19 June 2010

The meeting with the people of MADARA started with the sound of clicking bottles: A toast to MADARA’s latest addition: MADARA 100% Clean Drinks!

MADARA has launched a new line, radically different from skincare, in Latvia, a fashionable range of 100% clean soft drinks

MADARA 100% Clean Drinks come in 4 flavors, Betty Rose, Anna Mint, Richard Berry and Ralph Pumpkin. As with all MADARA products, the design are top notch with emotional given to it. Looks classy, fashionable and you may even think that it is a cocktail drink if you have not tried it. Drinking alcoholic drinks along the streets is an offence in Latvia and they told us a story about a girl whom was stopped by the police when they saw her downing a bottle of MADARA soft drink while walking. Now that is really a story! Ha!

I like the idea of giving “human” names to the drinks. It gives the drink “character” and makes it “alive”. Trust MADARA to think of this.

After all the usual introduction of program and lunch, we were brought to tour MADARA manufacturing factory. The most exciting part of the whole trip! An exclusive preview into the making of MADARA skincare. No one (out of Madara’s staff circle) has seen it before. Pure Tincture will be the first to bring you through this.    

The manufacturing hall resembles a clean room. We had to cover our head, feet and wore special coats to enter.

The first stop is the measurement cum storage area where raw ingredients such as beewax, cucumber extract etc were kept in neat jars, boxes etc. All these ingredients come from five specially eco-cert approved organic farms in Latvia. It is the very ingredients that made up the uniqueness of their products, ingredients from the Baltic Region! We were told that it was scientifically tested that they found higher concentration of menthol in the peppermint grown in the Baltic region, than peppermint grown in other region.

These farms are under strict ECOCERT regulations to ensure correct farming techniques and methods. The raw harvested plants/flowers are brought to another company for extraction of its potent bits before storing it in jars like this.


 It is in this room that these ingredients are measured in the right amount before putting it into a special mixer.

This gigantic intimidating looking machine is the mixer where EACH and EVERY product is mixed and made from. The ingredients are heated to the right temperature (never above 100%) to allow even mixing of ingredients. See how the inside of the machine looks like. It reminded me of a milk shake though. :)

 

After the mixing, it is vacuumed sucked into a big container like this.


From this big container, the mix is injected into individual bottles. What the lady doing is blasting high velocity of air into the empty bottle to ensure that it is completely clean and dry. These bottles will be injected with the content then capped tightly. For moisturizers, the cap is a special cap that will not any more air to enter. Products will go though an automated stamping of expiry dates before this lady pack it into boxes.

 

There are a total of 30 types of products in MADARA range. Roughly one batch of it will be made once a month. Each batch is at least 200kg to 330kg which is equivalent to xx number of bottles per month. For faster moving products such as the Deep Purifying Foam, it can sometimes be made at least 2-3 batches per month.

For the hair products, it is made from a different, more compact-looking machine. This wonderful machine made one bottle of hair products every 2 seconds!  These new hair products will hit Singapore shore in July 2010. No more bad silicone coated hair days from now.

Packed products are kept in a warehouse with temperature between15 - 25degree before shipping out to the respective retailer stores.

Also all products have to undergo rigorous testing to ensure stability (i.e. no separation) even in the roughest environment such turbulence test and temperature changes test.

That’s all for now. I will be posting on Madara’s concept stores next.