Tube Filling Service

Tube Filling Service

Our tube filling service is our guaranteed fastest, cheapest, most convenient service.

Tubes come to our factory, pre-sealed, pre-capped, and pre-printed from a single source and supplier.   Our Norden tubing machines quickly fill the tube, seal the tube, print a code onto the tube and eject the completed product ready to be boxed all from a single machine.  It’s the definition of streamlined filling.

A single machine setup with standardized packaging means labor, setup times, clean up, and scrap rate is extremely low.  Also, our Norden tubing machine was the first tubing machine designed to fill hand sanitizer, which can be a hazardous affair without necessary precautions.

Tubes are designed with utility while not compromising your brand’s aesthetic.

Tubes are a popular packaging with consumers because they are easily handled, recapped for reuse, and sealed for freshness.  Tubes can come with a variety of orifice sizes, ensuring consumers get the right application amount every time. 

Tubes can come in different dyed colors and coatings, millions of printed colors, and in a variety of different sizes, ranging from very small to 10 inches in length.

Tubes are more economical with less chance of supply-chain failure than bottles and jars.

In our article Tubes Beat Bottles we show how sourcing bottle components and individually shipping those components to BPI Labs can have anywhere between a 22% and 42% difference in cost.  That’s incredible margin you could be saving by working with a packaging designed to deliver best value.

When a component is unavailable for bottles or jars, substitute components must be found. Since tubes are entirely produced from a single manufacturer, they do not suffer the risks of large supply chains.  Moreover, BPI Labs has multiple good, domestic sources for tubes that we are ready to share with you.

Read more about the difference between tubes and bottles here.

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Bottle and Jar Filling Services

Bottle and Jar Filling Services

Your formula possibilities are extensive with our array of bottle and jar filling equipment.

Your product, wet or dry, can be filled into a large variety of bottle and jar types. This is because we have many varied machines with different purposes. We have salt and powder augurs for filling dry product into jars, vacuum filling equipment that prevents mess for viscous liquids, fillers with modular filling heads for containers that vary in size, and rotary bottle filling equipment for fast production.

This equipment was selected to service the spectrum of product formulations, allowing our customers maximum control over product formula to packaging fit.

Bottle and Jar filling is automated to give you low-cost manufacturing.

Our bottle and jar filling equipment are augmented with automated cappers, bottle and jar loading, automated coders, labelers, taping, and induction sealing.  Every product you onboard or develop at BPI Labs will have a filling line designed to maximize your piece-per-minute production rate, which also allows us to give you accurate fulfillment forecasts

Automated labeling lets you service all your packaging needs at one manufacturer.

BPI Labs offers wrap-around, front-back, and stamped automated labeling for jars and bottles. These machines can operate extremely fast with precision, creating a perfect adhesion every time. However, this precision equipment does require some careful adherence to packaging design to get perfect outcomes.

See how you should design your labels for perfect application every time at this 3-part blog post.

We can service your unique packaging requirements with custom machines & tooling.

If our equipment does not meet your packaging requirements, BPI Labs can often spec new machinery and tooling to get the job done. We have had hand-built tools, devices, and machines made specially for our customers. Talk to your project manager to see if this is something we can accommodate you with at BPI Labs.

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BPI Labs Makes Bath Salts, Scrubs, and Powders

BPI Labs Makes Bath Salts, Scrubs, and Powders

Bath salt, scrubs, and powder manufacturing at BPI Labs

BPI Labs offers bulk production and filling services for all kinds of personal care salts, scrubs, and powders.  Some of the products you can manufacture with us include bath salts, soaks, baby powders, dry shampoo, foot powders, effervescents, coffee scrubs, salt scrubs, and sugar scrubs. 

Our ribbon blenders can mix up to 8000 lbs per batch and we color your product by hand for a boutique feel. Our v-blender makes it possible to complete safe and friction-less mixing for reactive dry products like effervescents.

Private Label Salt Products
Three unique filling services available
  • Bags (Sachets): BPI Labs can fill your dry products into bags with zippers, spouts, and even fill them with spoons with some extra tooling.
  • Bottles/Jars: Bottle and jar filling that can fill containers ranging from a few ounces to five pound buckets.
  • Packets: Our facility can fill your dry product into first time and single use packets, useful for promotional unit sizes, travel, or medical markets.

Speak to a project manager at BPI Labs to hear about all our filling options and learn more details about how you can have your product packaged and filled.

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Pure and Safe Personal Care: Sanitizer with Gas Chromatography

Pure and Safe Personal Care: Sanitizer with Gas Chromatography

You will be selling safe hand sanitizer at advertised ethanol volumes.

Multiple controls have been instituted to guarantee you will receive sanitizer containing ethanol at advertised levels without contamination or impurities.

The Problems

The FDA issued no less than 4 warnings regarding hand sanitizer last month, several as recent as last week.  The FDA has been warning consumers about the hazards of hand sanitizer made with methanol on the market stating that it can be absorbed through the skin.  Methanol’s toxic effects in sufficient quantities causes nausea, blindness, and death among other symptoms.  NBC News reported this week that 15 adults were hospitalized and four died after consuming sanitizer with methanol.  Moreover, some products on the market, the FDA warns, have alarmingly low levels of ethyl or isopropyl alcohol making them ineffective at defending against Covid-19.

BPI Labs has heard other stories from its customers.  In a conversation with a customer last week we learned that their last manufacturer of hand sanitizer ruined their product by mixing bad ethanol with good ethanol, believing all ethanol is manufactured similarly.  Almost as recently, another customer complained that a manufacturer produced smelly hand sanitizer because they incorrectly believed that all ethanol sources have the same purity, purpose, and commercial grade.  BPI Labs has been instituting redundant safeguards against these outcomes, which include locating several reliable suppliers of cosmetic ethanol, onsite tests with gas chromatography, and purchasing a carbon filtration system.

The Solutions

BPI Labs purchased a $20,000 gas chromatography system that can indicate not only the purity and concentration of a sample of ethanol, but it will identify the presence of other impurities, such as methanol, in the sample. Since this system can reliably tell us the purity of ethanol within minutes, every shipment of ethanol to our facility will be tested before we receive it into our facility and especially before it is used or intermixed with other batches of product. Moreover, BPI Labs will source its ethanol from a single, reliable source to minimize the intermixing of differently manufactured ethanols.

Finding sources of good ethanol is a high priority for BPI Labs, and we have found several sources for ethanol in the event that a source becomes unavailable. Our primary supplier for ethanol presently triple filters ethanol to remove odors and impurities from the product. Our management team is evaluating and authorizing other suppliers of ethanol only if they filter ethanol for cosmetic use. In the event that sources of ethanol become difficult to locate, BPI Labs has also purchased an activated charcoal filter system that is designed to remove impurities from ethanol, and with our gas chromatography machine, we can certify the purity of the ethanol being used in your hand sanitizer.

Conclusion

Creating the assurance of a quality product for our customers is a top priority as we bring hand sanitizer production online. If you are looking for a new source for hand sanitizer, set up a meeting with us today to discuss how we can meet your needs.

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Tube Filling Service

Tubes Win, Bottles Lose in Cosmetics

The Experiment

Last week we asked a great, domestic tube manufacturer and supplier for tube prices to compare with bottles. 

The results are in: You can have hand sanitizer in tubes with caps from a single supplier, in continuous supply, that also have a printed label, and come with applied metallic safety seal for significantly less than bottles with only 6 – 8 weeks lead-time.

Tube Prices

The prices we received were for tubes with pre-applied caps and metallic, induction, pre-applied, safety seals and 4-color print from a single supplier.  The prices we received are below:

 

Tube Vol.(fl.oz.

Dimensions

$ per 25K Ordered

$ per 100K Ordered

1

1″ x 3.5″

$.26

$.22

2

1 3/8″ x 3.75″

$.28

$.23

3

1 3/8″ x 5 1/16″

$.29

$.24

4

1.5″ x 5 7/16

$.30

$.25

6

2″ x 5.5″

$.33

$.28

8

2″ x 6 13/16″

$.35

$.30

Tube Specifications

The specifications on these tubes were the following:

 

Tube Type

Co-Ex

Tube Length

+/- 1/16″

Outer Layer Blend

MDPE

Outer Color

White

Head Color

White

Cap Style

Flip-Top

Cap Color

White

Decoration

4-Color Offset

Coating

Matte Coating

Safety Seal

Metallic

Bottle Pricing

We also purchased an 8 fl.oz. Boston round bottle in June and 4 fl.oz. sharp-shoulder with disk-top cap in March for some of our customers.  Note: the pricing for the bottles is at all volume purchases.  The pricing came in at:

 

8 oz. Clear Boston Round Bottle 24-410 $0.21991 4 oz. Sharp Shoulder LPDE Bottle 24-410 $0.19413
Bottle Shipping $0.02 Bottle Shipping $0.02
Black Saddle Pump Locking $0.245 White PP 24-410 Flip Cap $0.06
Pump Shipping $0.03 Cap Shipping $0.02
Labels $0.13538 Labels $0.12
Labels Shipping $0.01 Labels Shipping $0.01
Total per Unit: $0.6603 Total per Unit: $0.4241
The Comparison

The differences between bottles and tubes are stark:

 

8 fl.oz. Bottle 8 fl.oz. Tube 4 fl.oz Bottle 4 fl.oz. Tube
Suppliers: 3 1 3 1
Components: $.60029 $.35 $.37413 $.30
Shipping: $.06 $.03 $.05 $.03
Totals: $0.6603 $0.38 $0.42413 $0.33
Percent Difference: / -42% / -22.19%
Are you able to find better pricing?

Even if you are successfully finding better pricing for bottles, you are probably purchasing the cap or pump separately and you are having these bottles either screen-printed or you are paying a manufacturer to print sticky labels.  Only after all the packaging arrives, usually from separate suppliers, BPI Labs must setup a long line of machines to load bottles, fill them, apply a cap, maybe apply a label, apply a screen code, and then feed them onto a collection table where they are boxed.  Our tubing machine does all of this by itself, which significantly reduces your cost of manufacturing hand sanitizer.

If you can have all the packaging you’d want, from a single source, not including case or master pack, for the same price as bottles or for less, then why use bottles that come with the extra supply-chain hassle and manufacturing costs?  Bottles not only make less economic sense, but you can read here the many other reasons that tubes make more sense than bottles to fill with hand sanitizer.  Speaking of bottles, has anyone got a lead on some available sources for us?  Asking for a friend.

Size Availability

The tube sizes you can purchase include those in the table above, but given a large enough order and lead-time we could have custom parts purchased to fit many different size tubes into our new Norden tube filling machine. BPI Labs will have the first Norden tube machine customized with additional safety features to make hand sanitizer in tubes a safe and efficient process.

Updated Conclusion

While prices have changed since this article was written, which was during the height of the 2020 pandemic, tubes have been perennially cheaper to manufacture.  To manufacture your tubed product, BPI Labs sets up a single machine instead of a line of machines, and you’ll see this difference in your bottom line.  Working with a single supplier and using the simpler tube components means you can’t have manufactured product for less.  Hopefully, this article provides enough reason for you to contact us and find out if hand sanitizer in tubes makes sense for your market and brand.

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