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Case StudiesCreating Long Term Success from a Simple Idea Sometimes customers come to P. J. Noyes Company with a great idea for a product, but no specific formula or packaging. A very successful product line for a P. J. Noyes customer resulted from one such idea. The customer’s idea was to improve upon an existing niche product and to private label the improved product for retail pharmacy chains and mass merchandisers. The dominant branded product in the category came in a single flavor tablet and a relatively inconvenient package. The tablet was chalky tasting, and there was no private label equivalent on the market. The customer asked P. J. Noyes to formulate tablets that would taste better and provide the same or better efficacy than the branded product, and to package them in a more convenient form. The P. J. Noyes team formulated the new tablets in four different fruit flavors and provided the customer with samples for extensive focus group and analytical testing. Soon thereafter, P. J. Noyes identified a clear plastic tube that would serve as a refillable trial size, and located machinery to package the tablets in these tubes. Sales of the tablets in tubes expanded rapidly, and P. J. Noyes grew with the customer, adding various bottle sizes to the line, and purchasing new equipment to increase capacity and improve efficiency. Today the customer has displaced the brand company as the dominant force in its niche market, selling the product both under its own brand and under dozens of private labels. Successful line extensions have been introduced in gel and liquid form, which were also formulated and produced by P. J. Noyes, and sales are now expanding overseas.
Packaging Plus Manufacturing Skill Equals a Successful Product Sometimes a good idea in one market works well in an unrelated market. P. J. Noyes Company manufactures chewable tablets and packages them in clear plastic tubes that hold ten one-inch-diameter tablets. The customer for whom P. J. Noyes makes this product distributes them widely in stores across the U.S. The unique packaging of these tablets caught the eye of another company that markets dietary supplements. They contacted P. J. Noyes’ customer to find out who was the manufacturer of the product. Their request to P. J. Noyes was to make their dietary supplement as a chewable tablet, and package it in the same clear tubes of ten tablets each. Once the packaging of the product was determined, P. J. Noyes had the challenge to manufacture a chewable tablet containing the necessary ingredients. They developed prototype tablets from four different formulas that the company provided. But when the P. J. Noyes team formulated the tablets, none of the four versions were satisfactory. The tablets were unpleasant to chew and got stuck in people’s teeth. Disappointed with the first four versions, the P. J. Noyes team created a fifth version of the tablet from their own formulation. That tablet was ultimately the one that was put into large-scale production and is now sold in Wal-Marts everywhere. The tablet formulating team at P. J. Noyes knew it was important to act quickly to create a version of the product that could be sold. The longer a product takes getting to market, the greater the chances for a competing product to come to market ahead of yours. The clever packaging of a current product P. J. Noyes was manufacturing for another customer brought this new customer to them. But it was the formulator’s skill and initiative that brought the new product to market quickly to help make it a top seller. In contract manufacturing and packaging, the two processes work together to create a successful product. |
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