The pharmaceutical industry is dynamic. Companies wishing to stay competitive within it need to keep pace, not only with the latest research and equipment but also with the roles that stakeholders play. Operations must be kept as lean as possible to optimize profits.
The custom pharmaceutical packaging market has shot up in response to this need allowing companies to drastically reduce or even eliminate their in-house packaging department.
What is Custom Pharmaceutical Packaging?
Custom pharmaceutical packaging is specifically aimed at the pharmaceuticals industry and involves the packaging, by a third party, of pharmaceutical products.
Why Is the Industry Growing So Fast?
It’s quite simple – outsourcing packaging makes sense for pharmaceutical companies. This is one area where there are no shortcuts to take. If the packaging is poorly designed, the product may be compromised, or worse still, open the company up to a lawsuit.
With so much at stake, it’s essential to get packaging right, and out-sourcing allows companies to get it right in less time at lower costs by using a specialized team rather than maintaining one in-house.
Market Drivers
Consumers today are more health conscientious than ever. This, along with an aging baby boomer generation, has led to rapid growth in every sector of the health care industry from herbal supplements to cancer treatments. As the industry struggles to keep up with demand more and more of the budget pie is fed to research and development leaving less and less for marketing, packaging, and delivery.
Worse, unlike many industries, the pharmaceutical industry has more to consider than just branding and reliable delivery. They also must adhere to strict regulations regarding safety and accuracy. For instance, if a medication has packaging that allows a child easy access or misrepresents the appropriate dose, serious consequences are bound to occur both legally and ethically.
Keeping track of all these regulations and building them into effective packaging is a time-intensive process—and that doesn’t even factor in the actual process of manufacturing and delivering said product.
It’s no surprise then that many companies are finding when they run the numbers, it’s much cheaper to pay someone else to package and distribute their product even if that company is half-way across the globe. There’s no expensive machinery to buy. No designers and package team to pay—just a very specialized team with all the necessary equipment already.
Specialization, in general, has become a popular trend in the business world as companies realize that it’s better to be really good at one thing than be able to do a bunch of things. New technology has made it easy to take this concept to a global level making specialization not only an efficient choice but also a cost-effective one.
That’s Pharmaceutical Packaging
The pharmaceutical packaging industry is a growing. The more pharmaceutical companies begin to diversify their product lines, the more efficient outsourcing packaging becomes. Currently, in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is booming, and the pharmaceutical packaging industry is following suit.