Cosmetic/Personal Care Packaging.

• Print
• Email

Natural Preservative Systems: The Paper Trail

With its Organics skin care line, Origins achieved the impressive feat of creating a line that is USDA-certified organic—preservatives and all. However, as the company tells it, documenting the ingredients’ organic origins was labor-intensive.

“I would say that one of the biggest challenges in developing the Origins Organics line, aside from developing high-performance, efficacious, and stable formulas with organic ingredients, was traceability,” says Ray Mauro, manager of product development for Origins. “Sometimes, tracing the ingredients back to the crop farms they came from and having [the farms] provide acceptable USDA organic certification proving that the ingredients were grown organically was definitely challenging.”

Origins faced this challenge even when it was still just looking for ingredients to include in the line. “Sometimes we’d be looking for a specific organic ingredient, get all excited about it, and then find out that we couldn’t have it due to insufficient traceability. Our team would then be challenged to find another organic ingredient that would give us the same types of benefits,” says Mauro.

“I spent more time tracking down paperwork than anything else,” adds Christine Baier, executive director of Origins research and development.

More on Natural Preservative Systems

Back to top