So you're considering purchasing a customized medical or environmental sampling product and you know what you need to do to get started, but you'd like to know how customization works in the real world before you commit. We understand that (and if you still need more information on how customization works, we recommend reading our previous posts on the subject).
Here's an example of how Puritan customized a line of products to support the requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2011. Since their launch, over 500,000 of the environmental sampling kits have been sold all over the world.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 1 out of 6 people in the United States suffers from food borne illness each year. The Food Safety Modernization Act was designed to help combat that and Puritan's EnviroMax® and EnviroMax Plus® line of products was designed to help the food industry root out contamination quickly and accurately.
This is from our announcement of the new line in 2011:
As the nation's food industry faces increasingly frequent and sometimes major contamination problems, Timothy Templet Puritan's Executive Vice President for Global Sales, stresses the importance of being able to quickly deliver reliable testing kits. "Food producers now need to know as quickly as possible whether their products are contaminated before these products are shipped. They cannot afford to wait until the food is on the store shelves," he says.
To create the environmental sampling kit line, we went straight to our customers - food processors, service companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and others, who sample for environmental contaminants, to study their operations firsthand. The end result was a line of products very closely tied to what each industry needed.
EnviroMax and EnviroMax Plus were developed utilizing an oversized medical grade foam swab, heat staked to a large plastic paddle handle. The foam mitt came in two configurations: pointed for hard to reach areas, and round for floors, walls, and counter tops.
The foam swab is affixed to an orange screw cap that was then inserted into a threaded polypropylene tube. The EnviroMax is a dry swab and the EnviroMax Plus is pre-moistened with 50 percent neutralizing buffer and 50 percent 0.1 buffered peptone water. Both products are then sterilized and packaged.
The original cap design was a one half turn cap with a small ridge line that was pulled into the tube upon tightening. This design made it easy for the sampling technician to use and provided a safety barrier after sampling.
But the first design for these products was certainly not the last. Over the years, we at Puritan have continued to prototype and customize new versions of these products, allowing us to provide the best possible solution for the industry.
In mid-2015, Puritan designed and introduced its next generation tube and cap for this product line. The ridge line in the cap was lengthened to allow the cap to be pulled deeper into the mouth of the tube and tighten the seal.
“Our focus was to limit the risk of evaporation during the shelf life of the EnviroMax Plus product and enhance the leak resistance characteristics of the product line,” said Terry Young, Puritan's General Manager.
These enhancements and product customization features are just one example of Puritan’s ability to provide a quality customized product.
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