powders, films, and small pills.
Formulation and quality control software to accelerate color development for thin plastics and capsules. Color iMatch achieves excellent first match performance, requires fewer correction steps, and generates audit and compliance logs for electronic recordkeeping.
Quality assurance software to receive digital color standards and tolerances from the brand, evaluate adherence throughout production, and export audit and compliance logs for electronic recordkeeping.
Achieve Color Success
A digital color solution from X-Rite enables Life Science Product Manufacturers to produce consistent color across product types, track compliance, and generate an audit trail.
