The race and chase of the unit dose

Whatever the sector, single-servings represent a contemporary and, in some sectors, mandatory packaging. If we talk about food, the main attractions of single-dose packaging are certainly quality, genuineness and practicality. The date of invention of the single serving portion in the food sector is not known with certainty, but we can cite those who, among the first, built an empire there: in the mid 1940s, Pietro Ferrero had the intuition to create the single serving portion of Giandujot gianduia pasta and so the famous Cremino was born.

If we think about the pharmaceutical sector, we can say that single-dose packaging is often mandatory and, always, opportunities for savings, less waste and efficiency in the production chain. A significant fact concerns the waste of medicines not in single doses: we talk about thousands of tons of expired medicines in the bins of Italians every year. To give an idea, according to partial calculations on waste that concern a sample of less than a quarter (23%) of the population, there are 1,270 tons of medicines in the waste in 24.5% of Italian municipalities. According to experts, this enormous waste is linked to various causes: poor ‘discipline’ of patients with regard to treatment, variation in treatment and even, in particular for self-care drugs, the impossibility of buying ‘mini’ packages when it comes to products used as needed and not for prolonged treatment.

Farmo Res is very sensitive to this issue and produces thermoforming packaging machines for the pharmaceutical sector in accordance with the law. We have recently taken an order from an American company for a thermoforming packaging machine to produce “cups”: small, sealed, single-portion glasses of different volumes 5/15/20/30 ml.

This thermoforming packaging machine is capable of producing 500 cups per minute, 30,000 in an hour, and we will install it in January 2020 in a pharmaceutical company near Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The single-portion glasses will contain a variety of medicines for hospital therapies. Product traceability will be applied to this machine in accordance with the latest updates to the FDA pharmaceutical directives. Tracking is a developed method that allows, from a single single dose, the recognition of the production chain of the batch to which it belongs and the traceability of all the single dose products in that batch.