I discovered HE’s current manual process for creating shower gel Oohos: briefly, the content needs to be frozen before being encapsulated. Success rate is not the best, but we managed to make some product and I follow their shelf life and behaviour.
We had meetings with Hayashibara representatives that are looking for applications for one of their product (as an ingredient for the membrane), and with Uniliver representatives to explore commercial potential of the product, as they are looking forward for a partnership.
After learning that Lush launched a similar product called Atmosphere with a different design and a membrane made of alginate like Ooho’s, I started to retro-engineer it by looking at the composition and paying attention to the seal. By 3D-printing a mould we managed to make Ooho using what appear to be their process.
HE has started to prototype an injection process to avoid the freezing step and gives it a new design, we evaluated that it was more efficient that Lush’s and more suitable for industrial process and I did a screening of different toiletries products to encapsulate depending on their type and composition.
This new process needs the content to have certain ranges of viscosity, calcium and surfactant into it. It started to adjust the formulation of different products using thickeners and different kinds of calcium salts to enable the encapsulation by injection and keep the same texture, so that the product is not altered.
