Cosmetics & Personal Care

IMCD expands its footprint with a Personal Care

IMCD, a leading distributor of speciality chemicals and ingredients, opened a new Personal Care Application Laboratory in Bangkok, Thailand. This facility further strengthens IMCD’s technical capability to better support its customers and suppliers in the Asia Pacific region.

The new Personal Care Application Laboratory aims to work in close collaboration with customers’ research and development departments, carrying out competitive matching against other ingredients and sharing new application opportunities. The facility will focus mainly on skin, sun care and colour cosmetics. Customers will also be able to test product performance, run stability and application tests, and review the finished product with the support of IMCD’s scientists and technical managers.

Suppliers, on the other hand, can gain an insight as to how their products interact and function in combination with other products from the IMCD portfolio as part of a finished formulation. With the in-depth knowledge and technical know-how of product functionality and market trend awareness, the technical team can support suppliers to develop new product concepts for the future.

“It all started as a collaboration project with the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science of a local university. We used their facility as a R&D centre to develop formulations and prototypes on skin and sun care, and to share the knowledge on latest innovative ingredients and market trends,” comments Sriwalpha Burarak, Business Unit Manager, IMCD Thailand Personal Care. “As we see an increase in demand for our technical expertise and co-creation projects on new trends, we decided to invest in our own facility to better support our customers and suppliers.”

“The Personal Care industry is constantly rejuvenating itself with new concepts, formats and approaches, especially with the increased demand of the premium product segment in Asia. The pace of how the industry evolves has been overwhelming for our partners to keep up.” remarks Kristian Hartono, Regional Business Director for Personal Care in APAC. “This application lab is meant to provide inspiration for new ideas in the development of next generation cosmetic products, help our customers to fulfill the consumers’ needs using the broad portfolio of highly performing functional and innovative cosmetic active ingredients, and support our partners to stay in the forefront of market developments and overcome their challenges.”

The facility will double up as a training centre to ensure that IMCD employees stay abreast of market trends and developments to provide the best knowledge of the functionality and characteristics of the product offerings.