Grant: Engage Grants Program

The stability and safety of a product is at the very heart of a business: does the product exhibit the characteristics and behaviour desired or advertized. Wild Orchid Farm is a small rural business in goat breeding which has branched out into manufacturing and selling natural cosmetics made from goat dairy products. They have recently formulated a new product, goat's milk body lotion, of great interest to their consumers, but with one huge drawback: the preservative blend they are using, is formaldehyde-releasing, unacceptable in the field of natural cosmetics with very low consumer acceptance. Natural products with a high concentration of milk, such as made by Wild Orchid Farm, requires special care and testing, as milk is an excellent nutritional source for microbes. The preservative used by Wild Orchid Farm is Liquid Germall Plus, a convenient, which inhibits the growth of both gram-positive and -negative bacteria, yeasts, and moulds. However, one of ts components releases formaldehyde and another was described as ""Suspected to be an environmental toxin"". This project is to (a) find a Natural preservative for the requirements of microbial inhibition and emulsion stability for the goats' milk body lotion, (b) demonstrate its effectiveness through microbial challenge tests and shelf-life studies and (c) develop and provide guidelines for the production process in order to minimize microbial contamination. Natural preservatives are more organism-specific than synthetic ones. Blending them has the potential to create a collective protective effect against a range of organisms, and the use of blended preservatives is a rapidly growing segment of the natural cosmetics industry. We shall also study the efficacy of paraben-free and formaldehyde-free ""man-made"" preservatives and their combination with natural preservatives to achieve the product stability desired. The project will have three stages: [1] Selection of preservatives, [2] Emulsion stability tests, [3] Microbial challenge tests, [4] Work complementary to the utilization of new preservatives. Solving the preservative problem for the goat's milk lotion would put the Wild Orchid Farm into a strong position for market growth.