P&G Patents “Late Stage Product Differentiation Process” for Personal Care Product Manufacturing

The Procter & Gamble Company has been awarded a patent (No. 12,042,552 B2/David Scott Dunlop, Anthony William Hill, Anne Sloan,  Michael Kai-Chiau Chang) for a manufacturing process for personal care compositions that includes late-stage differentiation designed to reduce or eliminate the disadvantages of “currently known” batch and/or continuous processes.

The invention relates to a process for liquid personal care products such as shampoos, conditioners, lotions and creams where is a common base is used and differentiating ingredients are added to the base late in the process, but prior to packaging the final product. Often, this leads to downtime for the fillers and packing machines, which adds to the cost of the product, P&G notes in the patent.

In the patent file, P&G discusses difficulties with controlling viscosity, and that current methods to ensure the desired viscosity of the end product can be time consuming and costly.

The Procter & Gamble process detailed in the patent entails:

• formulating a batch of the base composition (an aqueous mixture of at least one surfactant and water and having a first viscosity) in a first vessel;

•  measuring the first viscosity of the batch of the base composition;

• comparing the first viscosity of the batch of the base composition to a predetermined desired base viscosity range;

• if the viscosity of the batch of the base composition is outside the predetermined desired base viscosity range, adjusting the viscosity of the batch of the base composition to a second viscosity that is within the desired base viscosity range by addition of one or more viscosity modifiers;

•  moving the batch of the base composition with the second viscosity to a second vessel; and

•  adding one or more differentiation compositions to the base composition creating the personal care composition, wherein the personal care composition has a final viscosity that is different from the second viscosity.

According to P&G, one unique aspect is that the viscosity of the base composition is measured and, if needed, adjusted to a predetermined range before the base composition is mixed with the differentiation ingredients. The predetermined viscosity range is calculated based on the estimated or measured effects of the differentiation ingredients on the base composition. According to the patent, once the differentiation ingredients are added to the base composition, the resulting composition will have a final viscosity that is within the desired final composition viscosity range and no additional trimming is required.