Product testing is a quality assurance in the context of research and development. It is a process of measuring the properties or performance of the product.
The 7 benefits of product testing are:
- It confirms that a product meets the necessary local, national or international quality standards relevant to a particular market or product set.
- It helps avoid prosecution, harm to reputation and financial risk, claims for compensation and damages.
- Consumer gets a peace of mind that your company is regularly monitoring the quality of product.
- It enables your product to stand out from the competition with a clearly visible mark representing quality.
- It guarantees for integrity and safety and ensures that your product do not have any contaminants microbial or metals or otherwise.
- If certified, indicates that product has undergone through strict GMPs, evaluated thoroughly and tested for safe use and product will perform its best as per the claims.
- Tested product builds consumer confidence for product acceptability, safety and efficacy and peace of mind for risk free and safe product.
Types of product tests:
A complete testing of a product involves following test parameters:
- Physical testing
- Microbial testing
- Chemical testing
- Performance testing
- Water testing
- Ingredient potency testing
- Challenging test
- Shelf life testing and many more
- Certification testing (Natural / Organic/ Non GMO/ Vegan / SPF etc.)
- Specific testing required for license
- Qualitative analysis ( Potency and purity of ingredients)
In order to make product testing economic and affordable for new entrepreneurs especially health products testing, we advice our entrepreneurs to go for following testing on the product which are very necessary for quality and safety:
- Physical testing including organoleptic characters
- Stability testing of a product includes physical and chemical stability, microbiological stability and packaging stability
- Microbes affect all classes of products and cause spoilage in health, food and cosmetic products. Since many natural health products contain herbal components, it is imperative to conduct full microbial testing prior to release for sale.
Microbial testing will ensure that product is free from microbes and will have less chances of it going bad during its shelf life. To save cost of expensive tests we suggest testing of only very important indicators of microbes such as:- Yeasts and moulds
- Total bacteria counts
- Escherischia coli
- Salmonella spp.
- Staphylococcus aureus
- Pseudomonas aeruginosa
- Enterobacteriaceae
- Chemical testing involves wide array of parameters such as heavy metals, solvent residues, pesticides, toxins etc. but as a basic necessity to make product health risk free we advise our clients to go for following testing:
Heavy metals such as:- Arsenic (As)
- Cadmium (Cd)
- Lead (Pb)
- Mercury (Hg)
- Chromium (Cr)
- Shelf life testing: After certain period of time product starts deteriorating (rancidity, texture change, moisture loss, moisture gain, staling, flavor loss, photo induced changes, enzymatic browning, chemical browning, and microbial spoilage) depending on the product type and storage conditions that affects consumer acceptance due to health and safety reasons. This necessitates shelf life testing of a product or accelerated stability testing to determine the life of the product for its use or extended use and an expiry of a product is mandatory to mention on the product label.