TESTING


53


A journey to vegan testing in a family-owned company


Dr Sara Robb - CSPRs by DR Sara Robb


Vegan cosmetics are the fastest growing vegan market and also the fastest growing sector in the personal care industry. In the US alone, the vegan personal care market is already worth over $4.1 billion/year. By 2025 its estimated that the global market will be worth over $20.8 billion/year.


With such a growing demand globally for


vegan personal care products, more brands are looking at having vegan ranges and some are transitioning to fully vegan brands. The option of having accredited microbiology testing is essential for them. Companies should not have to choose between being able to sell their products to retailers that insist on accreditation or using microbiological culture media containing animal products. Although the vegan cosmetic market is booming, testing without using animal products is still not available on a large scale. Even with the newly available vegan alternatives to the standard culture media, many labs shy away from offering vegan testing due to it being ‘commercially unviable’. This article details the journey of a laboratory whose passion for the vegan lifestyle and love of animals and the environment prompted them to start the process of providing a full suite of accredited vegan microbiology testing.


Moving to vegan Melbec Microbiology was established in 2013 by Dawn Mellors in Rossendale, UK. The company’s journey to providing accredited vegan testing actually began earlier, when Dawn set off to study microbiology at university at the age of 17 and decided she would become a vegetarian. History repeated itself when Dawn’s teenage daughter, Grace, became vegan and Dawn joined her. The next logical step was looking into


how she could reduce animal products in her work. With the industry moving more towards accredited testing, including vegan testing was not going to be an easy task but with the support of the managing director, Nigel Mellors, who is also a vegetarian, and the leadership team the move to accreditation of vegan testing alternatives began. Many supermarkets and large retailers insist


on accredited testing, forcing the industry to decide between the vegan alternative and the UKAS accreditation that is expected. Although Melbec offered vegan testing, it was aware that it could not bring this to the mainstream


www.personalcaremagazine.com


market without accreditation. The company was already UKAS 17025-accredited for the testing of cosmetics and personal care products, including both QC testing and preservative efficacy testing (PET, or challenge testing) so the next step was to create a vegan alternative to both that offered the same quality.


Current media Like most microbiology testing, QC testing and PET use culture media to grow the bacteria, yeasts and moulds. There are many components which make up a typical culture media, including tryptones, meat peptones and casein peptones. These tryptones and peptones are a nutrient source for the microorganisms and are predominantly derived from the enzymatic digestion of meat or milk. Most culture media available today will


contain some components of meat or milk origin. In addition to peptones and tryptones media contain may contain a gelling agent (usually agar), sugars, buffers, indicator dyes


and selective agents. Most culture media were developed many years ago and the same formulations are still used today. Indeed, they have contained meat and milk extracts since first being used in microbiology in the early 1880s. Surprisingly little has changed in the


last half century and the market has slowed down the development of new media. The developments which have taken place are particularly around chromogenic media, which incorporate substrates utilised by target organisms that give a microbial colony a specific colour. However, even the newer media still predominantly use animal-derived tryptones and peptones as a main nutrient source. In order for Melbec to provide vegan


alternatives for QC and PET which gave the same quality of results and hence would be considered by UKAS for accreditation, it needed to source, assess and validate culture media which replaced animal proteins


November 2021 PERSONAL CARE


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104