Robinson Pharma upgrades for more efficient encapsulation
initiated a series of upgrades in its facility, which the firm says
will improve speed of delivery and quality assurance.
The contract manufacturer last month received certification for cGMP production of dietary supplements, and also implemented an automated soft gel inspection system. In addition, the company this month started switching its machinery to faster and more accurate encapsulators. According to Robinson Pharma's vice president of marketing Kenn Israel, the upgrades are expected to improve the company's competitiveness, in terms of both quality and pricing. "Eventually, as a company becomes more efficient it is able to be more cost competitive. As a company, I'd say we're approaching a maximum competitive capacity," he told NutraIngredients-USA.com. Machinery upgrades Robinson Pharma this week announced that it has started a multi-year initiative to upgrade all its encapsulators to a faster, more accurate model. The company has so far added three new Kamata encapsulators to its facility, to replace its existing Bo-Chang machines. Although the Bo-Chang is "reliable" and "effective", Israel said that the Japanese-made Kamata is "recognized in the soft gel business as the very best". "Kamata has twice the encapsulation rate as the Bo-Chang, so with each line we convert it is like adding an extra production line," he said. Robinson Pharma currently has 22 encapsulation lines, which the company says makes it the largest soft get encapsulator in the US. The firm produces around 12bn soft gels a year. The company said it eventually plans to convert all its lines to Kamata machines, a major shift in its infrastructure that will take several years and run up costs "in the tens of millions of US dollars". Benefits for customers will include faster speed of delivery and speed of turnover. In addition, production with the new machines can be more cost-efficient for customers that supply their own ingredients, as Kamata is said to be more precise and therefore results in less ingredient waste. Another benefit of Kamata is that it can effectively manage highly viscous fill materials, such as high potency CoQ10 or mineral and multivitamin formulas. Other advantages include a dense die roll design and simplified operation, said the firm. Automated soft gel inspection Robinson Pharma has also in recent weeks upgraded its soft gel inspection to a fully automated Symetix optical inspection system, which the firm said delivers greater quality assurance. The company explained that traditional soft gel inspection SOPs involve human operators visually inspecting thousands of soft gels a day, which can lead to some errors. "The new automated system digitally photographs each soft gel with up to 4 cameras and compares each the set of images to a reference standard image set of an accepted and approved dose. The new system can process up to 1 million doses per hour," said Robinson Pharma. The machine checks for irregularities in color, size, shape, width, symmetry, and surface quality, and also detects foreign objects or flaws. cGMP certification In early January, the company also announced that it successfully completed an audit for cGMP compliant manufacture of dietary supplements. The audit, which was conducted by the independent tester Shuster, included an analysis of SOPs, staff qualifications, training, facility adequacy and cleanliness. All aspects of the manufacturing process were also reviewed, including receipt and validation of ingredients, the production process, post production product analysis, product handling, packaging and storage. Robinson Pharma said the certification will help position the company to "pursue important additional market opportunities in 2008".
