After Long Life, the first separator cap for mono-dose bottle entirely made of polyethylene in a unique piece, Long Life Super Maxi presents another result of its commitment constantly oriented to the research and development of innovative solutions for primary packaging
Long Life Super Maxi cap is realized in PE in a single piece with a considerably reduced amount of plastic material than the other separator caps present on the market.
Long Life Super Maxi is in fact an absolute innovation in the world because, until now, no mono-piece separator caps with a capacity of 1,5 ml suitable for PET, PE, PP and glass bottles had ever been developed and produced.
Long Life Super Maxi is covered by international patent, designed for nutraceutical and for all cases where it is necessary to separate powder active substances from liquids.
The Long Life Super Maxi cap adds to the already many advantages of Long Life cap, whose characteristics remain unchanged, another very important benefit: it can contain a greater amount of active substances powder.
The company located in Garbagnate Milanese (Mi), has been producing plastic packaging systems for pharmaceutical, cosmetical, trichological, diagnostics, nutraceutical, food-complements and household products since 1947.
Inge is certified UNI and ISO 9001: 2008 since 1996 and owns more than 260 national and international patents.
In more than 65 years Inge has gained and consolidated an important know-how becoming a reference point in the field of primary packaging. Inge’s internal R & D division designs new products that can be customized according to the customer requirements and decorated up to five colors, thanks to the silk screening printing machines.
With its technologically advanced equipment the company internally designs and manufactures the moulds both for bottles and for components made by injection moulding and injection blow moulding technology.
Finally, Inge can provide internally assembling and packing (in blister and flow-pack) of its products. INGE has a long experience in the field of development of separator caps in plastic materials. The first one was patented in 1968 and since then INGE has been working on it to optimize its performance, and has been producing more than 70 million per year totally. Beside Long Life, one of the most recent ones is Push & Mix, a separator cap made of polyethylene, covered by an international patent; it is composed by two pieces (cap and inner plug) and easy to use. Its capacity goes from 6 to 16 ml and it is compatible with most of mineral water bottles available on the market.
Satisfy specific needs
Inge is continuously looking for innovative materials and technologies to define its range offer; with Long Life Super Maxi, Inge reached a new goal, observing the opportunities of the still growing food supplements market and its good expectations of further growth (in Italy, Europe and worldwide).
According to the latest data provided by IMS Health during the second “Nutraceutica Forum” (Milano, July 1st 2014), 158 million of packs were sold between August 2012 and August 2013. Also the value of the market is growing; it is expected to grow from 2 billion Euros in 2012 to 2.3 billion Euros in 2014.
The incentive to assume food supplements, especially with prevention scope, is the always major and incisive attention of the Italian people to their own well-being. Due also to the crisis, this attention has been growing and is more oriented toward essentiality than in the past.
The culture of health is getting stronger in our country, where seven Italians on ten use food supplements at least once a year. According to another recent research conducted by Gfk Eurisko for FederSalus, this “phenomenon” has to be considered as one of the structural changes that occurred in the last years among the habits of Italian people. As a consequence of the market’s growth, the opportunities for the involved companies are growing. They will be more and more involved in satisfying new requirements, in terms of administration systems also, that will have to be handy and easy to use. The usage of separator caps has been increasing in the last years.
Today it is widespread, but it happens that consumers, especially seniors, find it hard to mix the powder contained in the cap with the liquid part contained in the bottle. This is due to difficulty to open the cap because it requires a certain pushing force. Inge has been working on the opening easiness, and tested several solutions until the easiest one came up. This solution has also been applied on the new cap Long Life Super Maxi. After the filling process, the separator cap, that has been sealed with a multilayer film aluminum-polyethylene-paper, easily opens, just normally pressing on the upper extremity.
An efficient barrier to water
For substances separator caps, safety is, obviously, the prerequisite on which must be based all the other characteristics, because it is necessary to preserve the flawlessness of the contained active substances, safeguarding it from the action of the environment humidity. Through many comparative studies for stability, control tests and measure of the relative humidity, Inge has proved that, thanks to its very low permeability to damp, the caps from the Long-life line are able to guarantee a higher protection against moisture compared to other standard separator caps in PE.
Long Life Super Maxi therefore performs a much more efficient barrier action against environment humidity than other standard caps in PE. This ensures that active substances such as vitamins and probiotics, easily biodegradable, remain stable, maintaining all their chemical, physical, organoleptic and microbiological characteristics absolutely intact, until the opening of the bottle. Moreover, this protection is reinforced by the aluminum-polyethylene-paper film with which the cap is sealed after filling.