Summary

Established since 1976, UPL is one of the UK’s leading contract manufacturers, specialising in the pharmaceutical and personal care markets.

Profile

UPL is a privately-owned company with a broad and valued customer portfolio, ranging from large multi-nationals to smaller start-up companies with niche market products. We have enjoyed consistent growth over 35 years due to our enviable reputation for product quality, service, superior customer relationships and fair pricing.

Our philosophy has always been to build long-term, confidential relationships with our customers and suppliers and to deliver effective and bespoke solutions to meet a broad range of manufacturing requirements. We appreciate one size doesn’t fit all.

Trusted Integrity & Uncompromising Excellence

UPL acts solely as a contract manufacturer – we do not have any brands of our own and we only develop products for external customers. This ensures that our customer’s interests are never compromised.

We understand that consumers judge our clients’ brands on the quality of what we manufacture, which guides our uncompromising commitment to quality control and quality assurance.

As we are geared to meet the strict benchmarks of pharmaceutical manufacturing we ensure that these same high standards are also applied to the preparation of our personal care products.

Accordingly, UPL’s fully equipped laboratory complex is manned by accomplished and qualified staff, enabling testing and analysis of a vast range of products using instruments such as HPLC, GC, FTIR, NIR and UV.

UPL is licensed by the Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to produce pharmaceutical products and is accredited by SGS to the ISO 9001:2008 quality standard.

As a result of our focus on quality we are pleased to have attained many other industry accreditations and full details of these can be seen on our website.

UPL offers a Dedicated Environment handling most types of Liquid, Cream, Ointment and Gel Formulations.

UPL moved to a purpose built facility in 1995, complete with 4 manufacturing and 7 filling suites designed to offer maximum flexibility.

Each of our climate controlled suites are segregated to eliminate any risk of cross contamination and they are designed with coved epoxy resin flooring for efficient manufacturing and speedy clean down. Manufacturing vessels and delivery pipes are all 316L stainless steel and are positioned on load cells for accurate batch production.

Each manufacturing suite houses its own resident vessels enabling UPL to offer batch sizes ranging from 200lt to 7,500lt. Additionally, there are 3 bulk storage areas housing 20,000lt vessels dedicated to pharmaceuticals, multiple 18,000lt vessels for bulk transfer direct to the filling lines, and 25,000lt vessels for road tanker deliveries of either raw materials or customer made product.

This substantial range of advanced equipment allows us to manufacture products such as syrups, suspensions, ointments and specialist pharmaceutical products, as well as shampoos, foam baths and shower gels, and most types of viscous creams and lotions, with the highest standards guaranteed.

We understand the importance of supply chain pressures and are capable of meeting the tightest of deadlines

Each segregated room houses a wide variety of equipment that allows UPL to fill a broad range of packaging presentations from 5ml to 5lt. From rollons to tottles, glass and plastic bottles, tubes, jars and tubs, cases to shrink-wrap packs: the aim is flexibility and versatility at all times.

Filling machines range from single to multi head volumetric fillers and UPL has filling machines capable of handling warm or hot fill products and can fill products from ambient temperatures up to 80°c.

Our capping machines are capable of handling anything from conventional screw caps to ROPP’s, pumps and push-on caps.

Our labeling facilities are also extensive and include the option to apply self adhesive labels in multiple combinations from the single or twin sides of containers, to partial or full wrap, as well as the top and/or bottom of containers.

Additionally, UPL offers in-line bottle blowers for pharmaceutical products, tamper-evident sleeving machines, trayed or trayless shrink-wrapping facilities, and numerous coding and cartoning machines.

All products are manufactured in an environment working to the highest standards of cGMP and staffed by well-trained, highly motivated operatives who are responsible, both individually and collectively, for the quality of every product.

Product Development

UPL has an award winning New Product Development (NPD) team and many of our NPD projects have become household names and market leaders in both existing and new product categories. We create about 200 new product formulations every year across the whole range of personal care products, and in recent years our products have been successful in winning many different consumer awards.

We work in partnership with you to understand your strategy, your philosophy and your specific needs, and we develop products that are tailored to meet those needs. All of our product development is bespoke to meet your requirements rather than an ‘off the shelf’ solution.

We can help our customers from step 1 of the product development process – everything from the original product concept to development and product testing. Our NPD service includes product stability and challenge testing at several different temperatures and we can also arrange external tests and user trials if required.

We also have an experienced packaging development and procurement team who can identify and source the packaging components to meet your marketing objectives.

If you would like to talk to us about your contract manufacturing or product development needs we would be happy to discuss your requirements with you.