From clean beauty to AI-driven skincare formulations, personal care manufacturing is entering a new era, one defined by three Cs: complexity, customization, and compliance.
In North America alone, personal care retail sales are projected to reach $157 billion by 2030, in part due to consumer demand for ethical, sustainable, and high-performance products. Meanwhile, regulatory shifts like 2022’s MoCRA (Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act) have raised the bar for Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) compliance, documentation, and facility design.
Whether you’re a multinational beauty brand or a specialty contract manufacturer in the beauty industry, ingredient handling is at the heart of your success. To make toothpaste, hair care, shampoos, lotion, gels, creams, makeup, and more, you need solutions that prioritize precision dosing and meet regulatory requirements.
Simply put, automating your bulk material systems is how you stay competitive. As personalized beauty trends grow (like men’s grooming products expanding at a 7-8% CAGR) formulation adjustments mean your lines need to be versatile.
Here’s how personal care manufacturers can innovate and design ingredient systems that are precise, hygienic, and scalable.
Behind everyday personal care products — from toothpaste to hair gel — is a complex system for handling powdered raw materials. While some liquid ingredients are involved, powders are foundational to these formulations and often determine product performance and consistency.
In oral care and topical applications alike, powders must be precisely blended and transferred to downstream processing without compromising uniformity. Once mixed into a formulation, they must maintain that homogeneity. Any segregation during transfer can lead to inconsistent dosing and quality issues, which is why dense phase conveying is commonly used to move blended powders efficiently while preserving their integrity.
These processes must also account for strict segregation requirements, including allergen controls such as gluten, to prevent cross-contamination across product lines.
Toothpaste manufacturing illustrates this complexity well. Here, multiple powdered raw materials are introduced into liquids to create a stable paste. Each powder behaves differently during storage, dosing, and conveying. For example:
Consumers scrutinize every label — and so do regulators. With MoCRA now in effect, manufacturers face stricter GMP requirements around facility registration, safety substantiation, traceability, and contamination control.
This level of hygiene necessarily requires a higher standard of design and fabrication. Internal vessel finishes, weld quality, and grinding must be exceptionally smooth to eliminate crevices where material can collect and contaminants can persist.
These welds are intentionally seamless, and achieving that finish takes time, precision, and skilled labor. While this process increases upfront equipment cost, it also delivers long-term value by reducing cleaning risk, improving product safety, and helping you consistently meet evolving regulatory and consumer expectations.
As the personal care market becomes increasingly fragmented, agility has emerged as a competitive advantage when manufacturing personal care products. The rise of niche brands and contract manufacturers means formulas evolve quickly, custom runs are standard, and a single production day may involve multiple SKUs, each with dramatically different ingredient profiles.
We recommend modular ingredient handling systems designed to scale seamlessly from pilot batches to full production. AZO’s configurable microdosing and batching solutions are built to adapt to changing recipe sizes, ingredient counts, and processing demands without compromising accuracy or efficiency.
An oral care manufacturer, for example, may manage more than 40 raw materials across its formulations. One batch may require just 10 ingredients, another 20, and another all 40. AZO systems support this variability by enabling big bag unloading, controlled storage, and precise dosing for each formulation. Using gravimetric gain-in-weight and loss-in-weight technologies, along with vacuum conveying, ingredients are delivered accurately and consistently every time.
Changeover speed is also important. The AZO®eDos feeder is designed for tool-free disassembly, making it easy to clean between runs. This supports fast product changeovers, reduces downtime, and helps manufacturers move from one formula to the next with confidence.
Personal care production lines frequently contend with dust generation and inconsistent powder flowability, which directly affect safety and product quality. Many commonly used ingredients, including pigments, botanical powders, and clays, can produce fine dusts that present combustible hazards. Glycine, for example, is widely used in toothpaste formulations and is classified as an explosion risk.
Under NFPA 660, manufacturers are responsible for identifying these risks and implementing appropriate mitigation strategies. This begins with a detailed evaluation of material characteristics. When working with AZO, safety data sheets (SDS) are reviewed alongside material behavior data from our internal database to ensure potential hazards are identified early and addressed at the system design level.
From there, dust and explosion protection are integrated directly into the equipment. Ingredient handling systems are engineered to meet NFPA and OSHA requirements, incorporating proper grounding, effective dust collection, and explosion protection where required.
Changeover speed is a growing bottleneck in multi-product personal care facilities, especially when production shifts between very different products such as shampoos, skincare powders, or pigment-heavy formulations. Even small amounts of residual powder — particularly allergens or colorants — can compromise the next batch if equipment is not designed for fast, thorough cleaning.
In dry powder handling systems, traditional clean-in-place (CIP) approaches are often counterproductive. Introducing moisture into a powder system creates new challenges: if cleaning solutions are not completely removed, powders can adhere to internal surfaces, filters, and seams. Eliminating that residual moisture then requires significant heat and extended drying time, adding complexity and downtime rather than reducing it.
Systems must allow operators to fully inspect and clean internal surfaces without entering confined spaces. AZO’s designs prioritize external access through strategically placed doors, removable filters, and tool-free components, enabling effective manual cleaning using brushes or vacuums while maintaining safety protocols that limit internal vessel entry.
Where wet cleaning is required, wash-in-place (WIP) solutions offer a controlled alternative. Liquid lances can be used to clean specific areas without flooding the system, reducing moisture exposure and simplifying drying. Across all configurations, clamp-on piping and angled internal surfaces facilitate faster disassembly, easier sanitation, and more reliable changeovers.
Ingredient automation helps personal care manufacturers improve accuracy, efficiency, and compliance. For example, by eliminating manual weighing of raw ingredients, automated systems significantly reduce labor requirements and remove one common source of human error. Gravimetric dosing delivers greater accuracy and repeatability, ensuring formulations are produced exactly as specified batch after batch.
Automation also increases throughput. Automated dosing units operate faster and more consistently than manual processes, allowing manufacturers to move more product through the line without sacrificing precision. When systems are properly designed, operators can focus on higher-value tasks.
Beyond speed and accuracy, automation enables full tracking and traceability. Every ingredient addition and weighment can be captured and assigned to a specific lot, supporting audit readiness, recall management, and regulatory compliance. While the initial investment may be higher — particularly when dedicated bins are required for individual ingredients and cleaning protocols must support frequent changeovers — the long-term operational gains often outweigh the upfront costs.
In practice, automation supports the core requirements of modern personal care manufacturing by delivering:
AZO’s engineered systems have an established track record of solving the real-world challenges of powder handling in the personal care industry. Whether you’re dealing with dust risks, upscaling a new facility, or optimizing your dosing procedures, we’re here to help. We believe in building lasting relationships and partnerships to help you bring innovative products to life.
Let’s design a better ingredient system for your product line.